“known” in early modern England through multiple histories and through both popular and learned knowledge, yet it remained in important ways unknown and obscure. Hakluyt’s medieval materials made Iceland part of a “legendary, archipelagic greater Britain, first subject to King Arthur” even as they recalled in more fragmentary ways a history of conquest by the Norse. In the practical terms of global long-distance trade, Iceland was the site of a productive English fishery. Yet despite its integration into a network of fisheries that linked ports from Newfoundland to Norway, Iceland seemed infinitely remote to European cosmographers, who represented it as a land of natural and supernatural marvels and of uncultured peoples. Jónsson’s Commentary of Island sets out not to narrate another voyage but to debunk xenophobic theories about Iceland’s geography and culture shaped by its distance from Europe and its northern position. Rather than a land of natural and supernatural marvels and barbarous living, he insisted, Iceland was a land of virtuous austerity and pure Christianity. Alone among the ethnographic materials printed by Hakluyt, Commentary writes back against a European discourse that had framed its culture of origin in exoticized and often xenophobic terms. It educates its Renaissance readers to see Iceland not as a remote and barbarous place, as “other,” but as a Protestant nation closely linked to England.
English explorations of sea routes to the north are also the subject of Gerald MacLean’s essay, “East by Northeast: The English among the Russians, 1553–1603” (Chapter 14). Discovery of new lands and routes to lucrative trade was the key factor that shaped the power alignments among European powers in the global Renaissance, and one such endeavor by the English was to find a northeast passage to Cathay and China. In 1553, a group of merchants, later to form the Muscovy Company, sponsored such an expedition by Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor, during which the former died at sea and the latter famously sailed into the White Sea, discovering the route to Russia. According to MacLean, their voyage and other attempts to discover a northeast passage to China were ultimately given up as being impractical, but they buttressed the “emerging mythology of England’s providential destiny and global importance as an imperial maritime nation” and had the unintended consequence of opening commercial and diplomatic relations with Russia and Persia.
The reports that came out from later travelers to Russia, several published in Hakluyt, according to MacLean, fascinated readers at home and gradually constellated into an “English mythology” about the “relative backwardness” of Russians, which further made it “possible for the English to imagine themselves living amidst greater wealth and civility.” Accounts by Adam Clements, who went on the 1555 expedition; Anthony Jenkinson, who made four voyages to Russia between 1557 and 1572, which were both published by Hakluyt; and other separate books, like Giles Fletcher’s Of the Russe Common Wealth (1591), illustrate how “commercial ambition helped generate imperial fantasy.” These visions, as the author notes, developed in terms of cultural comparisons. Both Ottomans and Russians provided models of existing empires – adjacent Eastern realms governed by Muslim despots and Christian tyrants – but they also confirmed Protestant England’s “God-given right to establish a global maritime empire ….”
As we conclude Part II on “contact zones,” we turn to Persia under the Safavid dynasty (1501–1722) in the context of the wider cultural relations between Safavid Persia and Stuart Britain at the turn of the seventeenth century, particularly during the Sherley brothers’ so-called embassy (1599–1628). Typically, the lens through which early modern Persia and Anglo–Persian relations were later observed and studied has been provided by the likes of the Sherleys: English (European) adventurers, ambassadors, missionaries, travelers, and so on. In “Connected Political Imaginaries: The Shāhnāmah and Anglo-Persian Alliance Building, 1599–1628” (Chapter 15), Masoud Ghorbaninejad argues that the early modern political imaginary under the Safavid dynasty was informed by what was later known as the Persian “national epic,” that is, Firdawsī’s Shāhnāmah (“Book of Kings,” completed 1010 ce). Describing the Shāhnāmah as a popular, formative element of nation-oriented cultures across the Persianate world, Ghorbaninejad places particular emphasis on ‘Abbas I the Great’s (r. 1588–1629) approach to alliance building with James I (r. 1603–1625) and Charles I Stuart (r. 1625–1649). After an introduction historicizing the role of the Persian national epic, the chapter investigates the Shāhnāmah-patterned “Persian attire” in a famous portrait of Robert Sherley (1581–1628), whose exaggerated and well-publicized adventures seem to have partially and implicitly influenced the imaginings of Persia in two Shakespearean plays. Finally, providing a sampling of Safavid royal names, he charts a layered interdynastic correspondence between Ottomans, Safavids, and Stuarts that employs Shāhnāmah shahs and champions to great effect – and as sources for cultural and political mediation in these interrelationships. Allowing for a pluralism of perspectives, this study decenters the otherwise dominant political imaginary (the “Western” or “European” perspective) while offering us a vision of the global early modern that exceeds and repeatedly crosses the boundaries of European history.
“To Live by Traffic:” Global Networks of Exchange
Exploration and travel as mapped in the preceding chapters testify to the fact that despite the challenging journeys facing unknown dangers across sea and land, the global drive for “discovery” among Westerners continued apace. The traveling itineraries and encounters of the English and Europeans across different geographical and cultural “contact zones” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reveal varied impulses and drives that propelled them. They could be driven by the imperatives of trade and profit, national pride, religious proselytization, or an ethnographic curiosity, combined with ineffable personal drives and ambitions. However, what also emerges in these varied strands is a sense of natural English and European entitlement to the commodities and minerals in lands they “discovered.” For instance, these drives are articulated from an English perspective by Richard Hakluyt, Lawyer, to his junior cousin and namesake the geographer and compiler of Principal Navigations. In “Notes to Colonization,” which is a part of the correspondence between the two men, he states that what the ideal conditions of English colonization mean is to “have access to supply all wants … [in a] seat … to bee chosen … in sweet ayre, where you may possesse, alwayes sweete water … fish, flesh, grayne, fruits … and [to have possession] … of mines of golde, of silver, copper, quicksilver, of any such precious thing.” (The Original Writings and Correspondence of the two Richard Hakluyts, E. G. R. Taylor, 116–117). In fact he strongly exhorts such colonizing activities to his countrymen, “to live by traffic … and by trade of merchandise” (117) (my italics).
In Part III, such incipient colonizing drives, with attendant cultural exchanges and cross-pollinations, figure in concrete form in eight essays on material culture of the global Renaissance, exploring the attributes and trajectories of disparate inanimate and organic objects: paintings, gun metal, coins, wines, books (almanacs), woodcuts, and the amaranth flower and seeds. Thus, these eight chapters demonstrate that the value and meaning of any economic object are determined by the varying contexts of their spatial and temporal movements.
The remaining two chapters in this part (17 and 24) examine two entities central to early modern mercantile capitalism: English “factories” or trading stations that organized the labor and racial taxonomies of the Asian natives; and the slaving ships that carried the human cargo of Africans for the commodification of human beings in chattel slavery, which became known as the infamous transatlantic slave trade. In sum, the movement, demand, and consumption of commodities in the early modern period cannot be separated from the historical, social, and cultural milieus within which the material objects – and objectified human beings – circulated, whether in domestic markets or in the frontiers of the “contact zones,” such as the Mughal Court, Canary Islands, Ottoman and North African kingdoms, Mesoamerica, the West Indies, and the African Guinea Coast. In fact, following Arjun Appadurai’s premise, several of these chapters demonstrate (in varying degrees and forms) that all “commodities like persons have social lives” (1986, 1) that become apparent while “exploring the conditions under