and misconceived tale of American triumphalism), an awareness of contemporary global issues and linkages (ecological, diasporic, digital) has intensified everywhere. To employ a concrete example: the handheld digital device works to both seal off the individual from their surroundings, producing an alienating cocoon effect; and it offers a sense of connectedness to a matrix of information that stretches invisibly across the planet. This paradox of both transnational connectedness and localized isolation has informed, sometimes in subtle or unconscious ways, the attitude of scholars in the humanities.
At the risk of oversimplification, I want to focus here on two intellectual trends that have emerged in early modern studies – one tendency is local, the other global. On one hand, there has been a critical movement toward greater textual, cultural, and material particularity: de-emphasizing larger historical narratives or frameworks, many scholars have taken refuge in particular things. This broad tendency goes under a variety of names and subheadings: “thing theory,” “the archival turn,” materialities of the book, histories of the book, of the object, of the everyday, “the new materialism,” and even “the new boredom.”2 Descending from Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Bruno Latour, a new critical paradigm has taken shape: we have witnessed the rise of a microhistoricism, an archaeology of local knowledge that traces the private life of objects, merges the human with the animal, and emphasizes the inextricable, agentic “entanglement” of objects and animals with the everyday lives of people in the past.3 This kind of work can be extremely productive, and it has brought forth rich new lines of research within the field of early modern cultural history and literary studies.4 But there is also a danger: pulling one’s head inside the hard, protective shell of “material culture” and withdrawing from any theoretical framework that would orient one’s scholarly method toward human history as a large-scale, long-term process – such a posture can often be politically dehabilitating. Specialization is, of course, a necessary aspect of all academic expertise, but the post-pandemic Capitalocene is no time for a critical practice that avoids large-scale questions of historical change, class struggle, or capitalist ideology.5 In pursuing their analyses of specific texts and material cultures, many scholars have disavowed the so-called totalizing narratives that are seen as unfashionable from a post–poststructuralist or new materialist point of view.6 In other words, their “micromaterialism” risks becoming microscopic without being microcosmic. At its best, a materialist criticism does succeed in placing micromaterial readings within a larger critique of ideology that engages with “big picture” historical narratives about class, gender, and race. But the risk is that it may dwindle into a petty antiquarianism, a flight from history-writ-large, and the end of politics. We peer down through a microhistorical lens to get a better look at the strange and fascinating creatures that crawl in the carpet, but in doing so we sometimes miss the larger design, the overarching historical process that links past to present and future.
Of all the early modern things or objects that have been lovingly recovered through the new material historicism, “the book” has been the most intensively fetishized of all. Obviously, there is an important place for scholarship that examines the physical forms and marks of the printing process and those left by the activities of readers (e.g., watermarks, bindings, marginalia). These archival investigations have real historical and political value. The evidentiary record of print serves to clarify and demystify the past, and, in many cases, archivists of the book have worked to refine our understanding of print history and the history of reading in ways that speak to long-term social and cultural processes. These historical reconstructions force us to awaken from the dream of the master text and to understand more fully the workings of the author function. Some scholars of book history have even deployed their findings in order to expose and debunk right-wing distortions and interpretations of texts like the US Constitution. While it often enables historical knowledge of one kind or another, the vogue for history of the book scholarship has also been the sign of a powerful nostalgia for the modern, printed book in a postmodern age of virtuality and digitization.7 The history of the book trend feeds off and encourages the notion of a Benjaminian aura surrounding the enarchived early modern rare book, even as electronic databases like Early English Books On-Line render the firsthand examination of such books dispensable for scholars who are not engaged in projects that require the physical handling of early printed books.8
At the same time that the history of the book and other forms of micromaterial historicism have flourished, there has been a very different (one might say opposing) tendency in post–9/11 early modern studies. Since the new century began, we have seen a growing initiative emerge within the field, a new globalism that reaches out beyond the borders of English culture to find connections with other cultures and to tell the story of how English culture changed and developed through interaction with other peoples in both the New and Old Worlds.9 There has been a resurgence of interest in English representations of other cultures, of cross-cultural exchange. These globalist scholars tend to frame their investigations and arguments within larger historical narratives about class, colonialism, and gender. I am thinking here of studies like John Archer’s Old Worlds, Valerie Forman’s Tragicomic Redemptions, Barbara Fuchs’s Mimesis and Empire, Ania Loomba’s Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, Mark Netzloff’s Internal Empires, Ayesha Ramachandran’s The Worldmakers, Coll Thrush’s Indigenous London, Su Fang Ng’s Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia, Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh’s collection Travel Knowledge, and the essays in Global Traffic (edited by Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng), to name only a few. Critics such as these are interested in the way that English culture changed as capitalism emerged, and they see English capitalism’s emergence as a phenomenon that is both domestic and global, part of a global system that connects England (and Britain) to the rest of the world. This kind of work is valid and important for a variety of reasons, including the present need to tell the tale of capitalism’s rise to worldwide dominance in an age when the power and pressure of an unsustainable global capitalism is pushing us ever closer to crisis. The work of cultural historians today can help to communicate, among specialists in our field and to a wider audience, the story of how the global economy developed and of how early capitalism emerged to support and redirect commercial and cultural energies. If capitalism is the engine that drives history, then perhaps we should not ignore its shaping role in relation to cultural production, including the production of literary texts.
Beginning with its founder, Immanuel Wallerstein, global systems theory (also known as world systems theory) has developed an empowering conceptualization of socioeconomic history that can be used to inform the narrative of British cultural history. Global systems theory has changed and developed over the years and is by no means a homogenous school of thought. Theorists like Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, Janet Abu-Lughod, and Samir Amin, have debated and disagreed with each other vigorously, but their debates, taken as a whole, offer a useful frame of reference for understanding the rise of capitalism, the beginnings of European colonialism in the New World, and the cultural changes that accompanied these developments.10 They also help us to see how early modern Europe was connected to other parts of the world. After reading global systems theory, we begin to see English literature not only within a Eurocentric, humanist tradition but within a much broader matrix of global flow and exchange – of goods, texts, people, and ideas. Obviously, this approach will be of much greater interest to scholars who want to connect specific texts to broader cultural transformations or channels of dissemination, but once we begin to think globally, even the most domestic-seeming texts and local issues are found to have transcultural elements. After all, no culture is sealed off, pure, or static, and if we look at early modern England, we find a textile-exporting and luxury-importing island with a rapidly developing maritime culture. London, the site of so much literary and theatrical activity, was a commercial port directly connected by the Thames River estuary to the open sea and thus to the world.
The last third of the sixteenth century witnessed a rapid expansion of English trade overseas. This commercial transformation wrought profound changes in English culture, including a much higher level of cross-cultural contact. As information and goods from abroad flooded in, London became more cosmopolitan, and its population of “strangers” and immigrants increased. The ideological conditions of the time were profoundly