This course examines the visible and material tradition of the Dutch Golden Age because the product of global forces. The young Dutch Republic shortly achieved a worldwide attain in the seventeenth century. And Amsterdam served as its business capital, which by 1630 could be counted as one of the necessary port cities on the earth and residential to the Dutch East India Company , the world’s first multinational corporation. This course situates that art, and the town of Amsterdam itself, within networks that connected it to such far flung locations as Japan, Jakarta, Surinam, Curacao, Brazil, and the Indian Subcontinent. Centered on modern-day Turkey and encompassing vast territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Ottoman Empire (1299 – 1923) was the longest lived and among the most powerful Islamic states in history, with a creative tradition to match. This course explores the useful and symbolic role that architecture played in the course of the empire’s formative centuries, when three successive capital — Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul — served to visualize the sultans’ rising claims to common authority. With reference to mosques, palaces, tombs, and different classes of structure, the course will examine the buildings in their creative, social, and political …