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.