Trading India: Commerce, spectacle, and otherness, in early modern England

Spices -- pepper, nutmegs, cinnamon and mace drove England's early quest for the East Indies. My dissertation charts the emergent stages of England's trade with the East Indies, exploring divergent English responses to both foreign objects and racialized bodies. Even before the establishment of the East India Company on December 31, 1600, 'India' circulated as a series of images, myths and commodities. While drawing on these older depictions of 'India' and the East Indies, my project takes into account the new ways in which early modern England interacted with eastern bodies after London merchants finally gained direct access to "the islands of spicerie." As such my research has much in common with the recent emphasis on a 'global renaissance,' situating England at the cross roads of transnational commerce and protocolonialism. I argue that not just far flung tropical islands, but London itself needs to be recognized as a 'contact zone' (citing Mary Louise Pratt) where actual East Indians roamed the streets and Englishmen consumed eastern objects. In turn, Indian subjects and commodities found their way into court masques, civic spectacles and the commercial stage, briefly transforming Cheapside into a pepper plantation for the Grocer's guild, or Henrietta Maria into an Indian queen in Whitehall. Nonetheless, trade expansion triggered divergent reactions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leading to public disavowals or championing of the East Indies trade. Structured around civic pageantry, court entertainments and the public stage, my chapters examine a mutually constitutive relationship between mercantile forces and cultural productions geared to varied and distinct publics.;Specifically, I focus on three particular publics: mercantile, courtly and playhouse gatherings. My opening chapter, "Imagining India: Discourse of the East Indies," reads the domestic spat between Titania and Oberon over the Indian Boy in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream alongside Mandeville's Travels, early cartography and the arguments against the East Indies trade set forth by seventeenth century pamphleteers like Robert Kayll and Edward Misselden. I argue that during the early modern period, older stereotypes of India as a land of aberrations transformed from a discourse on physical or moral monstrosity to that of economic deviancy. In my second chapter "Blackness, Spices and Civic Spectacle: Importing the East Indies in London's Lord Mayor's shows," I turn to mercantile publics and the Grocers Guild. I am particularly interested in how questions of indigenous labor, religious conversion and spice trade play out in Thomas Middleton's The Tryumphs of Honor and Industry (1617) and The Triumphs of Honor and Vertue (1622).;A racially ambiguous Indian queen and her troop of singing Brachmani priests form the subject of my third chapter, "Playing an Indian Queen: Neoplatonism, Ethnography, and The Temple of Love." Focusing more on 'becoming' Indian, this chapter analyzes William Davenant's masque for Henrietta Maria alongside the thriving new market of curiosities. My final chapter "'And make them perfect Indies': Alchemy, transmutation and the East India Company," examines the conflation of roguery and East Indies trade in Jonson, charting how the fabulous riches of 'India' transform into a metaphor for an elaborate hoax. As such this chapter tests the limits of 'becoming' Indian, and the appetite for consuming spices, pearls and calicoes.