The Van Otterloos are among the world’s leading collectors of Dutch and Flemish old master works. The museum’s audience is typically interested in exhibitions with Dutch themes, Ms. Corrigan said, but this show has a larger resonance.

“Fundamentally, it’s relevant to all of us because it’s about global trade and the impact of global trade on our daily lives,” she said.

The primary mover of the goods was the Dutch East India Company, known in the Netherlands as the VOC. At its peak, it had 40,000 employees and a fleet of more than a hundred ships. In 1619 the company established its administrative seat in Batavia, in what is now called Jakarta, to oversee the operation of some 600 trading positions in its charter area from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan.

Although originally established to trade in Asian spices, the company quickly discovered a market for Asian household goods, for which European connoisseurs would pay handsomely.

Image A jinbaori, or overcoat, from Japan, mid-18th to early 19th century, made of Dutch leather and wool, lined with European printed cotton, and trimmed with silk. Credit... Peabody Essex Museum, Salem. Photography by Walter Silver

Chinese porcelain, in particular, had a market that never stopped growing. “Europeans were amazed by the quality of the porcelain material,” said Jan van Campen, curator of Asian export art at the Rijksmuseum and curator of the exhibition. “They didn’t know how it was made, and it was so much better than what they had. To be able to make it so very thin and so very white and to make sure that it couldn’t be deglazed — it was a miracle to them.”