Global traffic

This remarkable collection investigates the relations between literature and the economy in the context of the unprecedented expansion of early modern England's long distance trade. Studying a range of genres and writers, both familiar and lesser known, the essays offer a new history of globalization as a complex of unevenly developing cultural, discursive, and economic phenomena. While focusing on how long distance trade contributed to England's economic growth and cultural transformation, the collection taps into scholarly interest in race, gender, travel and exploration, domesticity, mapping, the state and emergent nationalism, and proto-colonialism in the early modern period.