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.

This book posits that coins and their (especially literary) representations were inextricably bound with several key factors for English state formation within the period. After surveying various definitions and histories of the "state" within the first chapter, this book identifies five major dimensions of state formation which correspond to the five chapters of the book: centralized institutional developments; the limits and extent of state and monarchical authority according to custom, reason and natural law; the development and expansion of a legal framework, in particular statute law, for moral regulation and upholding of state prerogatives; the political theology of state evident especially in the charisma of kingship; and the territorial boundaries of state authority, including their impact on intra-state relations. Most of the chapters marry an element of coinage and a literary text (or set of texts) to one of the key factors in English state formation.

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.

A reassessment of the historic relation between money and the state through the lens of early modern English literature, Coinage and State Formation examines the political implications of the monetary form in light of material and visual properties of coins as well as the persistence of both intrinsic and extrinsic theories of value.