– were proponents of settlement and colonization in Guiana and Virginia, and in sub-Saharan Africa, where Sir John Hawkins represented England in belatedly attempting to muscle in on Spanish and Portuguese slaving activities. As covered in this volume, the first English slaving voyages were led by Hawkins in 1562, 1564, and 1567–1568, for which he had royal endorsement, taking him to the Guinea coast and the Spanish West Indies, the location for the sale of enslaved people. And accounts of these slaving voyages were printed in both editions of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, framed by the compiler in terms of nationalistic pride and competition with Spain and Portugal in the slave trade. Overtly, cosmopolitanism – resulting from trade and contacts with foreign mores and exotic products – produced cultural diversity, but its dark side lay in the emerging sub-Saharan African slave trade and the seeds of empire being sown in the plantation economies of the Americas.
Within these varied geopolitical arrangements and interactions, we can find a wide range of possible responses to alterity within English and European globalizing drives. And a dazzling array of these understandings and productions of difference – cultural, religious, sexual, social, and political – is the subject of many literary and creative offerings of the period. Thus, in reconsidering the “Renaissance” both as a literary movement (that captured “the spirit of the age”) and as a historical period, it is important to recognize that its range was temporal – going back to antiquity – as well as spatial and geographical, stretching across the globe in voyages of “discovery.”
III Chapter Summaries
The title of this anthology, The Global Renaissance, not only calls for a reconsideration of the scope and meaning of the term “Renaissance” as I have discussed. It also encourages us to “think globally” at the intersections of contemporary global capitalism and its cultural networks and the early modern flow and exchange of commodities, persons, ideas, technologies, and aesthetic objects in relation to emergent colonialism involving England and Europe. Such an epistemology helps us to confront globalization today, which many consider the central crisis of our times. Immanuel Wallerstein historicizes the “discourse of globalization” in similar terms when he states: “we are told by virtually everyone that we are now living, and for the first time, in an era of globalization … [but] the processes that are usually meant when we speak of globalization are not in fact new at all. They have existed for some 500 years” (249). Wallerstein’s historical formulation of a global system is a useful way of understanding the systemic nature of globalization through different periods. And many of the themes and issues within the essays in this collection resonate with contemporary concerns, including flows of capital and labor power, rampant consumerism and material culture, race and gender struggles within the new global cultural economy, and East–West economic power struggles and relations with Islam. While it is important to observe anticipations and echoes between the two different historical moments, and especially in terms of the emergence of capitalism and its links with colonialism, as Wallerstein suggests, it is also necessary, following Foucault’s reading of history, to avoid a “totalization of past and present” (Poster, 76). As a result, by disrupting any sense of a seamless continuity between the global drives in the different periods we can retrospectively question the inevitability of supposedly inexorable forces of globalization, which are sometimes evoked in terms of a stereotypical “march of history.”11
The broad range of essays in this volume offers us a rich, pluralistic perspective on the early modern global world. One way of understanding the ways in which early modern discourses and practices of globalization may conform to or diverge from contemporary global trends and events is via a broad power–knowledge axis: approaching any economic or cultural process as a multiplicity in order to explore each discourse or practice separately, unpacking its layers, decoding its meanings, and understanding its development both in its own terms and in relation to larger, cumulative effects of change.12 This collection of 29 chapters and one Afterword engages with the “global” precisely thus: as a multiplicity, encompassing the intersections of global and domestic discourses and practices; in some instances, evoking our contemporary global crises; reminding us that the processes of exploration, travel, trade, cross-cultural and religious interactions, and labor exploitation, among others, have continuing relevance today. And finally, and perhaps crucially, we learn that globalization is not simply an economic or political movement, but equally, as the essays reveal, a product of the ideological work done by literature, art and visual culture, travel writing, legal treatises, ethnographic inquiries, and other cultural texts.
The chapters of The Global Renaissance are organized into four parts: Mapping the Global, “Contact Zones,” “To Live by Traffic”: Global Networks of Exchange, and The Globe Staged. These titles do not imply rigid divisions but rather denote some broad categorizations within which all the chapters share common themes and concerns. The essays in this first section all engage with globalization and the global in terms of larger historical and conceptual paradigms.
Mapping the Global
Daniel Vitkus’s opening essay, titled “The New Globalism: Transcultural Commerce, Global Systems Theory, and Spenser’s Mammon” (Chapter 1), examines the usefulness of applying “global systems theory” to early modern English literature and culture in the context of two critical trends shaping studies of the period: a “micro-material historicism,” drawn from de Certeau and Foucault, in terms of “an archeology of local knowledge that traces the private life of objects and everyday lives of people in the past” and a “new globalism” that focuses on England’s role in the era of expansion and on how its “culture changed through interaction with other peoples in both the New and Old Worlds.” Material historicism, according to Vitkus, has produced some interesting studies in print history, archival investigations into the early modern “book,” and a history of reading. However, cautioning against a nostalgia – and fetishization – of the printed book, he promotes recent globalist approaches that weave into their scholarship capitalism’s rise to global dominance and its role in shaping cultural production, including the production of literary texts in early modern England. Global systems theories proposed by Wallerstein and others, Vitkus suggests, enable scholars to connect the most domestic-seeming texts to broader transcultural and global elements.
One such canonical work, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene – perhaps among the more nationalistic English texts – is also a work that “is restlessly global,” Vitkus argues. Beginning with the proem to the second book of The Faerie Queene, with its allusions to Peru, the Amazon, Virginia, and “unknowne lands,” which suggests linkages with global networks, the essay focuses on the poem’s treatment of Mammon, “both a devil and a false god, and as a personification of wealth and worldly goods.” While Guyon’s trial in the cave of Mammon (Book II, Canto seven), namely, his resistance to the temptation of gold, is often described in theological terms, this essay places that narrative within a global context: that Mammon’s attempts to seduce Guyon associate gold not with the Spanish colonies but rather with a global phenomenon that includes both Spain and England in its worldwide sweep. Thus, ultimately, Spenser’s epic, with all its harkening back to the Crusades and Middle Ages, is also an important site for unresolved tensions between “a residual code of honor that rejects money as corruptive and a desire to obtain wealth and power … under an emergent capitalist economy.”
Crystal Bartolovich’s essay, “‘Travailing’ Theory: Global Flows of Labor and the Enclosure of the Subject” (Chapter 2), maps the emergence of capitalism by following “both local and global flows of labor power – and resistance to its privatization” while arguing that both were “implicated in the formation of early modern subjects at the dawn of capitalist accumulation.” Exploring both the labor and laborer in a trajectory that moves from the domestic enclosure acts which led to a growing landless population, often labeled “vagrant” in England, to narratives of travel and colonization, such as The Journal of Richard Norwood (1590–1675), the colonial surveyor of Bermuda, Bartolovich demonstrates