historically, and their descriptions demand synthesis. The author also cites very little re- cent scholarship on the principal themes, ex- cept for some of the outstanding works published by Bolivian scholars on Mizque over the last five year. But in this book Lolita Gutie´ rrez Brockington has certainly ‘re- claimed [much of] the forgotten’ – the thriving Mizque of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, doomed to fade from the historical picture in the eighteenth century; the incredi- ble complexity of ethnic mixing, the critical re- lationship of the eastern Andes to the mining centers of the highlands, and the varieties of lives and hazards of living. Given the difficul- ties of extracting data from the national, re- gional, and local archives we should be grateful for this first entrada. David J. Robinson Syracuse University, USA doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2008.07.011 Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2007, xiv þ 562 pages, £25 hardback. Writing on astronomy in the mid-seven- teenth century, the Japanese neo-Confucian scholar and physician Gensho Mukai knew what was wrong with Western knowledge. As he told his readers, Europeans ‘are inge- nious only in techniques that deal with ap- pearances and utility, but are ignorant about metaphysical matters and go astray in their theory of heaven and hell. Since they do not comprehend the significance of li-ch’i or yin-yang, their theory of material phenomena is vulgar and unrefined. But this vulgarity appeals all the more to the ignorant populace, and stupefies them’ (quoted on p. 345). Whether the subsequent success of Western science across the world can be put down to public stupefaction is doubtful, although that argument is cer- tainly still around. What is clear is that this specific form of science – one that es- chewed metaphysics in favour of physic and physics – was able to turn itself into the very definition of what science is. First, it is a practice of knowledge-making defined by the limitation of the world to be known to that of appearances. What appears to the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, and can be communicated in straight-forward language, is what can be objectively known. It is a knowledge of ob- jects. It is a knowledge based on observa- tion, experience and experiment. Second, its end is utility. It is a knowledge that does not seek to know why the world is as it is, but only how the world works. That was troubling to Gensho Mukai, and it has troubled many others before and since. In Matters of Exchange, Hal Cook has set out to write a history of this familiar form of knowledge by locating it in the Dutch Republic of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, more importantly, in the net- works of global commerce upon which the wealth and power of The Netherlands was founded. Cook’s argument proceeds through a thought- provoking combination of enviable simplicity and wonderfully dense detail. The simple argu- ment is that this form of knowledge was part of the world of commerce. Merchants sought to know the world in just this way, guided by ap- pearances and utility. Unlike monarchs, noble- men and priests they were untroubled by what should be, and more interested in what is. Merchants wanted the facts, just as they wanted objects; and they were interested in what those facts and objects could be exchanged for in the 677 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 658–687