“‘So Pale, So Lame, So Lean, So Ruinous”: The Circulation of Foreign Coins in Early Modern England” (Chapter 20). Deng argues that what appears to be a xenophobic response common among all English people actually presents a more complex dynamic when class differences and relations between state and subjects are taken into consideration. In particular, foreign coins, which tended to be gold and higher-valued silver coins, circulated primarily among aristocrats and wealthy merchants, in contrast to the hardworking domestic pennies with which commoners would have been more familiar. Such distinctions among coins are evident in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, which, Deng argues, maintains clear class distinctions in knowledge and experience of foreign coins despite appearing to offer a fantasy of social mobility. A critique of foreign coins, such as in their associations with disease, could be indicative of internal class tensions in addition to general xenophobia.
Moreover, a suspicion of foreign coins even among the elite could signal anxiety about English coins circulating abroad, especially following the disastrous experience of debasement under Henry VIII. Prior to the “Great Debasement,” English coins had maintained considerable prestige abroad. But even after Elizabeth’s restoration of the coinage, England suffered an inferiority complex about its coins that often inspired ridicule of foreign coins. Ultimately, Deng argues, “English critique of foreign coins should be considered not only as chauvinistic expressions of English nationalism but also as representative of domestic concerns about social relations and a history of economic exploitation by the state.” The social lives of coins therefore offer an insight into the social lives of English people.
The ways in which a domestic demand for new commodities stimulated traffic and trade to far-flung regions on the globe, such as the Canary Islands, and created new social and cultural communities of merchants and factors is the subject of Barbara Sebek’s essay, “Canary, Bristoles, Londres, Ingleses: English Traders in the Canaries in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (Chapter 21). Noting the popularity of sack or canary wine (with its familiar associations with Falstaff), Sebek quotes one trader: “There is more canary brought into England than to all the world besides …” However, her aim is not to follow the trajectory of the wine’s consumption but to study the Canary trade at its source, the islands that came to serve as an entrepôt linking Mediterranean, northern European, north African, Caribbean, and American markets.
Sebek’s analysis focuses on the specificities of a locale as rich as the Canaries and on the narrated experiences of two Englishmen who lived there, the factor Thomas Nichols, who arrived in 1556 and stayed several years, and the merchant Marmaduke Rawdon, who lived there twice between 1631 and 1655. The Canaries were the center of a thriving commercial community: “In 1555, the English factory – or trading post – in Gran Canaria hosted a thriving market of English textiles for Canary sugar, wine, and drugs” with huge profits for the English trading companies. Overall, the polyglot island community afforded an easy cosmopolitanism, “a window onto the expanding geographies, competing temporalities, and shifting … identities contained within the early modern ‘moment.’” An interesting fact: given the Inquisition was active on the islands, the traders avoided religious antagonisms, one among many reasons for a fluid and nonhomogeneous community. Thus, the establishment of the Inquisition on the islands was both a response to and a record of the diverse religious and national groups who settled and thrived there.
A convergence of the possibilities of profit and the printing press in early modern England (and Europe) brought about the “triumph of the book,” which “revolutionized the transmission of knowledge” (Jardine, 177). Adam Smyth’s essay, “‘The Whole Globe of the Earth’: Almanacs and Their Readers” (Chapter 22), explores the popularity of a seemingly innocuous kind of book: printed almanacs, perhaps the “most popular printed book in England,” which sold in incredible numbers during the seventeenth century, such as 43,000 copies of Vincent Wing’s almanac and print runs of 18,000, 15,000, 12,000, and 10,000 for other almanacs. The popularity of these miniature books, Smyth argues, reflected the early modern imagination’s attraction to small forms that “had a capacity to hold large subjects.” In this context, almanacs were quite striking: sold in the last months of the year, providing knowledge of the year to come, they included information ranging from monthly calendars, local fairs, and husbandry advice to lists of dozens of international cities with notes on their location, mediating the local and globe “through sudden shifts of scale.”
Almanacs offered considerable global information about foreign lands, generally deploying a “rhetoric of practical application,” but Smyth suggests that it is difficult to know how readers may have used this global information or whether almanacs were useful to long-distance travel. What almanacs did do, however, was to encourage readers to think about the relationship between the very local and the national, the global, and even the astrological. The annotations that readers added to their almanacs, an early form of life-writing, suggest a conception of life mediated through these shifts in scale. Perhaps in straddling these different dimensions and worlds, the almanacs offer a unique perspective on the era of expansion from such a narrow, yet richly detailed, lens.
The history, contents, and cultural significance of a cosmopolitan costume book, Habiti antichi et moderno di tutto il Mondo (1598) – full of prints and descriptions of clothing worn throughout the world, in Europe, in Asia, and Africa – is the subject of the next essay in Part III by Ann Rosalind Jones: “Cesare Vecellio, Venetian Writer and Art-Book Cosmopolitan” (Chapter 23). This essay takes us beyond England’s frontier to sixteenth-century Venice, the rival to London as a great mercantile and cultural center at the intersection of East and West, focusing on the cosmopolitan vision of Cesare Vecellio, the compiler of Habiti antichi et moderno di tutto il Mondo (1598), and a great admirer of the Turkish Ottomans. Notably, Jones observes, “this Venetian merchant of images and texts looks at the world through the lens of pragmatic curiosity: he is always ready to be favorably impressed.” How does the work of this sixteenth-century Venetian artist contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the globalizing trends in the Renaissance?
Vecellio, Jones suggests, reflected the spirit of Renaissance Venice, a veritable bazaar of luxury goods and skillfully crafted objects that circulated between Italy and western Asia from the fourteenth century onward. And both Vecellio and Venice worked outside the “one-way colonizing and missionary takeovers and violent global investments of the Northern and Western Europeans.” Instead, Vecellio’s openness to a non-European material culture and peoples shows how the circulation of goods and cultures need not depend on coercion but can be based on “pragmatic adaptation and mutual recognition.”
Richmond Barbour takes us to the East Indies in his essay, “A Multinational Corporation: Labor and Ethnicity in the London East India Company” (Chapter 24). Not unlike Bartolovich, he follows the trajectory of laborers employed by the East India Company: mariners on ships and workers hired both domestically and in foreign locations. Here he postulates that in order to have workers hazard the dangers of these lucrative voyages without access to profits beyond their regular wages, “London merchants instituted divisions of finance and function, and generated vocabularies of race and station which, being yoked to praxis, inflected the emergence of global capitalism.” Most mariners wagered no money into these ventures but rather literally put their lives on the line, given the large numbers of fatalities on these voyages, as is evident in the accounts of accidents and disease.
Typical English strategies of negotiating the differences of station and race while maintaining a labor supply in their foreign factories (trading posts) is vividly delineated by Barbour in his account of the “English Nation at Bantam,” a factory compound in Java, as recounted by Edmund Scott, the chief factor there. A thriving, cosmopolitan port city, Bantam offered many challenges to the English factors, getting the support of the Javanese ruler, striking deals with their Dutch rivals, and negotiating regional differences – among the Javanese, Indians, and Chinese –