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1 1. Three indispensable recent accounts of the neoliberal economic system and its consequences are Wendy Brown, Chomsky, and Harvey.

2 2. On “thing theory,” see the fall 2001 special issue of Critical Inquiry, edited by Bill Brown, and Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003). See also the essays in D. Miller, and, for a discussion of the “new materialism” in early modern studies, see Harris 2001 and the collection edited by Harris and Korda. “The New Boredom” is an ironic term first coined by David Scott Kastan in Shakespeare after Theory (18).

3 3. There is much to admire about the work of ecocritical scholars who declare themselves to be “posthumanists” or “new materialists.” Clearly, it is a good thing to be raising awareness about the rootedness of human beings in a complex network of entangled objects (e.g., human, animal, plant, mineral) as we seek to remedy the global climate crisis. To show how the category of the human has been constructed in problematic ways is also a worthy intellectual and historical project. And at a certain level of philosophical or theoretical discourse, object-oriented ontology and actor-network theory have undoubtedly made valuable contributions to scholarly debate. Furthermore, the affiliated new materialist trend in literary studies has also offered many important new contributions to the field. Notwithstanding these positive developments and substantial achievements, recent critiques of object-oriented ontology and of the new materialism have exposed the tendency of this approach to engage in a questionable, quasi-religious mystification of matter and to deemphasize human agency in ways that distract from the central role of human agency per se (especially human economics and politics) in causing and (potentially) alleviating the climate emergency. For a range of recent critiques of the new materialism, detailing some of its political implications and limitations, see Battistoni, Lossin, Malm 78–118, Rekret, Tompkins, and Žižek.

4 4. Materialist criticism, including work on the history of the book, does chart out new scholarly territory and findings, and there are recent studies that masterfully bridge the gap between print or manuscript history, on the one hand, and broader historical frameworks that are conducive to political and ideological critique, on the other. A terrific example of this kind of politicized history of the material book is Miles Ogborn’s Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company. This study is based in part on Ogborn’s archival investigation of East India Company records, but Ogborn also examines non-Western texts, discusses “the ship as material space,” and brings these elements together in a globally oriented argument that addresses the broad history of emergent capitalism and imperialism over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

5 5. Jason W. Moore has introduced the term “Capitalocene” (as opposed to “anthropocene”) as an indicator of how the capitalist system has played the central role in bringing about a new age of climate crisis.

6 6. The story of global capitalism can be narrated without recourse to rigid totalities or teleologies (whether Whiggish or traditional Marxist) and without reliance on oversimplifying essentialisms, but such a narration does require a willingness to make sense of world history in terms of long historical processes that link past and present. See Vitkus, “How the 1% Came to Rule the World”.

7 7. Witness the article on writing tablets by Stallybrass, Chartier, Mowery, and Wolfe; Lena Orlin on peepholes (177–189); or Gallagher and Greenblatt’s communion wafer-munching mice (147). See also the essays in Bleichmar and Martin; Findlen; Fumerton; and Hunt.

8 8. Cited in J. Hillis Miller, “Literary Study among the Ruins,” on the crisis of relevancy.

9 9. I first noted this “new globalism” in my introduction to the 2002 special issue of The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies on “Representations of Islam and the East”.

10 10. For a key portion of that debate, see the three reviews, by Amin, Arrighi, and Wallerstein, of Frank’s ReOrient in Review 22 (1999). Other useful perspectives on world–global systems theory include Abu-Lughod, Amin, Blaut, and Polanyi.

11 11. See my article“‘The Common Market of All the World,’” in Global Traffic, for further discussion of England’s cultural and economic “outward thrust.”

12 12. See Jan de Vries (94).

13 13. In her review of Harris’s Sick Economies, Howard provides a concise description of the “insight” that she acknowledges in Harris’s book: “even as early modern writers pathologized the foreign, they ratified the global, recognizing the necessity of foreign trade and the entanglement of England in an increasingly global economy. Economic cosmopolitanism and rhetorical (and often more than rhetorical) xenophobia were paradoxically parts of a single world view and helped to define the nation state as a bounded entity that nonetheless participated uneasily in international trade. Harris thus makes a complex contribution to ongoing discussions about England’s transformation into a national entity and the role of both ‘the foreign’ and ‘the global’ in that transformation” (407).

14 14. See the articles by Cohen (128–158) and Bartolovich.

15 15. For some good examples of how historians are redefining “the modern world” in terms of the new global history, see Marks, Porter, and the collection edited by Parker and Bentley.

16 16. Quotations from The Faerie Queene are taken from the 1596 edition of the poem. Following the usual practice, I have kept original spelling except for the early modern print forms of “u” and “v,” which I have silently modernized.

17 17. For more information on Spenser’s relationship with Raleigh, see Herron, Bednarz, and the essays by Oram, Erickson, and Rudick in Spenser Studies 15 (2001).

18 18. See Landreth (57–74) and Dawson for two readings of the Cave of Mammon episode that draw on object-oriented, new materialist thought. Dawson declares, “It isn’t an accident that Spenser’s complex allegorical poem appears at a moment when the modern world-system is just emerging and Christianity is in disarray. For Spenser’s poem not only attempts to articulate a complex and fragile idea of world harmony amidst historical conflict, but it also brings out the paradoxes and contradictions that inhere in all notions of universality” (182). Dawson also suggests that allegorical texts like Spenser’s epic exhibit their own agency in constructing our sense of the world under globalization. See David Hawkes’s chapter on “Money as Metaphor” in Shakespeare and Economic Theory for a helpful critical survey of “materialist” work on Shakespeare, Spenser, and their contemporaries. Hawkes goes on, in his book, to offer a dialectic, Hegelian–Marxist corrective to the undialectical materialism that he sees in the scholarship of The New Economic Critics and in those whose materialism relies on Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, and Timothy Morton rather than Marx.

19 19. See Shannon Miller on Raleigh’s claims that the English could create a paternalistic empire in the West Indies that would be unlike Spain’s coercive empire.

20 20. Jardine discusses in detail the negotiations between Jakob Fugger and the Habsburgs in chapter 6 of Worldly Goods.

21 21. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (26–41).

22 22. Maureen Quilligan observes that “what Spenser offers in the Mammon episode is the dark underside of money’s world, the functions it performs that are usually hidden to the eye. Spenser’s allegory takes as its province the usually hidden springs of human society, making manifest the latent contradictions of Elizabethan economic organization…” (Quilligan 1983, 55).