on economic behavior. Global systems theory makes clear that the tremendous commercial expansion of the late sixteenth century did not come about because of some “natural” Anglo-Saxon capitalist essence that was waiting to be actuated. England, Britain, and Western Europe did not comprise national or regional units of economic activity that could autonomously initiate or generate such an expansion; rather, they participated in a dynamical system through which they were linked to distant peoples, cultures, and commodities. And it was the organization of flow and exchange within that system as a whole that allowed for England’s changing economic circumstances.11
The middle of the sixteenth century was a time of relative commercial isolation for England, in part because overseas trade was hampered by the internal struggle between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. This economic seclusion began to change, however, during the second half of the sixteenth century, and by the early seventeenth century the English had “exchanged their passive, dependent role in Europe’s trading system for an active, independent role in the world” (Andrews, 8). The enduring tendency for silver to be valued more highly in Asia than in Europe shaped the commercial world of the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and this economic activity helped to stimulate the rise of European capitalism.12 In China, for instance, there was a strong demand for gold and silver. The tug of this “bimetallic flow” allowed for spices and luxury goods to travel west to Europe, while New World gold and silver were brought from the mines in the Americas to Europe and then moved on to Asia. According to economic historian Jan de Vries:
The fifteenth-century introduction [in China] of a silver currency and the imposition in the 1570s of the “single-whip” tax system (transforming various payments in kind to a single tax payable in silver) established the basis for China’s seemingly insatiable demand for silver. The silver required to monetize the economy was enormous, and it became a moving target as population growth accelerated.
(96)
Wallerstein sees early modern China as a world empire and not as a world economy made up of multiple polities. The rise of capitalism, in Wallerstein’s view, was, in part, an outcome of the protracted crisis of feudalism specific to Europe (c. 1290–1450). Wallerstein stresses the fact that Northwest Europe gained control over most of the world economy and presided over the development and spread of industrialization and, in time, the global capitalist economy, resulting in unequal development.
In response to Wallerstein, later work in global systems theory has often focused on China’s important role in the world economy. There has been a welcome effort by Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, and others to counter a Eurocentric tendency in Wallerstein’s work, and to stress the notion that the “great divergence” between the European economy and the rest of the world should be understood in terms of a worldwide, holistic system. These developments comprise a new global approach to history writing that differs from earlier forms of world history that were Eurocentric or even comparative. Insofar as scholars working on early modern texts continue to do historicist work that appeals to a broad vision of embeddedness in historical processes, this new global approach to history becomes an important framework for making sense of cultural history.
As I said earlier, many scholars working on early modern literature and culture have been demonstrating the ways in which English culture was going global in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This transformation has been revealed from many different angles. Lesley B. Cormack, in her study of what she calls “the English geographical community” (50), argues that “Geography provided a key to an imperialism that stressed the superiority of the English people and customs and the knowability, controllability, and inferiority of the wider world” (11). Scholars like Jonathan Gil Harris and Jean E. Howard point out the contradiction between xenophobia and cosmopolitanism that intensified during this period, as London adapted to a position in the changing matrix of global commerce.13 Walter Cohen and Crystal Bartolovich have written about how London was becoming a “world city” and how that worlding was expressed on the London stage.14 At a number of linked sites of textual production and consumption, from the English universities to the theaters and wharves of London, to the trade networks and diasporas that connected London to overseas markets, we see the beginnings of what we now call globalization. If I choose to make English culture the primary object of analysis here, this choice does not imply that England or Britain or Europe (whatever Europe might have been in 1600) are causally more significant in bringing about a new world order than other participants in the global system, like China or India or Persia.15 My analysis acknowledges the participation of London in a global network – an economic and transcultural system of catalytic dependencies and dynamical changes. Before the 1570s, English society was far less mobile and outgoing, but as English merchants, sailors, pirates, colonists, travelers, and diplomats began to circulate in unprecedented ways beyond the shores of the British Isles, literary production became more globally oriented as well. This global turn is seen in prose narrative, in the theater, in epic poetry, and in other genres. Early modern authors were stimulated by the new cross-cultural contact: from More’s Utopia to Shakespeare’s Tempest we can see clearly that many writers were inspired by this experience. I will try to demonstrate my point with reference to a single text, but one that is restlessly global – Spenser’s Faerie Queene .
Spenser’s romance epic hearkens back to the era of the Crusades and the literature produced at that time, when English knights traveled to the Middle East and participated in its economy. The European romance tradition of the Middle Ages, with its orientation toward the Holy Land, represented Christian–Muslim conflict as a struggle between Christian knights and their “saracen” or “paynim” foes. Spenser and other English authors of the late sixteenth century took up the thread of that tradition and refashioned it to weave new versions of romance narrative, and produce new transnational, and often cross-cultural, epic poems.
In The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s imaginative geography encompasses Ireland, Europe, the East Indies, and the West Indies. Spenser’s epic is oriented not only toward the English court, but also toward the known world, the colonial contact zone, and beyond. His patrons, including Raleigh and the Queen, were interested – and, literally, invested – in England’s connections with the global system of the day. Spenser’s allegorical heroes pursue their quests through Fairyland, and the exhausting labor that they undertake is compared to the poet’s long-distance labor – both the heroic quest and the poet’s task are figured as a journey by sea.
Perhaps the connection between poetic inspiration and global vision is most explicit in the proem to the second book of The Faerie Queene, which begins with these cantos:
Right well I wrote most mighty Soveraine,
That all this famous antique history,
Of some th’aboundance of an idle braine
Will judged be, and painted forgery,
Rather then matter of just memory,
Sith none, that breatheth living aire, does know,
Where is that happy land of Faery,
Which I so much do vaunt, yet no where show,
But vouch antiquities, which no body can know.
But let that man with better sence advize,
That of the world least part to us is red:
And dayly how through hardy enterprize,
Many great Regions are discovered,
Which to late age were never mentioned.
Who ever heard of th’Indian Peru?
Or who in venturous vessell measured
The Amazon huge river now found trew?
Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever vew?
Yet all these were, when no man did them know;
Yet have from wisest ages hidden beene:
And later times things more unknowne shall show.
Why then should witlesse man so much misweene
That nothing is, but that which