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.

"We live in an age which has naturalized the global paradigm, while eliding differences between economic systems, social groups, and cultural practices. Global Traffic offers a brilliantly illuminating counterpoint to and interrogation of this paradigm by exploring the relations between early modern English mercantilism, capitalism, and cultural forms such as literature. This innovative and insightful collection is crucial to our understanding of English commercial expansion in the period in terms of both a world system and its local and specific manifestations." - Jyotsna Singh, Michigan State University

"Sebek and Deng's volume makes a major contribution to, and quietly transforms, the new economic criticism. Situating early modern England within emerging global networks of commercial and cultural exchange, this wonderfully diverse collection shows how the rise of international trade comprehensively transformed early modern English life at every level, impacting discursive systems and material practices from the state to the stage." - Jonathan Gil Harris, George Washington University

Autorentext
Barbara Sebek is Associate Professor of English at Colorado State University, USA.
Stephen Deng is Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, USA.

Inhalt
Global Traffic: An Introduction; B.Sebek 'Common Market of All the World': English Theater, the Global System, and the Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern Period; D.Vitkus 'Ill luck, Ill luck?': Risk and Hazard in The Merchant of Venice; I.MacInnes Salvation, Social Struggle, and the Ideology of the Company Merchant: Baptist Goodall's The Tryall of Travell (1630); D.Morrow The Panoramic View in Mercantile Thought: Or, A Merchant's Map of Cymbeline; B.D.Ryner 'Not Every Man Has the Luck to go to Corinth': Accruing Exotic Capital in The Jew of Malta and Volpone; L.K.Allen 'Absent, Weak, or Unserviceable': The East India Company and the Domestic Economy in The Launching of the Mary, or The Seaman's Honest Wife; A.Christensen The Flowers of Paradise: Botanical Trade in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England; A.L.Tigner Inhaling the Alien: Race and Tobacco in Early Modern England; K.Brookes 'Foreigner by Birth': The Life of Indian Cloth in the Early Modern English Marketplace; G.Shahani The Tempest and the Newfoundland Cod Fishery; E.M.Test 'Mysteries of Commerce': Influence, Licensing, Censorship and the Literature of Long-Distance Travel; M.Day Global Economy: Ben Jonson's The Staple of News and the Ethics of Mercantilism; S.Deng Afterword: Accommodating Change; J.Howard