Imperial Ventures - by Benjamin Vanwagoner (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Links early modern English drama and empire studies, exploring how staged scenes of maritime peril created a new form of economic uncertainty

Imperial Ventures links early modern English drama and empire studies, exploring how staged scenes of maritime peril created a new form of economic uncertainty around the turn of the seventeenth century, amid London's explosion in commercial colonialism.

While the hazards of global maritime trade became increasingly apparent during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the word "risk" did not enter English usage until around 1660. The prevailing scholarly narrative has linked uncertainty to concepts such as "chance," "accident," and "providence," but this book reveals that these fragmentary concepts were reordered into an economic abstraction, and that the theater was a key site for that process. Playwrights reached for ways to represent this new uncertainty, and audiences watched perilous voyages set in colonial contexts and dramatized in increasingly typical forms. Imperial Ventures is organized by these forms, with five chapters examining scenes of shipwreck, pirates, enslavement, colonial subjection, and perilous news across a wide range of early modern plays.

Benjamin VanWagoner shows how maritime drama connected English venturing to economic vulnerability in increasingly systematic ways, helping to develop the economic logic that would come to be codified as risk. In revealing this process, Imperial Ventures establishes the unique protocolonial status of early modern England--in the theater and at sea--and demonstrates how risk became a perverse instrument for justifying Anglophone imperialism.

Review Quotes

"Imperial Ventures is distinguished by its close attention to economic ideas and processes. It is especially concerned with risk's conceptual history. . . . Imperial Ventures is at its best where VanWagoner deploys his considerable expertise to draw out the economic implications of dramatic set-pieces."--Laurence Publicover "The Review of English Studies"

"In this erudite study, Ben VanWagoner defines his task as 'literary archaeology' as he charts the invention and emergence of risk as an economic concept in late sixteenth and seventeenth-century drama. Imperial Ventures aims to provide fresh insight into 'how English culture understood its own imperial project' and the book's focus on the London stage is an apposite one."--Claire Jowitt "International Journal of Maritime History"

"Provides a fascinating study of early modern maritime risk in literary and non-literary contexts. It will be of interest to the literary scholar and cultural historian alike, as not only does it write a new history of the development of risk in early modern English literature and culture, but it also presents an exemplary model of how to do this type of scholarly work persuasively."-- "Renaissance and Reformation"

"Imperial Ventures provides a fascinating study of early modern maritime risk in literary and non-literary contexts. It will be of interest to the literary scholar and cultural historian alike, as not only does it write a new history of the development of risk in early modern English literature and culture, but it also presents an exemplary model of how to do this type of scholarly work persuasively."--Hayley Cotter "Renaissance and Reformation"

"The study is lucidly written, impressively researched, and intellectually ambitious. . . . By drawing drama and commerce into a shared analytical frame, VanWagoner convincingly demonstrates that the invention of risk was not only an economic abstraction but a theatrical one. This book will be indispensable reading for scholars of Shakespeare, early modern drama, and maritime culture, as it promises to stimulate productive dialogue across literary, historical, and theoretical fields."--Laurie Ellinghausen "Sixteenth Century Journal"

"Imperial Ventures is a path-breaking study of early modern postcolonialism, examining how risk animated both economic discourses and dramatic representations of peril at sea. The strength of this book lies in its fresh readings of familiar plays as they dramatize the risks and challenges of the new maritime economy buttressing England's imperialist drives."-- "Jyotsna G. Singh, author of Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory"

"In the midst of twenty-first-century refugee crises, climate migrations, and supply-chain volatility, Benjamin VanWagoner's study of the early modern history of maritime risk and theatrical performance is both timely and keenly illuminating. Offering incisive case studies of a corpus of maritime plays and venturing documents, this provocative book demonstrates the theater's contributions to a 'cultural archaeology' of risk punctuated by shipwreck, pirates, enslavement, and subjection."-- "Jane Hwang Degenhardt, author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage"

"This excellent and erudite book reconsiders early modern maritime drama in terms of imperialism and colonial expansion, brilliantly bringing together new developments in critical thinking about race, slavery, economic risk, and related areas. Anyone interested in oceanic cultures, early modern globalization, ecological imperialism, or the blue humanities should read this book!"-- "Steve Mentz, author of Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550-1719"

About the Author

Benjamin VanWagoner is a Core Lecturer at Columbia Univeristy.