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Exploration and travel as mapped in the preceding chapters testify to the fact that despite the challenging journeys facing unknown dangers across sea and land, the global drive for “discovery” among Westerners continued apace. The traveling itineraries and encounters of the English and Europeans across different geographical and cultural “contact zones” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reveal varied impulses and drives that propelled them. They could be driven by the imperatives of trade and profit, national pride, religious proselytization, or an ethnographic curiosity, combined with ineffable personal drives and ambitions. However, what also emerges in these varied strands is a sense of natural English and European entitlement to the commodities and minerals in lands they “discovered.” For instance, these drives are articulated from an English perspective by Richard Hakluyt, Lawyer, to his junior cousin and namesake the geographer and compiler of Principal Navigations. In “Notes to Colonization,” which is a part of the correspondence between the two men, he states that what the ideal conditions of English colonization mean is to “have access to supply all wants … [in a] seat … to bee chosen … in sweet ayre, where you may possesse, alwayes sweete water … fish, flesh, grayne, fruits … and [to have possession] … of mines of golde, of silver, copper, quicksilver, of any such precious thing.” (The Original Writings and Correspondence of the two Richard Hakluyts, E. G. R. Taylor, 116–117). In fact he strongly exhorts such colonizing activities to his countrymen, “to live by traffic … and by trade of merchandise” (117) (my italics).

In Part III, such incipient colonizing drives, with attendant cultural exchanges and cross-pollinations, figure in concrete form in eight essays on material culture of the global Renaissance, exploring the attributes and trajectories of disparate inanimate and organic objects: paintings, gun metal, coins, wines, books (almanacs), woodcuts, and the amaranth flower and seeds. Thus, these eight chapters demonstrate that the value and meaning of any economic object are determined by the varying contexts of their spatial and temporal movements.

The remaining two chapters in this part (17 and 24) examine two entities central to early modern mercantile capitalism: English “factories” or trading stations that organized the labor and racial taxonomies of the Asian natives; and the slaving ships that carried the human cargo of Africans for the commodification of human beings in chattel slavery, which became known as the infamous transatlantic slave trade. In sum, the movement, demand, and consumption of commodities in the early modern period cannot be separated from the historical, social, and cultural milieus within which the material objects – and objectified human beings – circulated, whether in domestic markets or in the frontiers of the “contact zones,” such as the Mughal Court, Canary Islands, Ottoman and North African kingdoms, Mesoamerica, the West Indies, and the African Guinea Coast. In fact, following Arjun Appadurai’s premise, several of these chapters demonstrate (in varying degrees and forms) that all “commodities like persons have social lives” (1986, 1) that become apparent while “exploring the conditions under which economic objects circulate in different regimes of value in space and time” (1986, 4).

The opening essay, “The Unseen World of Willem Schellinks: Local Milieu and Global Circulation in the Visualization of Mughal India” (Chapter 16), by Jos Gommans and Jan de Hond, offers a compelling account of cultural productions and cross-cultural encounters as they are illuminated in the work of Willem Schellinks, a seventeenth-century Amsterdam painter-cum-poet whose work was inspired by Mughal history and miniatures. As far as we know he was the very first European observer to write about his appreciation of Mughal painting and situate it in a global historical context. This chapter revisits Schellinks’ own engagement with global history as revealed in his recently rediscovered poem on Indian painting and two of his most intriguing Indian works. It begins with an analysis of the historical sources emanating from the global information hub that Amsterdam already was in this period. They include Jesuit reports, VOC intelligence, and personal travel journals. Second, Gommans and de Hond go on to explore the particular milieu of painters, playwrights, and poets in Amsterdam and highlight the importance of the interface between literature and painting in the making of Schellinks’ work. Third, they argue that it is possible to understand Schellinks’ Mughal works only in light of his profound fascination with theater and in particular the type of theater being made in Amsterdam in this period. Through this microhistorical study of Schellinks’ local milieu – in particular, the practice of painting and its relation to poetry and theater – this essay reassesses the general phenomenon of European visual representations of the Orient in this period. The spectacular interplay in these paintings between reality and illusion, between the seen and the unseen, makes Schellinks’ artistic vision surprisingly commensurable with that of his Mughal protagonists, whose artistic vision encouraged an intermingling of Western naturalistic traditions with Islamic art. Finally, while typically Western descriptions of the Mughal court in the early modern period were shaped by English (and Portuguese) accounts, here we are reminded that the Dutch also had a presence in India – albeit fleeting – as they went on to establish their empire farther east.

From artistic production and cultural exchange in Mughal–Dutch relations, we move to an account of the discursive and representational justification of the early English commodification and sale of Africans captured on the Guinea coast by John Hawkins (1562, 1564, 1567–1568). In this essay, titled “Hakluyt’s Books and Hawkins’ Slaving Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade in the English National Imaginary, 1560–1600” (Chapter 17), Jyotsna G. Singh revisits the life of John Hawkins, often described as a “colorful” denizen of Plymouth and Devon and at other times as an Elizabethan notable, naval commander, and treasurer of the Navy, but who was also considered England’s first “official” slaver. Hawkins’ three slaving voyages to and from West Africa to the West Indies, Hispaniola, and the Mexican coast, where he sold the captives to the Spanish colonials, give a remarkable close-up account of the interactions with the indigenous inhabitants, of raiding battles, seizing of captives, and local logistics and economics – of Africans labeled as “Negroes” by the English when enslaved, “taken,” or bought. Overall, these voyages yield detailed information of their slaving practices: modes of acquisition and sale, including prices, profits, and commodities exchanged. While recognizing that England’s entry into the profitable transatlantic trade was belated compared with other European powers such as the Spaniards and more centrally the Portuguese, this chapter focuses on the Hawkins voyages as an optic for examining the enslavement and trafficking of Africans in the period. Hawkins’ voyages were and continued to be known as recounted and endorsed by Richard Hakluyt in his anthology of travel narratives, Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589) and reprinted in a second edition, Principall Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, 1598–1600. Furthermore, honors received by John Hawkins soon after his voyages further testify to the stakes of the English Crown in his slaving enterprise; in 1565, he received a heraldic coat of arms under royal endorsement, “decorated” by a figure of a bound African “Moor,” euphemistically representing the forced enslavement of Africans as a “victory” over the “Moors” in battle. This chapter aims to critically reassess early English trading and slaving practices, not only as they unfolded “on the ground” but also as they widely permeated and shaped the English national imagination.

The following chapter turns to the twists and turns of Anglo–Ottoman trade. Matthew Dimmock discusses the export of valuable English gun metal and arms and the import of decorative “trifles” in his essay “Guns and Gawds: Elizabethan England’s ‘Infidel’ Trade” (Chapter 18). He examines the often xenophobic anxieties surrounding foreign trade via the famous “Dutch Church Libel” of 1593 – a pamphlet attached to the door of a London Protestant church – that attacks foreigners, specifically Northern Europeans, as parasites who facilitate the export of valuable English goods, “our Lead, our Vittaile, our Ordenance,” and import of “Pedlers” trifles made from English commodities originally and sold in England. This attack on foreigners and foreign trade is set against a backdrop of economic crises in the 1590s coupled with England’s shrinking trade in European markets. Such mercantile pressures and realignments, Dimmock argues, are clearly demonstrated on one hand by the sale of decorative trifles on English streets and on the other by England’s growing exports to the “infidel” Ottomans, especially tin from Cornwall and the scrap, bell metal from the old monasteries.

Defying an edict of the Pope against the sale of weaponry and metals, though downplaying the extent of its trading relationship with the Ottomans, England continued to sell bell metal and guns to the Ottomans (and others) as a part of its arms trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Discursively, Dimmock argues, as the centerpiece of his essay, “in the schism of the ongoing Reformation the Protestant English had become the ‘infidels’ of Christendom, increasingly bound together in polemical, mercantile, and symbolic terms with the Muslim ‘infidels’ of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire.” Yet while the English were accused by some of exchanging the “Bible for the Alcoran,” the bells confiscated from monasteries also became the symbols of “Protestant iconoclasm,” reaffirming Elizabeth’s status as a “Protestant idol destroyer.” In sum, objects such as metal and guns acquired an “infidel” character, associated with the enemies of Christendom, yet in a different “regime of value” they enhanced Elizabeth’s power and status.

Next, in an inquiry into the role of the natural world of plants in the global colonizing forays of the period, Edward M. Test follows the physical journey of a plant, amaranth, from Mesoamerica to Renaissance gardens throughout Europe, in his essay “Seeds of Sacrifice: Amaranth, the Gardens of Tenochtitlan and Spenser’s Faerie Queene” (Chapter 19). And, in doing so, he also charts the two systems of signification in which the amaranth accrues differing meanings. For the Mesoamerican Mexica (the pre-Columbian name for the Aztec people) the amaranth was integral to their diet, ecosystem, and most importantly (in terms of this essay) to rituals of human sacrifice. An enormous interest in alien flora – brought by the explorers and merchants who crossed the seas – underpinned the great age of Renaissance gardens and herbal literature in which an interest in botany implied a new scientific curiosity. But, according to Test, these new gardens also had religious associations with Paradise and Spenser’s “Garden of Adonis” in The Faerie Queene, drawing on both contexts: of early modern gardeners planting, grafting, mixing foreign and native seeds, and evoking the Genesis where God provides “every herb bearing seed.”

Spenser’s term “sad Amaranthus” suggests that he knew of the plant’s association with Mexica ritual sacrifice but here, as Test argues, “the sacred plant of extreme religious devotion in ancient Mexico is transformed into a symbol of devotional love in England.” While pointing to the cross-cultural transference of a range of associations, Test also adds a twist in order to reverse the Eurocentric template: while the Mexica used their sacrifice rituals “for ritual and regeneration” of the earth, the Europeans used brutal public torture as rituals of imposing order. Second, the gardens of Mesoamerica “propelled the study of botany in Europe,” and thus, the supposedly “primitive” New World aided in “the development of the early modern world.”

English xenophobia regarding foreign trade, foreigners, and specific commodities, discussed in some of the earlier essays, also figures prominently in Stephen Deng’s essay, “‘So Pale, So Lame, So Lean, So Ruinous”: The Circulation of Foreign Coins in Early Modern England” (Chapter 20). Deng argues that what appears to be a xenophobic response common among all English people actually presents a more complex dynamic when class differences and relations between state and subjects are taken into consideration. In particular, foreign coins, which tended to be gold and higher-valued silver coins, circulated primarily among aristocrats and wealthy merchants, in contrast to the hardworking domestic pennies with which commoners would have been more familiar. Such distinctions among coins are evident in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, which, Deng argues, maintains clear class distinctions in knowledge and experience of foreign coins despite appearing to offer a fantasy of social mobility. A critique of foreign coins, such as in their associations with disease, could be indicative of internal class tensions in addition to general xenophobia.

Moreover, a suspicion of foreign coins even among the elite could signal anxiety about English coins circulating abroad, especially following the disastrous experience of debasement under Henry VIII. Prior to the “Great Debasement,” English coins had maintained considerable prestige abroad. But even after Elizabeth’s restoration of the coinage, England suffered an inferiority complex about its coins that often inspired ridicule of foreign coins. Ultimately, Deng argues, “English critique of foreign coins should be considered not only as chauvinistic expressions of English nationalism but also as representative of domestic concerns about social relations and a history of economic exploitation by the state.” The social lives of coins therefore offer an insight into the social lives of English people.

The ways in which a domestic demand for new commodities stimulated traffic and trade to far-flung regions on the globe, such as the Canary Islands, and created new social and cultural communities of merchants and factors is the subject of Barbara Sebek’s essay, “Canary, Bristoles, Londres, Ingleses: English Traders in the Canaries in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (Chapter 21). Noting the popularity of sack or canary wine (with its familiar associations with Falstaff), Sebek quotes one trader: “There is more canary brought into England than to all the world besides …” However, her aim is not to follow the trajectory of the wine’s consumption but to study the Canary trade at its source, the islands that came to serve as an entrepôt linking Mediterranean, northern European, north African, Caribbean, and American markets.

Sebek’s analysis focuses on the specificities of a locale as rich as the Canaries and on the narrated experiences of two Englishmen who lived there, the factor Thomas Nichols, who arrived in 1556 and stayed several years, and the merchant Marmaduke Rawdon, who lived there twice between 1631 and 1655. The Canaries were the center of a thriving commercial community: “In 1555, the English factory – or trading post – in Gran Canaria hosted a thriving market of English textiles for Canary sugar, wine, and drugs” with huge profits for the English trading companies. Overall, the polyglot island community afforded an easy cosmopolitanism, “a window onto the expanding geographies, competing temporalities, and shifting … identities contained within the early modern ‘moment.’” An interesting fact: given the Inquisition was active on the islands, the traders avoided religious antagonisms, one among many reasons for a fluid and nonhomogeneous community. Thus, the establishment of the Inquisition on the islands was both a response to and a record of the diverse religious and national groups who settled and thrived there.

A convergence of the possibilities of profit and the printing press in early modern England (and Europe) brought about the “triumph of the book,” which “revolutionized the transmission of knowledge” (Jardine, 177). Adam Smyth’s essay, “‘The Whole Globe of the Earth’: Almanacs and Their Readers” (Chapter 22), explores the popularity of a seemingly innocuous kind of book: printed almanacs, perhaps the “most popular printed book in England,” which sold in incredible numbers during the seventeenth century, such as 43,000 copies of Vincent Wing’s almanac and print runs of 18,000, 15,000, 12,000, and 10,000 for other almanacs. The popularity of these miniature books, Smyth argues, reflected the early modern imagination’s attraction to small forms that “had a capacity to hold large subjects.” In this context, almanacs were quite striking: sold in the last months of the year, providing knowledge of the year to come, they included information ranging from monthly calendars, local fairs, and husbandry advice to lists of dozens of international cities with notes on their location, mediating the local and globe “through sudden shifts of scale.”

Almanacs offered considerable global information about foreign lands, generally deploying a “rhetoric of practical application,” but Smyth suggests that it is difficult to know how readers may have used this global information or whether almanacs were useful to long-distance travel. What almanacs did do, however, was to encourage readers to think about the relationship between the very local and the national, the global, and even the astrological. The annotations that readers added to their almanacs, an early form of life-writing, suggest a conception of life mediated through these shifts in scale. Perhaps in straddling these different dimensions and worlds, the almanacs offer a unique perspective on the era of expansion from such a narrow, yet richly detailed, lens.

The history, contents, and cultural significance of a cosmopolitan costume book, Habiti antichi et moderno di tutto il Mondo (1598) – full of prints and descriptions of clothing worn throughout the world, in Europe, in Asia, and Africa – is the subject of the next essay in Part III by Ann Rosalind Jones: “Cesare Vecellio, Venetian Writer and Art-Book Cosmopolitan” (Chapter 23). This essay takes us beyond England’s frontier to sixteenth-century Venice, the rival to London as a great mercantile and cultural center at the intersection of East and West, focusing on the cosmopolitan vision of Cesare Vecellio, the compiler of Habiti antichi et moderno di tutto il Mondo (1598), and a great admirer of the Turkish Ottomans. Notably, Jones observes, “this Venetian merchant of images and texts looks at the world through the lens of pragmatic curiosity: he is always ready to be favorably impressed.” How does the work of this sixteenth-century Venetian artist contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the globalizing trends in the Renaissance?

Vecellio, Jones suggests, reflected the spirit of Renaissance Venice, a veritable bazaar of luxury goods and skillfully crafted objects that circulated between Italy and western Asia from the fourteenth century onward. And both Vecellio and Venice worked outside the “one-way colonizing and missionary takeovers and violent global investments of the Northern and Western Europeans.” Instead, Vecellio’s openness to a non-European material culture and peoples shows how the circulation of goods and cultures need not depend on coercion but can be based on “pragmatic adaptation and mutual recognition.”

Richmond Barbour takes us to the East Indies in his essay, “A Multinational Corporation: Labor and Ethnicity in the London East India Company” (Chapter 24). Not unlike Bartolovich, he follows the trajectory of laborers employed by the East India Company: mariners on ships and workers hired both domestically and in foreign locations. Here he postulates that in order to have workers hazard the dangers of these lucrative voyages without access to profits beyond their regular wages, “London merchants instituted divisions of finance and function, and generated vocabularies of race and station which, being yoked to praxis, inflected the emergence of global capitalism.” Most mariners wagered no money into these ventures but rather literally put their lives on the line, given the large numbers of fatalities on these voyages, as is evident in the accounts of accidents and disease.

Typical English strategies of negotiating the differences of station and race while maintaining a labor supply in their foreign factories (trading posts) is vividly delineated by Barbour in his account of the “English Nation at Bantam,” a factory compound in Java, as recounted by Edmund Scott, the chief factor there. A thriving, cosmopolitan port city, Bantam offered many challenges to the English factors, getting the support of the Javanese ruler, striking deals with their Dutch rivals, and negotiating regional differences – among the Javanese, Indians, and Chinese – who, given the limited number of English personnel, provided them with labor in the factories and sometimes on the ships back home. Thus, Bantam functions as a local, micro setting for England’s global trade – a “contact zone” – invoking English relations of contention and exploitation with the native workers while mimicking local customs in paying homage to the Javanese ruler. Examining the “local” dimensions of the East India Company’s global vision, shaped by emergent racist ideologies and the commercial imperatives of the company’s directors in London, Barbour demonstrates a clearer cause–effect relation between economic policy and labor exploitation in the period.

The next chapter purports to be a follow-up on Bernadette Andrea’s past and present investigations on the refracted literary presences of displaced girls and women from Islamic lands in early modern English texts, in a context of globalized human and commodity traffics and turnings. “Patterning the Tatar Girl in George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesie (1589)” by Ladan Niayesh (Chapter 25) takes as its starting point one such possibility of refracted presence for the person of the Tartar girl offered to Elizabeth I by Anthony Jenkinson, an agent of the Muscovy company engaged in the circuit of textile trade with the East. It first shows how the Tatar’s girl’s presence and her connections to the textile trade networks can be inferred from the fictional oriental origin attributed by George Puttenham to pattern poetry in The Art of English Poesie (1589), a volume offered to the queen in an act of self-promotion, just as the Tatar girl herself had been offered to her with a similar promotional agenda by the Muscovy Company. It further explores how the Tatar and textile associations are reflected both in the shapes retained for Puttenham’s visual poems (including spindles) and in the textile-connected puns implied in the nomenclature and origins chosen for his Tatar and Persian speakers. Next, Niayesh moves on to study how fusing an actual ancient literary form from the West with very contemporary and global concerns allows Puttenham to map an emerging global discourse of trade and conquest onto bodies that are both the ornate ones of his poems and the transcultural ones of the ladies he stages. She concludes that Puttenham’s literary composites invite us to take stock of the social lives of artistic forms and their accumulated meanings in a period in which culture was at times as globally interwoven as the patterns on the rich textiles that were traded internationally.

Some implications one can draw from this chapter are that global history is not a straightforward contractual document of one-way conquest and subjection but a complex and at times experimental narrative progressing by fits and starts. Fine prints and supplements add up to produce a ramified narrative, with meaning greater than the sum total of its parts. Thus, to explore an instance, here those fine prints and supplements bring into focus the contribution of gendered subaltern voices refusing to be suppressed by the master narrative of European economic and cultural engagements with the global.