Literary scholars have long been aware of the global forces which shaped English cultural production in the early modern period. The Renaissance, itself already a transnational phenomenon, has increasingly been seen as a global movement with the integration of travel narratives, almanacs and utopian fiction as key texts, as well as thematic overviews which reconsider the place of global trends such as trade, exoticism, material exchanges and new conceptions of spatial relations.1 As the appetite for, and circulation of artistic, decorative, domestic and culinary materials grew among European audiences during the seventeenth century, so too did their textual representations and reflections. Moreover, these representations became increasingly complex and embedded within the literary text – no longer objects of wonder, ‘exotic’ materials, languages and ideas became ways in which European writers and readers could reflect on the changes to their world and sense of self occasioned by global networks of travel and exchange driven by corporate actors.
For this reason, the ‘discipline’ of early modern literary studies has increasingly seen itself as porous or even amorphous, as formalist concerns have been superseded by, or integrated into, largely historicist projects emphasising the ‘text’ in ‘context’. In doing so, the boundaries of literary criticism have expanded to include cultural, political and economic history, anthropology and sociology, art history, the histories of science, and biological-ecological issues. Just as these fields have moved towards ‘global’ conceptions of their discipline, so too have literature scholars begun the process of exploring their refractions in cultural production, excavating the intercultural or transcultural themes and ideas embedded within the text.
A play like 1 Henry IV may not provide the most reliable account of fifteenth-century dynastic politics, but it can tell us a lot about the way sixteenth-century English men and women thought about sovereignty, religion, gender and what it meant to be ‘English’ in the first place.2
The same historicist process is at play in texts which engage with the economic or social consequences of corporate activity. Documents that might be thought of as being ‘literary’ have much to offer us when we consider the function and social understanding of the corporate form, and the way it functioned within society. Though literary scholars have rarely engaged directly with the corporate form, doing so gives a fresh insight on the integrative functions of the corporation, and literature’s ability to reflect on the corporate form and its activities. The corporation was deeply embedded in the literary world of early modern London, on stage, on the page, and in the streets. These texts offer a version of global corporate activity that is at once symbolic and deeply reflective, revealing concern over the constitutional framework in which corporations operated, as well as their particular activities and ambitions. The constant processes of negotiation which constituted corporate activity were laid bare by literature, allowing their readers to question the precise nature of the corporate form at home and abroad.
If the meta-narrative of globalisation is frequently one of economic imperatives, most obviously trade and industrialisation, literature has responded by considering the role of economic thinking and transactions within the text; that is, literature becomes, in effect, a site of negotiation in which competing visions of global, corporate activity (in more or less complete forms) can be imagined, compared and promoted. There are a number of broader ‘economic’ studies of early modern writers, which are often affected by corporate and mercantile activity, even if ‘the corporation’ is not the primary unit of analysis. The classic study here is Hoxby’s Mammon’s Music, which analyses works by Milton and his contemporaries in terms of their use of economic metaphors and their engagement with the urgent questions of trade, such as mercantilism, free trade, and the value of labour. Hoxby limits his frame of reference to ‘literary texts in which authors quite directly address economic issues or avail themselves of economic reasoning’, but in doing so he demonstrates just how deeply embedded these ‘economic issues’ are within the poetry of Milton, Waller, Dryden, and many others.3 Questions of ‘loss’ and ‘productivity’ are similarly examined in Valerie Forman’s Tragicomic Redemptions, which demonstrates how ‘loss’ became a productive category of investment, as ‘a reconceptualization of present loss as expenditure, that is, as a transformable source of legitimate, future profit’.4 Forman begins with the pamphlet wars between Mun, Misselden and others over the export of bullion and the balance of trade in the 1620s, and shows how this model of investment fits into the development of tragicomedy, a literary form which takes its dramatic power from, and indeed seeks to legitimise and valorise, such profitable transformations.
What The Comedy of Errors offers, then, is a compromise formation, one that mediates between a residual moral discourse of appetitive economy and an emergent systemic discourse of global trade. This compromise might be termed a syphilitic economy.7
The discursive systems Gil Harris finds in A Comedy of Errors (appetitive economy and systemic trade) are generated outside of the play, but in the language of the play, and the compromise formation in the literary text anticipates and shapes debates in the political economic sphere (whether as compromises or, more usually, as restatements of one of those positions in response to the other).
More, though, can be done to focus on the impacts the form of the corporation, and corporate activity on a direct level, had on early modern culture. Until very recently, studies of literature and the corporation could be divided into two types. Firstly, there are studies of travel literature (most prominently Hakluyt, Purchas, Roe and Coryat). Many of these studies mention the corporate background of their authors, or the assistance and interaction with the corporation, but are not focused on the corporation as such. More recently, work has been done on the engagement between corporate writing and travel narratives: Robert Markley’s recent study of Hamilton’s A New Account of the East Indies (1727), for example, reads the work in the light of corporate writings relating to the Mughal war.8
Added to these are studies following the methodology of the history of science, which track the transfer of ideas from the ‘periphery’ to ‘centre’ via the written word – bestiaries, herbals, books of medicine, oriental or ‘exotic’ writing, news and history.9 Crucial in this tradition is Anna Winterbottom’s Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World. Locating her study in the settlements and territories of the East India Company, Winterbottom aims at ‘a nuanced discussion of the extra-European sites in which knowledge was created’ and ‘a wider recognition of the range of actors involved in the production of knowledge’.10 Such knowledge was refracted into literary texts, allowing an indirect commentary on the integrative function of corporations as conduits for knowledge generation and exchange.
Secondly, there are studies of individual authors in the light of their corporate activities. Many of the writers who considered ‘global’ issues were engaged with corporations: Hakluyt and Purchas collected material from the trading companies; Josuah Sylvester, translator of Du Bartas’ epic on the creation and history of the world was a Merchant Adventurer. Other writers, such as Defoe,11 engaged with corporations as jobbing propagandists; still others, such as Davenant,12 Dryden,13 Milton14 and Behn15 were investors or otherwise tangentially involved. There are also lesser known texts placed into corporate contexts: Jenifer Buckley reads Haywood’s Cleomelia (1727) as a response to questions of ‘value’, sexuality and morality engendered, at least in part, by trade in Asia and the South Sea bubble.16 Suvir Kaul notes the effects of plantation colonies and Indian trade, as well as the political economy of the Cromwellian government and its relationship with the Dutch, on the works of Marvell and Waller.17 These studies reveal the way in which corporate political economy, and corporate constitutionalism, was examined in literary works, often through abstractions into a corporate-inflected literary register of terms such as ‘risk’, ‘debt’, ‘trust’, ‘credit’, ‘value’, and ‘bond’, among others.
In this category we might also place studies of ‘corporate writing’ more generally, such as Markley’s Far East and the English Imagination, Ogborn’s Indian Ink and Richmond Barbour’s Before Orientalism. This work is largely historicist in nature, discussing the responses to corporate activity which are im- or ex-plicit within the literary texts. Richmond Barbour, for example, notes that ‘kindred alliances of corporate and royal interests generated both trading companies and playing companies, and London’s merchants committed joint-stock to both enterprises’, and outlines the ways in which the representations of geography and power on the stage influenced English activities overseas, not least in the person of Sir Thomas Roe.18 Shifts in material culture was an important legacy of corporate activity, and concerns over the changes in eating or dressing habits in England found their way in to literature as well.19
Corporations were deeply embedded in the literary world of early modern London, on page and in the streets. Corporate display sat at the heart of London’s civic pageantry, with the Lord Mayor’s Show offering a particular opportunity for the city, and its commercial communities, to reflect on their activities and ambitions, and represent them to the general public. Indeed, it is likely that no other cultural activity (save perhaps sermons) had as great a ‘reach’ into the daily lives as the pageants through London, viewed by thousands or even tens of thousands. These entertainments were often printed, too, allowing both a wider audience and a permanent textual record of the day’s events and key images.
Major writers such as Jonson and Middleton were commissioned to produce these entertainments. Tracey Hill has shown how these pageants reflected the ways in which ‘[o]ligarchs from the Great Twelve livery companies were deeply imbricated with the Merchant Adventurers, the Virginia Company, the East India Company and the like’, especially as Lord Mayors began to be drawn from the ranks of these overseas investors from the 1620s onwards.20 These shows encouraged a reflection on the source of the City of London’s wealth, presenting the global world with which the city’s merchants engaged not as a passive space of European expansion, but as complex, sophisticated cultures and trading partners.
In 1617 Middleton produced The Triumph of Honour and Industry for the confirmation of George Bolles, a Grocer, as Lord Mayor, receiving a fee of £282 from the Grocer’s Company. The first ‘invention’ (scene) of the performance is ‘a company of Indians […] every one severally employed’ in growing spices.21 Bolles was a member of the East India Company as well as the Grocers, and the prominent position given to eic activities reflects both a desire to honour Bolles’ personal connection and an assertion of the Company’s status as an integral part of the ‘honour of the City’ (39). These productive Indians are followed ‘triumphantly [by] a rich personage presenting India, the seat of merchandise’ (53–4). Middleton’s India, ‘whose seat is the most eminent’, and who holds in her hand ‘a wedge of gold’ (89–90), is flanked by figures representing Merchandise and Industry. Though India is brought to London in triumph, it is to honour her: the eminent positioning of India is far from the Roman triumph of a subjugated enemy, and in fact more akin to a respected state visitor, whose ‘wealth and love’ (80) has to be, and is being, earned by London. Industry’s speech, which reminds the audience that the trade with India is ‘not only to itself adding increase / But several nations where commérce abounds’ (82–3), reminds them that this is a mutually beneficial trade with India as willing, peaceful, partner.
After the rich presentation of India, Middleton’s show progresses to a series of speeches honouring the Grocers and the new Mayor in French and Spanish, and a presentation of dignitaries from a variety of nations: ‘an Englishman, a Frenchman, an Irishman, a Spaniard, a Turk, a Jew, a Dane, a Polander, a Barbarian, a Russian or Muscovian’. (153–5) Though Middleton has his narrator inform the viewer that he would like to include all nations, but that the ‘customary bounds’ of the pageant deny him this opportunity, it is significant that these nations represent the international, often corporate, trades with which the grocers might engage: the Irish Society (in which the Grocers were an investor), the Muscovy, Levant and Eastland Companies (in which Jews were often middlemen), as well as trade to France, Spain and the Barbary coast, which was unregulated at the time of the pageant, though occasionally incorporated in the early modern period. Middleton’s pageant is thus designed to reflect a growing commercial community at the heart of London’s social order, and to establish a harmony between economic pursuits and civic virtues.
The Triumph of Honour and Industry thus places global trade in productive dialogue with the complex corporate networks which enabled it in London. Conrad, in his survey of global history as a discipline, notes that ‘[t]he most interesting questions often arise at the juncture where global processes intersect with their local manifestations’.22 For this period, the history of a global corporate literature is not one of the periphery ‘writing back’ to the centre (as it will become towards the end of the eighteenth century), but the intersection of global corporate activity with locally-oriented literary production and consumption.
Corporate practices abroad generated new literary forms and ideas in London, as authors and consumers of literature sought new ways to reflect on a world opened up to them by corporate practices. If in the first half of the seventeenth century this largely took place on the stage or the streets, in the 1680s and beyond it took place on the page, and in particular the debates between pro- and anti-corporate writers in letters, broadsides, ballads and newsbooks. One key debate was the necessity of establishing fortifications in other countries – corporate writers argued these structures provided crucial defences, and an extension of sovereignty, needed to secure the long-distance trades. Anti-corporate writers suggested they were simply ‘castles in the air’ and no defence at all, but rather an unnecessary charge undertaken to provide support for monopolistic practices, not trade.
And that the Poet hath that Idea, is manifest, by deliuering them forth in such excellencie as hee hath imagined them. Which delivering forth also, is not wholie imaginatiue, as we are wont to say by them that build Castles in the ayre: but so farre substantially it worketh.23
Though Sidney acknowledges that ‘castles in the air’ might normally be taken to be ‘wholly imaginative’, he nonetheless maintains that a poet – any writer of craft and ability – might work them into something ‘substantial’. This is akin to Thoreau’s use of the phrase, but where in Walden the suggestion is that work should be done to move to an imagined state (that is, to move ‘reality’ closer to the ‘fantasy’), Sidney argues that a powerful imagination will by itself produce real effects (that is, the fantasy will itself change reality).
Wée buylde Castles and toures in the ayre to get vs a name. So many heads, so many wittes, so many common wealthes. Plato his Idaea, Aristotles felicitie, and Pythagoras numbers, trouble most mens brayns. Wishers and woulders were neuer good housholders, deuisers and phansiers were neuer good Common wealthes menne.24
Curteys explicitly links the castles and towers in the air to the abstractions of both utopian literature and mathematics. The language of forts and towers, though, also suggests something of colony or rule over these commonwealths, and perhaps even a sort of unruliness in these imagined communities.
Other writers linked the castles in the air to actual sites abroad, but unreachable. Michael Drayton, a court favourite of Elizabeth, wrote a narrative poem based on the life of Robert, Duke of Normandy (son of William the Conqueror). Despite his foreign conquests, Robert is obliged to return home to head off a rebellion, leading the poet to reflect on the vainglorious pursuits of territories and titles which cannot be enjoyed in person:
In Drayton’s poem, the ‘castles in the air’ have moved from the realm of imagination to reality, in that they substantially exist somewhere, but he wittily undercuts the basis of that existence: can they be said to exist, or are they mere ‘shadows’, if Robert cannot enjoy them and they do not add to, or even protect, his position at home?
nothing but a Company and a Joynt Stock could have laid the Foundation of so considerable a Trade […] it being impracticable to raise any considerable Trade in a remote Country, amongst Savage Indians, without Forts and Factories erected and setled amongst them.26
Those Forts pretended to be built by the Hudson-Bay Company, are no better than Pig-Sties, in England, nor of greater Strength; being a few Pine-Trees, squared and laid one upon another, and ramm’d only with Moss, to keep out the Wind.27
Indeed, the attack on the company turns on the naming of the structure, changing the name from ‘fort’ to pig-sty, as well as changing the geographical location from Hudson’s Bay back to England; this double-pronged attack destabilises the company’s particular claims for territorial governance and efficient global trading systems, rooting them instead in the parochial concerns of domestic pig farming. This is reinforced by the further detail of the fort/sty, which, by being ‘rammed with moss’ is poorly built and temporary (against the company’s claim to permanence), and can only keep out the ‘wind’, not an attacking army. These structures could not provoke awe or loyalty in the native peoples, and consequently would protect neither the company’s servants nor its trade.
Forts and Castles are none at all, in Case the Great Mogul or other Princes in India will at any time Offend us. And for others (the French and Dutch, &c. if they be our Enemies) they cannot hurt us in any Port of the Indies, because there the Government, &c. will Protect us: And if they meet us at Sea, our Forts and Castles (if we have them) cannot defend us. So that Forts in India are, at best, no better to us in point of Security or Defence against Enemies, than Castles in the Air; but may do us much Hurt, for that they are likely to create a Jealousy of us in the Great Mogul, and other Princes of India, &c. and tempt us (as it did the New Company) to Contests, which will be fatal to us.28
For this anonymous writer, the forts may as well be fictions – in terms of their capabilities as forts – but they nonetheless have a deleterious effect as ideas, because they project a false image of sovereignty which tempts the corporation to change its behaviour to Stern’s model of the company-state, declaring war and acquiring territory.
The ‘Castles in the Air’ thus passed from literature, to political economy, and back to literature (or fiction), demonstrating the enduring power of the image in the making of corporations and their global activities. These literary materials, when analysed in their corporate context, thus enable us to observe the global operations of the early modern corporation. They reveal the ways in which the legal features of the corporation – the constitutionally structured overseas negotiations that enabled the construction of forts and governing of territory – were challenged and negotiated in the incipient public sphere. The imagining, constructing, and rewriting of these corporate spaces overseas was a crucial mechanism in the development of integrational corporate practice: seeking to reconcile its constitutional frameworks at home and abroad, through these mechanism of public speech and popular opinion, forced the corporation to engage directly with its jurisdictional evasiveness, as well as the precise nature of its power and influence, whether in London, Madras or Ouidah.
a way out from the struggle within English society to these distant lands; a way out that is not only an escape to a new land but as in some of the real history an acquisition of fortune to return and re-enter the struggle at a higher point.30
Naturally, such studies are more prominent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of the general current of colonial literature (and the study of the aesthetic effects of colonialism – on both colonisers and colonised – by post-colonial scholars)31; authors like Mill32 in the century after Plessy but before the mutiny, and others such as Trevelyan and Kipling in the period immediately after the winding-up of the company have attracted attention for the interplay between their works and the British activities in India, and how they were represented and consumed in Britain.33
Moreover, the ‘afterlives’ of early modern texts (especially canonical literature) have been indelibly tinged with empire, or even the struggles against empire: As Jyotsna Singh points out, texts such as The Tempest have been part of colonial attitudes and independence movements from Africa to Latin America, and so scholars can never ‘retrieve the play from its non-Western contexts and return it to its singular canonical, ‘Western’ status’.34
Conclusion
For ‘Empire’ after 1757, perhaps we ought to read ‘corporation’ in the preceding century and a half. Many of the concerns about ‘Englishness’ which are pertinent to imperial writing are just as pressing for those writers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, even if they are often expressed in different ways. Clearly, this is more diffuse than ‘Empire’, that all-consuming unit of foreign policy, national identity, material goods, morality and the industrial revolution. But just as the men of Wuthering Heights or Great Expectations made their fortunes abroad before returning, so too did characters in early modern plays; Behn’s Oroonoko engaged thoughtfully with the activities of the Royal African Company before the great eighteenth century novelists’ oblique references to the slave trade; and questions of the moral economy were current in writers in the seventeenth century before Pope or the romantic poets.
This does not mean we ought to simply read back the criticisms and insights of imperial literature into the earlier centuries, or see the corporation as a proto-empire, subject to the same concerns and literary representations. Rather, it is an invitation to think more deeply about the process Said identified in which the great ‘ahistorical’ triumphs of English liberal thinking, its ‘great humanistic ideas, institutions and movements’ did little to ‘stand in the way of the accelerating imperial process’.35 The process was not really accelerating in this period – indeed, the engine had barely been started – but there are nonetheless questions of constitutional development, morality and humanism associated with extra-European corporate activity which are refracted in contemporary literary productions. That is, by considering the corporation we can add a historical dimension to Said’s discursive and largely trans-historical system ‘Orientalism’; to do so allows us to consider a ‘pre-history’ of Orientalism which is not teleologically oriented towards imperial writing. Instead, we can understand discourses of power or nationhood not as dominant modes of understanding the world, but rather as one of a number of overlapping and competing discourses, which reflect ‘the diverse effects of their historical moment and complex, shifting evaluations of ‘East’ and ‘West’’.36 In this way we can sidestep essentialised categorisations such as East/West, European/Other, centre (metropole)/periphery and so on, which were yet to be fixed in the seventeenth century, and were explored in corporate activities and the writings they encouraged or provoked.
The period covered by this volume has, perhaps, a different conception of national identity. Early modern England had no real empire to speak of, and the practical attempts to establish colonies were often failures in one way or another, so it is not especially accurate to speak of the early modern period as ‘proto-imperial’; however, as Daniel Vitkus points out, it ‘is important to acknowledge that the ‘idea’ of empire arose in England long before there was a real, material empire on the ground’.37 His readings of early modern texts demonstrate both the frustrated colonial ambitions of England, but also the way in which England’s ‘Others’ (especially in the Orient) were more distinctive and individual than the inconsistent caricatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which flatten out difference and form the basis of Said’s analysis (and are too often read back into the early modern period, particularly by placing ‘colonial’ enterprises as ‘proto-imperial’).38
Conversely, Benjamin Schmidt has argued for a renewed understanding of ‘exoticism’, a ‘surge of sources that described, depicted, or otherwise engaged with the non-European world’ which issued from the Netherlands and became dominant from the 1660s onwards in Europe.39 These sources included atlases, printed catalogues of foreign flora and fauna, non-European histories and travel narratives, as well as material goods such as fabrics and porcelain, all of which presented a version of the exotic filtered through European eyes and hands (unlike earlier tastes for goods, such as carpets, brought directly from exotic locations).40 Schmidt argues that this boom in Dutch goods created a pan-European idea of the ‘exotic’, or at least a European way of consuming the exotic, which was previously lacking in the more parochial and patriotic attempts to engage with either American or Asian cultures. Consequently, the ‘invention of exoticism’ was simultaneously ‘the invention of Europe’;41 the marks of difference in these ‘sources’ do not rely (as in later Imperial studies) on a pre-existing conception of Europe, but rather create that idea of Europe by subtly eliding the differences between European states, and presenting an understanding of the world based on apparently ‘universal’, rather than ‘local’, knowledge. Schmidt thus perhaps offers a model to mediate between weakened Europeans in Asia and ideas of ‘empire’ before empires.
Recent studies have begun to ‘open up’ the early modern literary world with detailed studies of the literary effects of engagement with China. Mingjun Lu’s study of Donne and Milton demonstrates the resonances of European interactions with China – including global bullion flows, exploratory missions to China and Chinese antiquities and language primers – on the works of those poets.42 However, the distinctions between nations, empires or ethno-religious groupings were rarely sharp in early modern writing, and groups were frequently elided, as Walter Lim notes, since in travel writing and histories from the period ‘imagination often has the habit of removing distinctions between nations, peoples and cultures, so that origins can get confused, geographical homelands become unfocused, and metaphorical conflations are not uncommon’.43
Traditional studies of European engagement in China have focused on the activities of the Jesuits, particularly their involvement in translation, in both directions, and their collaborative work with local scholars and scribes.44 Trading companies, too, frequently relied on go-betweens (interpreters, factors, local credit brokers and so forth) to navigate markets in Asia and elsewhere.45 A parallel process of transliteration and cross-cultural understanding was occurring in European writings and scholarship, as both works and peoples from these corporate spaces travelled to Europe.46 Recently, Robert Batchelor has shown a similar pattern of translation and circulation of Chinese texts in London and Oxford, and suggested that this intellectual work should be considered alongside the impact of the boom in European-Asian trade when considering the development of early modern Europe. These twin processes of translation and material circulation (akin to Schmidt’s ‘exoticism’) forced England ‘to build new kinds of selves and new kinds of institutions appropriate to the world of exchange they found in maritime Asia’.47
Literature thus reveal the circulations inherent in transnational corporate activities, including the impact of non-Europeans on the institutional and cultural development of Europe (even if this is often only registered in oblique ways). A truly ‘global’ version of corporate literary history would also take in texts generated in Mandarin, Urdu, Farsi, and those within the Niger-Congo and Amerindian families; sadly, this is outside of the scope of this essay (and its author), but understanding the ramifications of English, or European, corporations on the cultural output of the indigenous people they engaged with, and the ways in which those outputs were, in turn, subsumed into the integrative networks of corporate activity, will be a fruitful avenue of further research within the global history of the corporation.
See, among many others, Jyotsna G. Singh, ed. A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng, eds., Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Carole Levin and John Watkins, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 7.
Blair Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 8.
Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 6.
Stephen Deng, Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Walter Cohen, ‘The Undiscovered Country: Shakespeare and Mercantile Geography’, in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (London: Routledge, 2001).
Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 49.
Robert Markley, ‘Alexander Hamilton, the Mughal War, and the Critique of the East India Company’, Genre 48, no. 2 (2015).
Jane Spencer, ‘The Animals of China in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination’, Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 8, no. 2 (2015); Catherine Armstrong, ‘Reaction to the 1622 Virginia Massacre: An Early History of Transatlantic Print’, in Books between Europe and the Americas: Connections and Communities, 1620–1860, ed. Leslie Howsam and James Raven (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); James Delbourgo, ‘Science’, in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 5.
Christopher Borsing, Daniel Defoe and the Representation of Personal Identity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 28, 91–9; Stephen H. Gregg, Defoe’s Writings and Manliness: Contrary Men (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 153–5; Ning Ma, The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 139–66.
On his links with the East India Company see Philip J. Stern, ‘Corporate Virtue: The Languages of Empire in Early Modern British Asia’, Renaissance Studies 26, no. 4 (2012); Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 219–46; David Waddell, ‘Charles Davenant and the East India Company’, Economica 23, no. 91 (1956). For his work as a writer for the Royal African Company, see William A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (Williamsburg, VA: U of North Carolina P, 2013), 95–8; Matthew David Mitchell, ‘“Legitimate Commerce” in the Eighteenth Century: The Royal African Company of England under the Duke of Chandos, 1720–1726’, Enterprise & Society 14, no. 3 (2013); Daniel Carey, ‘John Locke, Money and Credit’, in The Empire of Credit: The Financial Revolution in Britain, Ireland and America, 1688–1815, ed. Daniel Carey and Christopher Finlay (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011).
In particular for the political context of Aurangzeb (1675), written while the eic was attempting to negotiate with the historical person of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, the failure of which would eventually lead to war. See Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 67–77.
Liam D. Haydon, ‘Paradise Lost and the Politics of the Corporation’, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 57, no. 1 (2017); David Hawkes, ‘Milton and Usury’, English Literary Renaissance 41, no. 3 (2011); Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton; Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay, 50–66.
Most notably for the Royal African Company and Oroonoko, as in Moira Ferguson, ‘Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm’, New Literary History 23, no. 2 (1992); Susan B. Iwanisziw, ‘Behn’s Novel Investment in “Oroonoko”: Kingship, Slavery and Tobacco in English Colonialism’, South Atlantic Review 63, no. 2 (1998). But see also studies which consider the role of ‘collectivity’, such as Melissa Mowry, ‘“Past Remembrance or History”: Aphra Behn’s the Widdow Ranter, or, How the Collective Lost Its Honor’, ELH 79, no. 3 (2012).
Jenifer Buckley, ‘“Bankrupt in All but My Good Wishes”: Speculative Economics in Cleomelia; or the Generous Mistress’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 14, no. 4 (2014).
Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 49–60.
Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 41.
David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).
Tracey Hill, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585–1639 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 289.
Thomas Middleton, ‘The Triumphs of Honour and Industry (1617)’, in The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010), 43–8. Further references are given by line number in the text.
Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 12.
Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London: William Ponsonby, 1595), Sig. B4v.
Richard Curteys, A Sermon Preached before the Queenes Majesty, by the Reverend Father in God the Bishop of Chichester, at Greenwich, the 14 Day of March 1573 (London: Henry Binneman, for Francis Coldocke, 1573), Sig. C4r-v.
Michael Drayton, The Tragicall Legend of Robert, Duke of Normandy (London: Ja. Roberts for N. L, 1596), canto 90.
Anon, The Case of the Hudsons-Bay-Company (London: s.n., 1690?), 1.
An Impartial Account of the Present State of the Hudson-Bay Company (London?: s.n.?, 1690?), 1.
Reasons Humbly Offered against Establishing, by Act of Parliament, the East-India-Trade, in a Company, with a Joint-Stock (London: s.n., 1693), sig. A2r.
David Minden Higgins, Romantic Englishness: Local, National and Global Selves, 1780–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 3; Susan Fraiman, ‘Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry 21, no. 4 (1995); Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 81–97.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 281.
On the imposition of a certain kind of ‘colonial aesthetic’ on the colonised bourgeois classes see Deana Heath, Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 189–99.
Abram L. Harris, ‘John Stuart Mill: Servant of the East India Company’., Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 30, no. 2 (1964); Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); Martin Moir, Douglas M. Peers, and Lynn Zastoupil, eds., J.S. Mill’s Encounter with India (Toronto; London: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
See Eddy Kent, Corporate Character: Representing Imperial Power in British India, 1786–1901 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 112–70.
Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narrative/Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discoveries’ of India in the Language of Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 6. The classic reading of The Tempest as colonial narrative is Paul Brown, ‘“This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).
Said, Culture and Imperialism, 82.
Rahul Sapra, The Limits of Orientalism: Seventeenth-Century Representations of India (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 27.
Daniel J. Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 6.
For example, Pramod K. Nayar, The Transnational in English Literature: Shakespeare to the Modern (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 3–5; Willy Maley, Nation, State, and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 6. See also Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
Peter Stabel, ‘A Taste for the Orient? Cosmopolitan Demand for ‘Exotic’ Durable Consumables in Late Medieval Bruges’, in London and Beyond: Essays in Honour of Derek Keene, ed. Matthew Davies and James A. Galloway (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2012).
Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism, 9.
Mingjun Lu, The Chinese Impact Upon English Renaissance Literature: A Globalization and Liberal Cosmopolitan Approach to Donne and Milton (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).
Walter S. H. Lim, ‘Introduction’, in The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, ed. Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 6.
R. Po-chia Hsia, ‘The Catholic Mission and Translations in China, 1583–1700’, in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 70–103.
C. A. Bayly and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 25, no. 4 (1988).
Michael Herbert Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 20–49.
Robert K. Batchelor, London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549–1689 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 14. On the Asian world as a series of trading zones, see Leonard Blussé, ‘No Boats to China. The Dutch East India Company and the Changing Pattern of the China Sea Trade, 1635–1690’, Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 1 (1996); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, ibid.31, no. 3 (1997); Amitav Acharya, The Making of Southeast Asia: International Relations of a Region, Reprint edition. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 51–104. For an integration of ecological and economic history in this vein, see Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
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