In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans invented 'Indians' and populated the world with them. The global history of the term 'Indian' remains largely unwritten and this volume, taking its cue from Shakespeare, asks us to consider the proximities and distances between various early modern discourses of the Indian. Through new analysis of English travel writing, medical treatises, literature, and drama, contributors seek not just to recover unexpected counter-histories but to put pressure on the ways in which we understand race, foreign bodies, and identity in a globalizing age that has still not shed deeply ingrained imperialist habits of marking difference.

Recent years have witnessed a surge in early modern ecostudies, many devoted to Shakespearean drama. Yet in this burgeoning discipline, travel writing appears moored in historicization, inorganic subjects are far less prevalent than organic ones, and freshwater sites are hardly visited. For All Waters explores these uncharted wetscapes. Lowell Duckert shows that when playwrights and travel writers such as Sir Walter Raleigh physically interacted with rivers, glaciers, monsoons, and swamps, they composed “hydrographies,” or bodily and textual assemblages of human and nonhuman things that dissolved notions of human autonomy and its singular narrativity. With a playful, punning touch woven deftly into its theoretical rigor, For All Waters disputes fantasies of ecological solitude that would keep our selves high and dry and that would try to sustain a political ecology excluding water and the poor. The lives of both humans and waterscapes can be improved simultaneously through direct engagement with wetness. For All Waters concludes by investigating waterscapes in peril today—West Virginia’s chemical rivers and Iceland’s vanishing glaciers—and outlining what we can learn from early moderns’ eco-ontological lessons. By taking their soggy and storied matters to heart, and arriving at a greater realization of our shared wetness, we can conceive new directions to take within the hydropolitical crises afflicting us today.

The period between the 16th and 18th centuries witnessed the expansion of European travel, trade and colonization around the globe, resulting in greatly increased contact between Westerners and peoples throughout the rest of the world. With the rise of print and the commercial book market, Europeans avidly consumed reports of the outside world and its various peoples, often in distorted or fictional forms. With the consolidation of new empirical science and taxonomy, prejudice against peoples of different colours and cultures during the 16th and 17th centuries became more systematic, giving rise to the doctrines of race 'science.' Although humanitarianism and the idea of human rights also flourished, inspiring the campaign to abolish the slave trade, this movement did not hinder imperialist expansion and the belief that humans could be ranked in a hierarchy that authorized White domination. The essays in this volume trace the complex pattern of intellectual and cultural change from popular bigotry in the Age of Shakespeare to the racial categories developed in the works of Buffon and Kant. These essays also link changes in racial thinking to other trends during this age. The development of modern ideas of race corresponded with emerging conceptions of the nation state; new acceptance of religious diversity became linked with speculations on racial diversity; transforming ideologies of gender and sexuality overlapped in crucial ways with developing racial attitudes. In many ways, the period between the Reformation and Enlightenment laid the foundations for modern racial thinking, generating issues and conflicts that still haunt us today.

Early Modern Theatricality brings together some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the many conventions that characterized early modern theatricality. It generates fresh possibilities for criticism, combining historical, formal, and philosophical questions, in order to provoke our rediscovery of early modern drama.

Focusing on writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Samson Occum, Charles Brockden Brown, and others, Transformable Race tells the story of how early Americans imagined, contributed to, and challenged the ways that one's racial identity could be formed in the time of the nation's founding.

A study of British imperialism’s imaginative geography, exploring the pairing of India and the Atlantic world from literature to colonial policyIn this lively book, Ashley Cohen weaves a complex portrait of the imaginative geography of British imperialism. Contrary to most current scholarship, eighteenth-century Britons saw the empire not as separate Atlantic and Indian spheres but as an interconnected whole: the Indies. Crisscrossing the hemispheres, Cohen traces global histories of race, slavery, and class, from Boston to Bengal. She also reveals the empire to be pervasively present at home, in metropolitan scenes of fashionable sociability. Close-reading a mixed archive of plays, poems, travel narratives, parliamentary speeches, political pamphlets, visual satires, paintings, memoirs, manuscript letters, and diaries, Cohen reveals how the pairing of the two Indies in discourse helped produce colonial policies that linked them in practice. Combining the methods of literary studies and new imperial history, Cohen demonstrates how the imaginative geography of the Indies shaped the culture of British imperialism, which in turn changed the shape of the world.