This volume examines early Anglo-Indian relations through trade (with the establishment of the East India Company), tourism, and diplomacy and reveals important differences between traveller reports and the representations of London's press and stage. Richmond Barbour looks closely at exotic visions of "the East," as staged in the playhouses, at court, and on the streets of Shakespeare's London. He follows the efforts of the newly established East India Company, and the careers of England's first tourist and first ambassador in India, Thomas Coryate and Sir Thomas Roe.

Studies of orientalism have chiefly concentrated on the eighteenth century and beyond, while Renaissance work on colonial discourse and travel writing has concentrated on the New World. Before Orientalism examines early Anglo-Indian cultural relations through trade (with the establishment of the East India Company), tourism and diplomacy and illuminates important differences between the reports of travellers and the representations of the London press and stage. Richmond Barbour examines exotic visions of the East as staged in the playhouses, at court, and on the streets of Shakespeare's London. He follows the efforts of the newly established East India Company, and the troubled, deeply theatrical careers of England's first tourist and first ambassador in India, Thomas Coryate and Sir Thomas Roe. The wide range of illustrations depict early modern London's theatricalization of the world and exotic representations of the East and reveal European influences on Moghul art and the latter on English representations.

England's Asian Renaissance explores how Asian knowledges, narratives, and customs inflected early modern English literature. Just as Asian imports changed England's tastes and enriched the English language, Eastern themes, characters, and motifs helped shape the country's culture and contributed to its national identity. Questioning long-standing dichotomies between East and West and embracing a capacious understanding of translatio as geographic movement, linguistic transformation, and cultural grafting, the collection gives pride of place to convergence, approximation, and hybridity, thus underscoring the radical mobility of early modern culture. In so doing, England's Asian Renaissance also moves away from entrenched narratives of Western cultural sovereignty to think anew England's debts to Asia.

Was it the Titanic of its age? Christened by an optimistic King James I in December 1609, the Trades Increase was the greatest English merchant vessel of the Jacobean era-a magnificent ship embodying the hopes of the nascent East India Company to claim a commanding share of the Eastern trade. But the ship's launch failed when it proved too large to exit from its dock, an ill-fated start to an expedition that would end some three years later, when a dangerously leaking Trades Increase at last reached the shores of Java. While its smaller companion vessel would sail home with handsome profits for investors, the rotting hull of the great ship itself was beyond repair. The Trades Increase and nearly all who sailed it perished wretchedly on the far side of the world. The terrible pattern proven by this voyage, with profits to an elite few in London stained by catastrophic losses in equipment and personnel abroad, ignited rancorous controversy in England over the human, moral, and economic costs of such commerce. In The Loss of the "Trades Increase" Richmond Barbour has written an engrossing account of the tragic expedition and of global capitalism at its hour of emergence. Its sources fragmented among journals, minutes, and letters in the archives of the East India Company, the full story of the Trades Increase is told here for the first time. Earlier writers minimized the loss as a temporary setback and necessary sacrifice on the road to empire. In a work informed by corporate history and postcolonial theory, Barbour sees the saga of the voyage, and all that produced and justified it, differently: as an expression of the structural conflicts, operational risks, and material incapacities that haunted and ultimately unraveled the British Empire-and that destabilize multinational corporations, global markets, and our common biosphere to this day.

England's Asian Renaissance explores how Asian knowledges, narratives, and customs inflected early modern English literature. Just as Asian imports changed England's tastes and enriched the English language, Eastern themes, characters, and motifs helped shape the country's culture and contributed to its national identity. Questioning long-standing dichotomies between East and West and embracing a capacious understanding of translatio as geographic movement, linquistic transformation, and cultural grafting, the collection gives pride of place to convergence, approximation, and hybridity, thus underscoring the radical mobility of early modern culture. In so doing, England's Asian Renaissance also moves away from entrenched narratives of Western cultural sovereignty to think anew England's debts to Asia. Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.