Dear Monsieur Jacques Savary

On a shrinking world and the violence of man

“Allegory of America,” Nicholaes Berchem (Late 17th Century)

You were alive when this engraving was commissioned. It was in the late 1600’s, the title page for the second volume of a World Atlas commissioned in Amsterdam, one of the hubs in a worldwide game of travel, and commerce, and culture. The Atlas itself has an enduring legacy even today; its nearly six hundred maps and over three thousand pages contain what amounted to a snapshot of the near-entirety of humanity’s geographic knowledge.

The world back then must have looked far larger, far more sublime than we now know it to be. But, to its — and your — credit, it was shrinking rapidly. The Americas had been discovered less than two hundred years prior and Magellan’s first circumnavigation quickly followed in its footsteps. There was no longer a scribbled question mark at the edge of the maps, and the maps no longer began and ended with the continental sum of Europe, Africa, and Asia.

It was from this rapidly shrinking world that your profession came to be; you were a trader, born to a wealthy French merchant family that held in high esteem what would be known today as mercantilism. I would even go so far as to describe you as one of the preeminent French mercantilists of the seventeenth century.