more broadly viewed not only included logic, rhetoric, and grammar but also opened the way to an interest in new disciplines like geometry, algebra, and mathematics, so crucial to understanding and mastering networks of money and goods in an increasingly global economy.6 Interestingly, these new commercial practices within European trade were in turn shaped by Arabic economic structures, derived from earlier Arabic knowledge of algebra and mathematics. My point here is that while European humanists had a strong interest in recovering their intellectual roots in classical antiquity, academic subjects such as mathematics also intersected with commercial practices based on Arabic, and other non-Western technologies and modes of learning in various fields.7 In effect, the expanding commercial world enlarged the intellectual, cultural, and linguistic boundaries of Europe.
In this context, while the terms “Renaissance” and “global” traditionally would be considered anachronistic if yoked together, recent globally oriented scholarship of the past decade has led the way in creating a more expansive, shifting Renaissance world picture, unyoking the term from its purely European coordinates.8 Thus, the “Renaissance” that emerges in this perspective – and as reflected in this collection of essays – is more multidimensional and culturally fluid than the one traditionally centered in Italy. Following this logic, the “Renaissance man” is not a singular, heroic figure embodying the spirit of a culture but is relocated within the historical phenomenon of an expanding global world, one that includes the “discovery” of America to the West, growing interactions and encounters with the East ranging from the Islamic empires to the territories in the far East, forays into North and sub-Saharan Africa, and explorations of the North Seas.
Drawing on and developing the discourse of the “global,” this volume emphasizes the historical transition of an era of European expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, recognizing the paradigm shifts in the production of knowledge and belief about various aspects of human experience, such as geography, economics, history, religion, nature, and art. While following these modes of inquiry about Europe in general, the presence of England and English culture – the predominant subject of roughly half the chapters in this edition – is also refracted through shifting, and often competitive, intra-European relationships. Overall, this volume tells a story of an era of globalization with a wide scope. It covers England’s emerging role within the complex networks of travel and traffic in diverse regions and nations, ranging from the Americas, North Africa, and East India to Russia, Iceland, Mexico, the Canaries, and Japan; the commercial and competitive relations between European imperial powers such as Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, and city-states like Venice and with non-European, Islamic rulers such the Ottoman Turks and the Mughals in India; and the various English and European ventures farther east, from Java to Japan. In doing so, it explores both the formation of English and European conceptions of the “global” and the impact of global economic, cultural, religious, and political developments on their societies and cultures during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
What becomes evident is that these cross-cultural encounters generated not only material exchanges within varying and uneven power relations but also rich and complex cross-pollinations of art, culture, belief systems, and technologies between England and European nations as well as with their “others” outside Europe. It is almost a given to recognize a widespread cross-cultural impact on artistic production worldwide. In this volume, such a process is richly illuminated by the case of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter-cum-poet Willem Schellinks, whose work was inspired by Mughal history and miniature paintings. And English literature and culture of the period – poetry, drama, prose writings, including the vast travel archive – were also clearly imbricated within the larger imaginings of the “worlds elsewhere,” which were brought home via a new cosmopolitanism. According to Alison Games, “Cosmopolitanism and Cosmopolitans facilitated this shift” (25). She goes on to chart this process as follows:
These cosmopolitans were most evident in the world of commerce. Tangibly centered around the circulation of goods, commerce first required the circulation of people who traveled abroad, inserted themselves in foreign communities, and brought back their treasures. Everywhere the appearance of cultural understanding was crucial to successful trade.
(25)
Cosmopolitanism was clearly an offshoot of the imperatives of trade and profit, and one aspect of this outside exposure could be viewed in positive terms, namely, that in their travels on commercial ventures, cosmopolitans “demonstrated their interest in and sympathy for foreign mores, worked with and for foreigners, sometimes immersed themselves in foreign worlds, and gradually dislodged themselves from unthinking attachments to a single nation” (Games, 25). English merchants in this era, for instance, who “were first of their nation to open new markets, to assess new commodities, to persuade foreign merchants that they wanted to buy English goods … had to rely on their social acuity to establish trade” (Games, 25). If the era of expansion produced such cosmopolitan modes of interaction with the foreigners, it was also permeated by uneven strains of xenophobia, which in some instances were tied to relations of power and emerging colonization.9 Complicated discursive operations involved in negotiating these opposing drives and tendencies are apparent, for instance, in England’s ambivalent relations with Islamic powers and Muslim peoples during the period of global exploration. One question that arises, then, were these images of Islam and the Muslims accurate representations of the Ottoman Turks and North African Moors, the two Islamic communities with whom the English had many contacts? Frequently, some critics argue, the English, like their European counterparts, revealed a tendency to invoke an all-encompassing non-Christian “other.” 10
Nabil Matar, for instance, suggests that in English plays, pageants, and other cultural forms the “Turk was cruel, tyrannical, deviant and deceiving; the ‘Moor’ was sexually overdriven and emotionally uncontrollable, vengeful, and religiously superstitious. The Muslim was all that an Englishman and a Christian was not” (13). Yet popular religious and cultural works, he demonstrates, belie the actual encounter with the Muslims in the Levant and North Africa, where there was “interaction and familiarity, along with communication and cohabitation” (Matar, 14). Other accounts such as government documents and commercial evidence also do not reveal a similar stereotyping (Matar, 13–14). Matthew Dimmock acknowledges the usefulness of Matar’s analysis of actual historical encounters and materials but, in contrast, argues that the images of Turks and Muslims in early modern English literary and cultural texts do not depict Turks so clearly falling between “polarizing stereotypes of ‘Muslim Otherness’ and English Christian” (New Turkes, 10). Rather, they show how “English encounters with Muslims, both imagined and ‘actual,’ multiplied and complicated notions of the ‘turke’ that had been contested from their very inception” (10). Travelers who had actual contacts with the Turks and Moors, such as George Sandys, Henry Blount, and Nicolas Nicolay, also “offered accounts which combined grudging admiration and awe with some measure of demonization” (Singh, 88).
Furthermore, commercial and political relations with other Muslim powers such as the Safavids of Iran and Mughals of India were also slowly developing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And English travel accounts to those empires also express mixed feelings, suggesting an attraction to the promise of trade and the grandeur of these courts but also an investment in a Christian – in this case, Protestant – ideology of demonizing non-Christian “others.” It is on the nexus of such complexities and ambivalences that one must cumulatively consider how these Islamic empires – Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals – evoked both fascination and anxiety about their riches and military and economic power within the European imaginary. Several chapters in this volume offer us insights into the intricacies of these relations, as they emerged in complex interactions, in trade, diplomacy, conversions as well as in literary and cultural representations of stereotypes of Muslims and Islam in European and English travel narratives, as well as in cultural and literary works. Robert Shirley in the Safavid court and Thomas Roe and the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in the Mughal court figure in accounts that testify to the centrality of these empires in the globalizing trends of the period.
If one trajectory of England’s global expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to the Islamic empires that at this time were