I stumbled across some of these stories in the course of my conventional research on European relations with China. At first I thought I would collect material on 1687 or 1689, to avoid the complexities of the Glorious Revolution, but Constantine Phaulkon in Siam and Shi Lang’s envoys to Madras made 1688 unavoidable. There has been no end of serendipities. I had never heard of the Coronelli globes before I saw one by chance in a museum in Brussels. In July 1995 I followed a historical monument marker to the Slovenian country house of Janez Valvasor, of whom I had never heard. In 1997 I was able to visit Dampier’s landfall on the coast of Australia and the fort on Ambon where Rumphius fell under the spell of tropical plant and animal life. In February 1999 I traced Phaulkon’s last day in Lopburi. Serendipity, surprise, and letting one thing lead you to another are not attitudes often associated with the methodical world of the professional historian. Not many historians will want to give them as free rein as I have in this book, but many will acknowledge that they are part of what makes their hard work fun. This book has been fun to do. And what a privilege it has been to spend time with William Penn, with Bashô, with William Dampier!
Serendipity produces an amazing and scattered array of debts of gratitude. Many of my colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Southern California have at one time or another responded to my requests for guidance or bibliography for this book. My debts are largest to Ayse and Hari Rorlich, for indispensable help with Russian and Middle Eastern materials. Others at USC include Marjorie Becker, Gerald Bender, Marguerite Bistis, Michael A. Burnstine, Thomas Cox, Charlotte Furth, Paul Knoll, Philippa Levine, Edwin McCann, Peter Nosco, Edwin Perkins, Carole Shammas, Lisa Silverman, Joseph Styles, and Shaoyi Sun. Connie Wills, Diane Wills, and Jeff Wills were a most helpful focus group in final editing agonies. Widening circles of helpful colleagues, from across the street to around the world, include Kim Akerman, E. M. Beekman, Leonard Blussé, David Ellenson, Lory Friedfertig, Aubrey Graatorex, Richard Hovanissian, Allen F. Isaacman, David Northrup, Demy Ohoilulin, Dhirivat and Pajrapongs na Pombejra, Branko Reisp, and Shalom Sabar. The libraries of USC and their Interlibrary Loan staff have been basic resources. I also have benefited from the riches of the libraries of the University of California at Los Angeles and the Huntington Library. The various funding agencies that made possible my research stays in Beijing and in The Hague and my brief visits to various parts of Europe and ports of maritime Asia, and the local authorities and archivists who facilitated my work, are thanked in detail in my monographs. I owe a special debt to Steven Forman of W. W. Norton & Company, who saw the merit of this eccentric project, waited with amazing patience while it moved forward and backward in my queue of things to be done, and provided a kind of engagement with the intellectual substance of my work I had never encountered in "academic" publishing. Geoffrey Parker’s supportive comments and astute criticisms of an early draft were very important.
My wife and our family have been bemused, patient, impatient, as most families are with someone caught in an apparently interminable labor of love. Our daughter, Lucinda, and her husband, Muhammad al-Muwadda, advised me on matters Islamic and gave me a T-shirt inscribed “1688—the best year of my life” that wore out before the book got done. One of the delightful fringe benefits of over forty years with Carolin Connell Wills has been that with her I acquired an uncle, Robert H. Irrmann, for many years professor of history at Beloit College. A scholar of England in the 1680s and a much-admired teacher and teller of stories, he gave much astute advice and always was ready for another 1688 story. This book is dedicated to his memory in affection and gratitude. I am especially pleased that in his last years he knew of the progress of this work and had in his hands a full typescript of it.