This remarkable collection investigates the relations between literature and the economy in the context of the unprecedented expansion of early modern England’s long distance trade. Studying a range of genres and writers, both familiar and lesser known, the essays offer a new history of globalization as a complex of unevenly developing cultural, discursive, and economic phenomena. While focusing on how long distance trade contributed to England’s economic growth and cultural transformation, the collection taps into scholarly interest in race, gender, travel and exploration, domesticity, mapping, the state and emergent nationalism, and proto-colonialism in the early modern period.
Author(s): Stephen Deng, Barbara Sebek
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 304
Contents......Page 6
List of Figures......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Series Editor’s Preface......Page 12
Notes on Contributors......Page 14
Global Traffic: An Introduction......Page 18
Part I: Emergent Epistemologies of Trade......Page 34
1 “The Common Market of All the World”: English Theater, the Global System, and the Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern Period......Page 36
2 “Ill luck, Ill luck?”: Risk and Hazard in The Merchant of Venice......Page 56
3 Salvation, Social Struggle, and the Ideology of the Company Merchant: Baptist Goodall’s The Tryall of Trauell (1630)......Page 74
4 The Panoramic View in Mercantile Thought: Or, a Merchant’s Map of Cymbeline......Page 94
5 “Not every man has the luck to go to Corinth”: Accruing Exotic Capital in The Jew of Malta and Volpone......Page 112
Part II: Transforming Home through Trade......Page 132
6 “Absent, weak, or unserviceable”: The East India Company and the Domestic Economy in The Launching of the Mary, or The Seaman’s Honest Wife......Page 134
7 The Flowers of Paradise: Botanical Trade in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England......Page 154
8 Inhaling the Alien: Race and Tobacco in Early Modern England......Page 174
9 “A Foreigner by Birth”: The Life of Indian Cloth in the Early Modern English Marketplace......Page 196
Part III: Trade and the Interests of State......Page 216
10 The Tempest and the Newfoundland Cod Fishery......Page 218
11 “Mysteries of Commerce”: Influence, Licensing, Censorship, and the Literature of Long-Distance Travel......Page 238
12 Global Œconomy: Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News and the Ethics of Mercantilism......Page 262
13 Afterword: Accommodating Change......Page 282
B......Page 292
C......Page 293
D......Page 294
E......Page 295
H......Page 296
J......Page 297
M......Page 298
P......Page 300
S......Page 301
T......Page 302
W......Page 303
Z......Page 304
