Is there a special role for the Low Countries in art history’s current focus on global mobility? How, and why, should we conceive of the globalization of Netherlandish art? The essays brought together in this volume examine how artworks produced in the wake of European expansion – produced in the Netherlands in reaction to the world outside Europe, or made outside Europe in reaction to an encounter with the Netherlands – contribute to a better understanding of the cultural impacts of early modern globalization (ca. 1550–1750).Historians and the public at large have often associated the onset of ‘moder-nity’ with the Low Countries: urbanization and capitalism in Antwerp and Amsterdam; new forms of scientific observation associated with the telescope (invented by Hans Lipperhey) and microscope (developed by Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek); secularization in the humanities and arts (resulting in new genres such as landscape and still life painting); and even republicanism and religious toleration (associated with the new state of the Dutch Republic). Increasingly, however, it is becoming clear that these developments cannot be separated from the exploration and intensification of global trade routes. The Dutch East and West India Companies (VOC and WIC) became major players on the world stage, resulting in unique constellations of overseas hubs in Japan, for example, which for two centuries (from ca. 1639 to 1854) restricted its contact with the West (and with Western arts and sciences) to a small settlement of Dutch traders.