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The Asian Flu; Or, The Pathological Drama of National Economy

At the end of 1997, newspaper readers around the world were treated to a striking journalistic diptych. Alongside reports of the outbreak of a new, possibly lethal strain of chicken influenza in Hong Kong, there appeared the first articles detailing the turmoil and collapse of East Asia’s “tiger” economies. The juxtaposition proved quite suggestive. Although the new strain of influenza turned out to be relatively innocuous, the language it generated was altogether more contagious: in a matter of days after the Hong Kong outbreak, Anglophone reporters had dubbed the economic ills afflicting nations such as Indonesia, Thailand, and Korea the “Asian flu,” or, with greater euphony, the “Asian contagion.” The tigers were thus transmuted into morbid chickens, threatening to infect the economies of the West.

The “Asian flu” metaphor reveals a great deal. First, it bears witness to the constitutive role played by the body in shaping Western perceptions of the economic. One might think also of eighteenth-century French Physiocrat theories of the blood-like circulation of wealth; the word “inflation,” which was originally a specialized medical term for “swelling”; the pathological connotations of “consumption”; Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market; or the organic etymology of “capital” itself.¹ Metaphors of infectious disease like the “Asian flu” similarly disclose the corporeal images that, even in an age where the archaic logic of resemblance between microcosm and macrocosm no longer holds sway, continue to organize popular understandings of the economic.

Just as strikingly, the metaphor lends expression to deep-seated fears about the vulnerability of national markets within larger, global networks of commerce. In these fears lurks an intriguing paradox. Fundamental to the notion of the nation’s commercial health is an ambivalent conception of transnationality that works to naturalize the global even as it stigmatizes the foreign. The “Asian flu” metaphor embodies this ambivalence particularly clearly. By troping economic illness as a communicable condition that transmigrates across oceans, the metaphor attributes the cause of plunging stocks and evaporating capital around the world to specific foreign bodies rather than to global commerce itself, which is figured simply as the disease’s indifferent medium. The trope of influenza thus works not just to pathologize the economic but also to enable it; contagious disease, in other words, provides the discursive ground for Anglophone understandings of national economy and transnational commerce. In the process, the tropological dimension of the “Asian flu” is accompanied by a narratological one. The “Asian flu” is not simply a metaphor; it is a character in a story, a story that, with its transoceanic setting and tale of hazards to be overcome, boasts the distinguishing generic features of dramatic romance.²

It is the early modern prehistory of this unlikely romance’s most striking detail—the pathologization of foreign bodies as the enabling discursive condition for the globally connected nation-state—that I seek to clarify in Sick Economies. This has entailed my thinking about “the nation” in ways that are somewhat different from what is now customary in Renaissance studies. The growing body of scholarship on early modern discourses of nationhood has focused largely on political, legal, and linguistic fictions of England or Britain.³ In doing so, however, it has almost entirely ignored an important genre of literature from the period: the so-called mercantilist writing of the early seventeenth century. In a series of treatises that endeavored to explain and manage the vicissitudes of international commerce, English mercantilists arguably offered the first systematic articulation of an object that now serves as one of the master tropes and characters of the drama of modern nationhood—the national economy.

Admittedly, the word “economy” did not acquire its modern, nation-specific sense of “the economy” until after World War II. In Tudor England, the term was used almost exclusively to refer to the maintenance of individual households and, by metaphorical extension, larger establishments and communities.⁴ Nevertheless, the broad outlines of a discourse of English national economy are visible in the work of four early seventeenth-century writers, sometimes referred to as the “four Ms”: Gerard Malynes, Thomas Milles, Edward Misselden, and Thomas Mun. Their treatises—now collectively regarded by economic historians as the canonical documents of early English mercantilism—mark the emergence of a recognizably modern, commercial conception of the nation. Significantly, the simultaneous naturalization of the global and pathologization of the foreign that is the hallmark of modern economic tropes like the “Asian flu” is anticipated by English mercantilist writing, in which metaphors of disease are likewise rhetorically central. Some of these diseases—canker, hepatitis—have subsequently lost their economic connotations. Others—most notably consumption—remain integral to the modern economic lexicon but have by and large shed their pathological senses. In early modern England, all these terms were key figures in a double helix of medical and mercantile signification. Pathology and economy, I shall argue, were interconstitutive domains of discourse. Each helped create the other’s horizons of textual and conceptual possibility; changes in one helped produce changes in the other. By attending to the work of the mercantilist writers and their contemporaries, then, we can recover an important yet largely forgotten chapter in the shared prehistories of our modern notions of global commerce and disease.

The Discourses of Mercantilism

Mercantilism is, however, a highly problematic term. If “the early modern English economy” is an anachronistic or catachrestic signifier, calling into being a concept that had no precise label in the Renaissance, so equally is “mercantilism.” Malynes, Milles, Misselden, and Mun did not regard themselves as “mercantilists,” nor did their contemporaries view them as belonging to any coherent, let alone nameable, school of thought. On the contrary, the men regarded each other largely as ideological adversaries: much of what is now considered the mercantilist canon consists of Malynes’s shouting matches with Misselden. Not surprisingly, then, many historians have questioned whether mercantilism ever really existed. “As a matter of fact,” one scholar complains, “mercantilism was never an entity, never a system, never a coordinated or coherent body of policy or practice.”⁵

This phantom “entity” or “system” was, in fact, born nearly two centuries after the fact. Mercantilism was for the most part the brainchild of Adam Smith, though he himself never used the term. The latter is a nineteenth-century neologism derived from the title of chapter 1 of book 4 of Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), “The Principles of the Commercial or Mercantile System.” In Smith’s historical analysis, the mercantile system preceded the age of capitalism proper and was distinguished by the mistaken equation of wealth with money or bullion. For Smith, the system also entailed regulatory and monopolistic economic policies that he attributed to the “[self-] interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers,” straw men in opposition to whom he made his case for unimpeded free trade.⁶ From the moment of its late eighteenth-century conception, therefore, “the mercantile system” was a loaded construct, serving a fundamentally rhetorical, not to mention political, purpose.

Such is the shadow cast by Smith in economic history, though, that a mercantilist epoch was for a long time an article of faith, and his assumptions concerning mercantilism went virtually uncontested. Smith’s critical analysis of the mercantile system styled it as not simply a precursor of capitalism but also an exercise in statecraft. The system was more than a mode of commerce, therefore; it was above all a mode of governmental management of commerce. This view was seconded even by Smith’s fiercest detractors. Karl Marx regarded the mercantile system as a necessary, state-sponsored variant of the protocapitalist “Monetary System.”⁷ And Gustav von Schmoller, the nineteenth-century German Kathedersozialisten, characterized mercantilism “in its innermost kernel [as] nothing but state-making—not state-making in a narrow sense, but state-making and national-economy making at the same time.”⁸ In Smith’s, Marx’s, and von Schmoller’s analyses, then, mercantilism was posited as a necessary, liminal stage in a teleological account of both economic and nationalist history—the system of governmental policies that provided the bridge from the petty bourgeois production of the urban city-state to the free market capitalism of the globally connected nation-state.

This view of mercantilism as a system of state policy persists in much scholarship on early modern culture. In her brilliant study of Francis Bacon’s science and its relationship to economics, for example, Julie Robin Solomon characterizes mercantilism as “governmental strategies” that were designed to “control those facets of commercial culture not comprehended within older and more traditional or customary protocols.”⁹ But the Smithian perspective is not the only version of mercantilism that retains critical currency. A significantly different interpretation was advanced in the middle of the twentieth century by Eli Heckscher, the influential Swedish economic historian. Heckscher conceded that mercantilism was “a phase in the history of economic policy” and that “the state was both the subject and the object of mercantilist economic policy.” But he deviated from both the mainstream Smithian position, that mercantilism was a system of state management of commerce, and the opposing extreme, that there was never any such thing. Instead, he argued that “mercantilism never existed in the sense that Colbert or Cromwell existed. It is only an instrumental concept which, if aptly chosen, should enable us to understand a particular historical period more clearly than we otherwise might.”¹⁰ In neo-Hegelian fashion, Heckscher proceeded to characterize mercantilism as less a material structure or system than a loose collection of seventeenth-century ideas about government intervention in foreign trade.

Heckscher may well have been right that the evidence discounts the historical existence of a mercantile system as such, at least in the sense of any coherent, coordinated set of commercial policies implemented by early modern European nation-states. But, as Heckscher himself acknowledged, that does not mean there were no significant trends during the period in state policy regarding the practice of international commerce. There had been trade networks across Europe for centuries, of course, networks in which the state was increasingly implicated. But until the middle of the sixteenth century, international commerce tended to be seen as the activity less of nation-states themselves than of people or trading associations identified with specific urban locations. Merchants from London potentially competed as much with traders from Bristol or Norwich as with their counterparts from Antwerp or Venice. Certain developments in English state policy, however, had spurred the cultural production of new, economically based conceptions of nationhood. As early as 1275, the English crown began to develop a national customs system—the first of its kind in Europe, where tariffs and tolls had traditionally been administered by cities, towns, or parishes.¹¹ The English monarch’s coffers, topped off by duties and subsidies imposed on goods both entering and leaving the country, came increasingly to be identified in mainstream political writing with the wealth and weal of the nation.

This identification was given considerable impetus by the Reformation and the resulting centralization of England’s political power in the king and the state. Following the dissolution of the monasteries, England witnessed a sustained standardization of economic policy and practice, motivated in large part by the objective of ensuring a ready supply of royal treasure in the event of war against hostile European Catholic powers. The emergent discourse of England’s national wealth was also bolstered by the opening up of new sea trade routes to the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and the resulting pirate wars waged against Spain and the Ottomans by crown-sanctioned privateers and freebooters such as Sir Francis Drake. Even though the main beneficiaries of such activities were the queen and the privateers themselves, Drake and his ilk were lionized as national heroes who had “enriched [their] Countries store.”¹² The rise of new associations of capital for foreign trade also helped fuel a sense of economic nationalism. Like Drake, these associations were lent legitimacy by the crown as representatives of the nation: whereas earlier merchant adventuring companies had been identified with cities, a charter in 1566 was awarded to the Merchant Adventurers of England. The brace of new early modern English regulated and joint-stock trading companies—including the Muscovy Company (chartered in 1555), the Levant Company (1581), the East India Company (1601), and the Virginia Company (1606)—likewise claimed to represent the interests of the nation, even as they lined the pockets of their principals and major shareholders.¹³ It is no accident that two of the mercantilists, Misselden and Mun, were officeholders in English trading companies—Misselden with the Merchant Adventurers and Mun with the East India Company.

As Heckscher argued, the growing alignment of mercantile interests with those of the English crown and nation hardly constituted a mercantile system. Yet his Hegelian alternative to the Smithian state policy paradigm seems itself problematic. To view mercantilism as primarily a set of ideas about commerce is to run the risk of parenthesizing its material forms and effects, whether economic or cultural. To the extent that mercantilism existed at all, it may be more accurate to understand what von Schmoller termed its “nation-making” power at the level not of ideas or statecraft but of discourse. This new understanding would entail recasting mercantilism as something more than simply an ideology and less than a mode of state-controlled production, accumulation, distribution, or exchange. Throughout this study, I propose to analyze mercantilism as primarily a discursive rather than an ideological or economic system. It may not be a particularly coherent discourse but, like any other, it is characterized by certain strategies of signification, by means of which it produces both knowledge and power. Here I follow the lead of Mary Poovey, who in her remarkable study A History of the Modern Fact analyzes mercantilism as a discourse in which numerical representation first became the epistemological bedrock of truth. In this, she signals a large debt to Michel Foucault’s interpretation of mercantilism in The Order of Things as constituting a new mode of representation founded on precise exchange.¹⁴ My analysis differs from both Poovey’s and Foucault’s, however, inasmuch as I am interested in mercantilism as a discourse less of “factual” or “precise” representation than of transnational typology. It is this typology that has bequeathed the framework within which the West continues to imagine both national and global economy.

Understanding mercantilism as a discourse, however, necessitates a preliminary sketch of its admittedly vague ideological premises. The disparate body of work produced by Malynes, Milles, Misselden, and Mun is rife with disagreement, much of it vehement, about how England’s economy was organized, the nature of its dysfunctions, and what the sovereign needed to do (or not do) to manage England’s trade with other nations.¹⁵ But all four writers shared fundamental assumptions. Each saw the wealth of the nation as the responsibility of the state, and the prince as the fons et origo of the nation’s riches, even as he is aided and abetted by merchants. And each assumed that the goal of mercantile activity is to increase the nation’s wealth, less in the form of productivity or capital assets than of money—that is, gold and silver treasure acquired from abroad. The early “bullionist” mercantilists of the 1590s and 1600s, Malynes and Milles, believed that the nation’s treasure should be hoarded at all costs, and any export of bullion out of England vigorously discouraged. The later “balance-of-trade” mercantilists of the 1620s, Misselden and Mun, tolerated the export of limited quantities of bullion, but only as capital guaranteed to bring back more gold and silver into the country’s coffers.¹⁶ Despite these differences, all four writers subscribed to a zero-sum conception of global wealth, according to which one nation’s gain was almost invariably another’s loss. Foreign countries, then, were rivals and even enemies. Because of the conviction that global commerce entailed England’s competing with other nations for finite quantities of bullion, mercantilist discourse displays a marked xenophobic tendency: Spain, the Ottoman Empire, and occasionally the “Jewish nation” and the Low Countries are cast as the villains from whom English bullion must be protected or expropriated.

Despite this hostility, all four men argued that England’s wealth could be augmented only if England joined with other nations in observing certain universal laws of commerce. In doing so, they followed the doctrine of cosmopolitan universal economy advanced by classical writers from Plato to Plutarch, according to which global commerce followed inevitably from the dispersal of necessary resources and commodities around the world. The difference was that the English mercantilists adapted this doctrine to explain trade between nations.¹⁷ In Free Trade, or The Meanes to Make Trade Florish, for example, Edward Misselden makes the case that

to the end there should be a Commerce amongst men, it hath pleased God to inuite as it were, one Countrey to traffique with another, by the variety of things which the one hath, and the other hath not: that so that which is wanting to the one, might be supplied by the other, that all might have sufficient.… Which thing the very windes and seas proclaime, in giving passage to all nations: the windes blowing sometimes towards one Country, sometimes toward another; that so by this divine justice, every one might be supplyed in things necessary for life and maintenance.¹⁸

Likewise, in his voluminous treatise of 1622, the Lex Mercatoria (or the “Law-Merchant”), Gerard Malynes argues that despite the “great diuersitie amongst all Nations … in the course of trafficke and commerce,” there is a “sympathy, concordance and agreement, which may bee said to bee of like condition to all people.” These universal laws of global “trafficke and commerce” between “Nations,” he insists, are “an inuention and gift of God.”¹⁹ Even as he attributes the doctrine of cosmopolitan economy to God, Malynes relies here—as he does throughout his treatise—on the Roman jurists’ distinction between ius, or prince’s law, and lex, or customary and natural law. His association of mercantile trade with the latter was part and parcel of the transformation of economics from a subset of ethics to an autonomous, protoscientific discipline. For the medieval scholastics, economics had tended to be a matter of individual morality; “good” practices of commerce avoided the sins of covetousness, miserliness, usury, and luxury. By contrast, the mercantilist appeal to the higher laws of “nature” helped ratify a new object of knowledge: an orderly, systematic sphere of transnational commerce whose workings could be ascertained through empirical observation.²⁰

Perhaps the natural law that most distinguishes mercantilist conceptions of national wealth production is that of the balance of trade. Misselden articulates it as follows: “If the Natiue Commodities exported doe waigh downe and exceed in value the forraine Commodities imported; it is a rule that neuer faile’s, that then the Kingdome growe’s rich, and prosper’s in estate and stocke: because the ouerplus must needs come in, in treasure.”²¹ Although this theory was explicitly outlined only in the work of the so-called balance-of-trade mercantilists, a version of it is also implicit in the work of the earlier bullionists. Malynes, Milles, Misselden, and Mun took it as a rule of thumb that selling native commodities to strangers brings treasure into the nation, while the import of foreign wares stands to lose it. To varying degrees, both the bullionists and the balance-of-traders tended to rail against the English consumption of “idle” foreign commodities and luxury goods. Increased national self-sufficiency was proposed as an ideal; Malynes, for example, advocated and even participated in mining ventures at home in the hopes of increasing the nation’s reserves of bullion. Yet to accumulate wealth without foreign trade was seen as an impossibility. As Malynes argues in The Maintenance of Free Trade (1622), absolute self-sufficiency is the stuff of utopian imagination.²² Hence the mercantilists understood the nation in terms of a potentially paradoxical pair of relations to the outside: England assumed its national identity in relation both to readily demonizable “forraine” bodies (other nations, their citizens, their goods), which potentially damaged its economic health, and to universal “rules” of transnational commerce, which sustained it.

This paradox was a crucial development in the emergent discourses of nationhood. Rather than a discrete geographical, linguistic, cultural, or legalistic entity defined sui generis, the English nation of mercantilist writing was now defined in terms of its wealth within a global framework. In this respect, the long-standing discourse of “commonwealth,” which preceded the mercantilist discourse of the nation, influenced but also crucially differed from it. For political writers from John of Salisbury in the twelfth century to Thomas Starkey in the sixteenth, “commonwealth” was a term that tended to designate the nation’s moral rather than economic condition. Thomas More lent “commonwealth” a literal financial sense in Utopia, but even for him the term retained a largely moral thrust: to hold wealth in common, Raphael Hythlodaeus argues, is the ethical basis of Utopian polity.²³ Here, as in nearly all its incarnations, the “commonwealth” is equated primarily with the internal, self-sufficient resources—ethical as well as financial—of the nation. By contrast, mercantilist formulations of the nation insist on how its wealth is necessarily the product of transactions across national borders. Although the mercantilists frequently referred to the English national economy as the “commonwealth,” their chief investment was less in that term’s “common” than in its “wealth,” and specifically “wealth” as the outcome of international trade by private merchants. “What else makes a Common-wealth;” asks Misselden in The Circle of Commerce, “but the private-wealth, if I may so say, of the members thereof in the Exercise of Commerce amongst themselues, and with forraine Nations?”²⁴ Even as it regards “forraine Nations” with suspicion, then, mercantilist writing repeatedly valorizes the global, although the forms of that economic cosmopolitanism are to be carefully monitored and controlled by the crown.

Early modern commerce’s ambivalent relationship to the foreign, I shall argue, necessitated new narrative forms within economic writing. To modern eyes, one of the more striking aspects of early modern mercantilist discourse might be its theatrical register. Critiquing Malynes’s allegations about the economic ills wrought by bankers and currency exchangers, Thomas Mun observes curtly: “I think verily that neither Doctor Faustus nor Banks his Horse could ever do such admirable Feats, although it is sure they had a Devil to help them; but wee Merchants deal not with such Spirits.”²⁵ If Mun, like Marx, saw the history of political economy narrating itself in the registers of (Marlovian) tragedy and farce, other mercantilists tended to shape their analyses to the imperatives of another dramatic genre: romance. This is particularly so with Gerard Malynes, as is evidenced by the title of his first published pamphlet, Saint George for England Allegorically Described (1601). Unlike patriotic Tudor writers who glorified England’s language, law, history, or geography, Malynes advanced an economic nationalism based primarily on praiseworthy practices of commerce. His unconventional brand of patriotism can be seen most clearly in Saint George for England Allegorically Described, in which he recasts the English patron saint as the champion of a damsel in distress, English Treasure, who is defined less by her location than by her vulnerability to the transnational dragon of usury.²⁶

Other mercantilist writers may have avoided such overtly melodramatic fantasies of risk and rescue, but the language of romance is a recurrent feature of their writing nonetheless. In his treatise The Custumers Alphabet and Primer (1608), for example, Thomas Milles characterizes “Trafficke” (i.e., England’s foreign trade) as “our swete … Mistresse” who, “distempered and distrest,” is in urgent need of “remedy” from her male champions.²⁷ The connection between the languages of romance and commerce is equally evident in the mercantilists’ use of the word “adventure.” By the late sixteenth century, “adventure” had come to signify both romantic quest and commercial venture. The Merchant Adventurers of England arguably freighted the two meanings in their name; Thomas Mun wrote of the merchant’s stirring “adventures from one Countrey to another,” deliberately blurring the term’s romantic and commercial senses.²⁸ A similar pair of connotations also attached to the word “hazard,” which could refer not only to the risk taken by the romantic quester but also to a commercial venture and a popular gambling game.²⁹ The romantic conventions of perils overcome, (male) protection of distressed (female) parties, and treasure gained all lent a fairytale veneer to the mercenary ambitions of mercantilism. Just as importantly, the conventions of romance also allowed for the simultaneous demonization of foreigners and the validation of transnational laws of commerce.

The power of dramatic romance not just to accommodate but to articulate this mercantilist paradox is illustrated by the Belmont subplot of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. As many readers have noted, the entire play foregrounds the links between the “hazards” of merchant adventurism and of romance.³⁰ “In Belmont,” says Bassanio, the man who must “hazard all he hath,” “is a lady richly left” (1.1.160):

And many Jasons come in quest of her.

O my Antonio, had I but the means

To hold a rival place with one of them,

I have a mind presages me such thrift

That I should questionless be fortunate. (1.1.171–75)

Thus begins the play’s insistent exposure of the commercial underpinnings of questing. As Bassanio suggests in this passage, a romantic venture needs venture capital. The fairytale-like subplot of the caskets is framed from the outset by its mercantile conditions of possibility: to enter the contest, this play’s Prince Charming has had to obtain sponsorship from a sugar daddy. “We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece,” brags Graziano in Belmont (3.2.240), but his turn as a romantic quester fails to conceal the commercial means—and ends—of that role. The Jasons’ Argos, then, cannot help but blur into Antonio’s argosies.

Like the mercantilists, the Venetian Jasons’ quest has a nationalist as well as commercial dimension, not least because of the parade of suitors whom Portia inventories in the second scene of act 1. In what might seem like an unholy marriage of the Eurovision Song Contest and the Love Connection, Portia is both the M.C. and the prize in a game show that has previously attracted contestants from Naples, France, Germany, England, Scotland, and, if critics are right about the County Palatine’s nationality, Poland. This contest is not in Shakespeare’s nominal source, Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone. Nor are the two princes, Morocco and Aragon, over whom the Venetian Bassanio eventually triumphs. The latter pair are in some ways stock figures from romance—the swaggering Saracen who boasts of his violent exploits with his scimitar, the chivalrous Iberian aristocrat whom Cervantes was to pillory a decade later. But their inclusion also consolidates the play’s transnational frame of reference, which corresponds to that of late sixteenth-century European commerce. In beating out Morocco and Aragon for Portia’s hand, Bassanio is the winner in a contest against representatives of two of England’s major trading adversaries, the Islamic North African states and Spain. Belmont thus attracts global adventurers who, for all their exoticism, are the specular images of Antonio and his more nakedly commercial ambitions, which dispatch argosies to Ottoman Tripolis and Spanish Mexico as well as to England and the East Indies.

Despite this national rivalry, Portia’s suitors are bound by a universal law analogous to, yet different from, Malynes’s lex mercatoria: the ius patris dictated by Portia’s father, which governs the terms of the lottery. No matter how much Portia may revile her foreign suitors, she and they willingly accede to her father’s law, which demands that they never marry if they choose the wrong casket: “To these injunctions every one doth swear / That comes to hazard” (2.9.16–17). Indeed, this uneasy but willing subjection to universally binding laws governing transnational “hazards” is one of the hallmarks of the play. It is evident also in Antonio’s refusal to contest Shylock’s suit on the grounds that “The Duke cannot deny the course of law,” a law that recognizes how “the trade and profit of the city / Consisteth of all nations” (3.3.27, 31–32). This law may be imposed by the Venetian state and, to that extent, fall into the category of ius; but it is predicated on the natural lex of cosmopolitan universal economy. In the manner of mercantilist writing, then, the play imagines the pursuit of transnational “hazards” as proceeding only through the observation of global laws. Romance, moreover, provides the generic framework within which the foreign can be repelled and the global ratified. This pattern is evident in both subplot and main plot: just as Bassanio bests Morocco and Aragon while submitting to the ius patris dictated by Portia’s father, so does Antonio triumph over Shylock while paying lip service to the lex mercatoria of global commerce.

If transnational economy in The Merchant of Venice has an explicitly romantic accent, it also has a more occulted pathological one. Old Gobbo misuses the term “infection” when he means affection (2.2.103), but his malapropism brings to visibility the pathological underbelly of desire, whether romantic or commercial, throughout the play. This underbelly surfaces most clearly in the courtroom scene. Bellario fails to appear in court because he is allegedly “very sick” (4.1.151); Shylock leaves the same courtroom complaining that he is “not well” (4.1.392); and Antonio calls himself a “tainted wether of the flock” (4.1.114), a diseased animal whose sorry condition, signposted in the play’s very first line, foregrounds the dark side of a desire bifurcated between the imperatives of romance and trade. Theodore Leinwand has noted how Antonio’s sadness exposes the affective component of commercial venturing.³¹ But this component is also at root pathological, as is suggested by Graziano’s advice to Antonio, couched in the language of humoralism: “fish not with this melancholy bait” (1.1.101). Indeed, The Merchant of Venice’s conjunction of pathology and commerce was made more explicit in a nineteenth-century American minstrel rewriting of the play; this updated version gave Antonio in the courtroom scene a case of “the mumps,” for which he takes the splendidly efficacious “Mrs Winslowe’s Soothing Syrup.”³²

The Merchant of Venice’s mixing of the languages of trade and disease within the generic constraints of romance is especially significant. I would go so far as to suggest that this mixing is what distinguishes early modern English mercantilism as a discourse. In a manner strikingly reminscent of the “Asian flu” metaphor’s freighting of the economic and the epidemic, the mercantilists’ discourse of national economy was also a pathologically inflected one. All four writers repeatedly offered “remedies” for what they regarded as the nation’s economic “sicknesses.” Malynes titled one of his earliest works The Canker of England’s Commonwealth, repeatedly compared the nation’s economic ills to “gangrene” and “dropsy,” and presented in his last treatise, The Center of the Circle of Commerce (1623), a sustained allegorical fable of the body politic’s economic diseases.³³ Milles saw commercial trade as suffering from “dangerous fits of a hot burning Feauer” and a “Frensie,” each of which he endeavored to cure with an “Apothecary Pill.”³⁴ Misselden employed pathologies of the blood, and even coined the term “hepatitis” to figure obstacles to the circulation of wealth.³⁵ Mun styled idleness as a “general leprosie” that depletes the nation’s treasure and developed the pathological metaphor of “consumption” in a way that heralded its modern, exclusively economic sense.³⁶ Most importantly, all four writers tended to imagine these sicknesses as the products less of internal economic problems than of exposure to foreign elements—whether people, goods, organizations, or practices—within the “natural” functionings of global commerce.

The mercantilists’ obsessively pathological imagination may strike the modern reader as eccentric. But their conceptions of disease itself must seem far less so. We are habituated to political metaphors of invading cancers, plagues, or Asian flus. Susan Sontag and others have bridled at the xenophobic potential of such metaphors, but that is because these critics more or less take for granted that disease is usually transmitted by, and resides in, foreign bodies.³⁷ That the mercantilists repeatedly resorted to the language of pathological foreign bodies does not testify to disease’s transhistorical figural power as an invasive entity. Rather, as I shall argue, mercantilist conceptions of economic pathology are possessed of a historical specificity born of changing material circumstances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—in particular, the emergence of the nation-state and the growth of global trade. The mercantilists’ language of economic pathology, moreover, provided one of the discursive fields within which disease could first be figured as a foreign body, “naturally” communicated from one organism to another.

Discourses of Pathology

So naturalized has the notion of disease as a foreign body become that it is easy to forget there once was a time when people’s pathological fears were not figured in terms of viruses, bacteria, germs, or any other contagion. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the dominant conceptions of health and disease in English culture looked decidedly different from our modern counterparts. Rather than an external, invasive entity, as it has overwhelmingly been conceived since Louis Pasteur formulated his theory of germs and Robert Koch discovered the bacillus that causes tuberculosis, disease was imagined as a state of internal imbalance, or dyskrasia, caused by humoral disarray or deficiency. An excess of melancholy, phlegm, or choler, or a deficiency of blood, was understood as both the immediate cause and the form of illness. The goal of the physician was not to prevent entry of any determinate, invasive disease, therefore, but to restore the body to a condition of humoral homeostasis, or balance. This model dates back to Hippocrates, although the notion of the humors was codified primarily in the writings of Galen. For nearly two millennia, humoral conceptions of disease held sway in Europe, northern Africa, and the Near East.³⁸

The humoral model was occasionally challenged by other theories of pathogenesis, particularly during periods of epidemic illness. Because of its understanding of disease as an endogenous state, Galenic humoralism was never able to explain successfully the operations of contagion. To account for the transmission of plague and other epidemic diseases, medical writers frequently resorted to Hippocrates’s miasmic theory of contagion or, more desperately, to arguments based on astrology or divine providence. Nonetheless, such deviations from the Galenic mainstream never seriously undermined the humoral model; indeed, they were usually accommodated within it. According to miasma theory, for example, polluted air or vapors were responsible for disrupting humoral balance. Disease might have external causes, therefore, but its form was understood to be endogenous, rooted in the complexion (or mix) of the body’s internal substances.³⁹ Until and during the Tudor period, Galen retained a virtually uncontested monopoly in scholastic English understandings of disease and its transmission. Nearly all the academic and lay treatises on disease of the sixteenth century shoehorn illness into the glass slipper of humoralism. The Scottish physican Andrew Boorde’s Breuiary of Helthe (c. 1540), for example, which was published in numerous editions in the sixteenth century, offers an exhaustive glossary of early modern illnesses, every one of which it endeavors to explain in terms of humoral composition and imbalance.⁴⁰

The Galenic understanding of the physiology of the body, its humoral mix, and its appetitive functions provided a particularly rich metaphorical language for sixteenth-century writers. Economic writers were no exception: many articulated fledgling conceptions of national economy in the language of humoralism. In his Dialogue Between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset (c. 1535), for example, Thomas Starkey adduced eight primary illnesses of the body politic. The majority of these are economic ills that have a humoral tinge:

And like as the health of the body determeth [sic] no particular complexion, but in every one of the four by physicians determed, as in sanguine, melancholic, phlegmatic and choleric, may be found perfit, so this common weal determeth to it no particular state (which by politic men have been devised and reduced to four)—nother the rule of a prince, nother of a certain number of wise men, nother yet of the whole multitude and body of the people, but in every one of these it may be found to be perfit and stable.… For when all these parts thus coupled togidder exercise with diligence their office and duty, as, the ploughmen and labourers of the ground diligently till the same, for the getting of food and necessary sustenance to the rest of the body, and craftsmen work all things meet for maintenance of the same, yea, and they heads and rulers by just policy maintain the state stablished in the country, ever looking to the profit of they whole body, then that common weal must needs flourish; then that country must needs be in the most prosperous state.⁴¹

Here we can see the literal sense in which “common wealth” was often understood, as the wealth of the English nation. But this is not “wealth” as conceived by the mercantilists, derived from foreign trade. Starkey instead regards England’s most “prosperous state” as a function of its internal economic operations—including labor, a category notably absent from mercantilist writing—for which the language of humoralism provides an appropriate vocabulary. Likewise, Galenic language suggested itself to the bullionists as a figurative resource for representing the intrinsic composition of the nation’s alloy coins. Hence, Thomas Milles argues, “Money in a Kingdome, [is] the same that Blood is in the Body, and all Allayes but humors.”⁴²

The humoral model does not cut the body off from the world. If anything, it stresses the impossibility of separating the body from the external elements on which it depends—air, food, drink, even astrological influences. Crucial to its understanding of physiology are notions of input and output. As Thomas Laqueur has argued, “seminal emission, bleeding, purging, and sweating were all forms of evacuation that served to maintain the free-trade economy of fluids at a proper level.”⁴³ For that reason, a humoral vocabulary is also evident in much early modern economic writing about the English body politic’s commercial transactions with other nations. The all-important mercantilist notion of the balance of trade, even as it draws on the new model of Italian double-entry bookkeeping, resonates with humoralism’s characteristic vocabulary of equipoise and homeostasis. So too does the recurrent mercantilist term “vent”; a synonym for the sale of domestic commodities abroad, it echoes the Galenic conviction that superfluous humors such as choler needed to be “vented” or expelled to restore complexional order within the body. As Margaret Healy has noted in her important study of Renaissance fictions of disease, mercantilists frequently employed a humoral conception of the “glutted, unvented” body politic; “wee must finde meanes by Trade,” Mun observes, “to vent our superfluities.”⁴⁴

Nevertheless, to the extent that humoral pathology emphasized dysfunctions within the body’s internal systems, its concepts and vocabularies were in many ways more useful for the residual discourse of “commonwealth”—that is, for the notion of the body politic as a primarily self-sufficient entity. It is perhaps telling that Gerard Malynes, nostalgically reflecting on the difference between the new, globally connected nation-state and the self-nourishing “commonwealth” of old, should resort to a metaphor from Galenic medicine to represent the political economy of the latter: “from the Prince as from a liuely fountain all vertues did descend into the bosome of that commonwealth, his worthy counsellors were with the magistrates as ornaments of the Law, and did ministrate (like Phisitions to the weale publicke) good potions for the ridding out of all distemperate humors.”⁴⁵ Notably, this fantasy longs not for Laqueur’s “free-trade economy” but for an isolationist program of ethical if not ethnic cleansing.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Galenic emphasis on the body’s internal humoral balance was gradually if only very partially displaced by a new medical understanding of the body’s vulnerability to invasion and infection by external foreign bodies. Regular outbreaks of epidemic illnesses such as plague, the sweating sickness, and, in particular, syphilis revealed the inadequacy of the conventional, Galenic understanding of disease as an endogenous state. Although providential and miasmic etiologies of epidemic disease retained popularity into the eighteenth century, physicians increasingly began to propose that illness was a determinate thing transmitted from body to body. This new exogenous model of disease, which I have examined elsewhere, was formally outlined in the first decades of the sixteenth century by the Veronese physician Girolamo Fracastoro and the iconoclastic Swiss physician Paracelsus.⁴⁶ Neither Fracastoro nor Paracelsus dispensed entirely with the theory of the humors; but in attempting to explain the transmission of epidemic illness, both radically reconfigured the very notion of disease itself. For Fracastoro and Paracelsus alike, disease was less an internal state of complexional imbalance than a determinate semina or seed, an external entity that invaded the body through its pores and orifices.

The idea was hardly an innovation of medical experts. Exogenous models of disease were part of folk medical lore, and religious rhetoric customarily embodied sin as a pathogenic spiritus mali that invaded the body through its sensory apertures.⁴⁷ But the notion of disease as an invasive entity was picked up with particular vigor in the century after Fracastoro and Paracelsus. Girolamo Cardano proposed in 1557 that the seeds of disease were infinitesimally small animals capable of reproduction.⁴⁸ With the growing Protestant reaction against classical Galenism and the championing of new “reformist” pharmacies, Paracelsus’s model of pathenogenesis was refined and disseminated by many physicians, including the Belgian J. B. Van Helmont. This is not to say that there was any radical break with Galenism. Many writers, such as the English physician Robert Fludd, cheerfully accommodated the new Paracelsan model within the old humoral paradigm.⁴⁹ But other intellectual developments helped consolidate the new exogenous models of disease. The renewed seventeenth-century interest in the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius and his doctrine of atomism helped writers like Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish to reimagine disease as an irreducibly small, migratory entity.⁵⁰ And the invention of the microscope, which prompted Antony van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of minuscule parasites, potentially pushed reformist European medical science even farther in the direction of a pathological microbiologism. Even non-Protestants embraced the new models of disease: the Jesuit Athanasius Kirchner claimed to have observed a microscopically small organism that caused plague. The discovery of the bacillus that was the agent of bubonic plague, however, had to wait another two hundred years.⁵¹

To understand the emergence of these new exogenous etiologies simply in the idealist terms of philosophical and scientific discoveries, however, is to conceal much. In particular, it neglects the seemingly unrelated yet immensely formative political horizons within which the pathological objects of these new “discoveries” were first conceived. In the sixteenth century, the names of dangerous diseases increasingly become nationalized in order to denote their putative point of origin. Typhus fever, for example, was often called the morbus Hungaricus, and dysentery became known as the “Irish disease.” England was not spared pathologization: the epidemic disease that attacked northern Europe in the 1520s was widely called the “English sweat,” and rickets became known in the seventeenth century as the “English disease.”⁵² Such nationalized nomenclature was most evident, however, in the case of syphilis:

the Muscovites referred to it as the Polish sickness, the Poles as the German sickness, and the Germans as the French sickness—a term of which the English also approved (French pox) as did the Italians.… The Flemish and Dutch called it “the Spanish sickness,” as did the inhabitants of North-West Africa. The Portuguese called it “the Castillian sickness,” whilst the Japanese and the people of the East Indies came to call it “the Portuguese sickness.”⁵³

As this account hints, the global spread of syphilis prompted radically new etiologies of the disease. It had begun to be seen as not only a state of humoral disarray but also a thing that migrated across national borders. The above passage shows also how the perception of syphilis’s migrations had an unmistakably economic tinge: the movement of the disease from Spain to Holland and North Africa, and from Portugal to the East Indies and Japan, delineated new, international trade routes. Communicable disease, in other words, was increasingly seen as an exotic if dangerous commodity, shipped into the nation by merchants, soldiers, and other alien migrants. Infection of the body politic by foreign bodies thus provided a template for infection of bodies natural.

The discourse of syphilis was not the only occasion for the pathologization of the foreign in late Tudor and early Stuart political writing. Moralist writers fired numerous jeremiads at exotic commodities, which they repeatedly lambasted as the agents of moral and economic illness alike.⁵⁴ With the help of some euphuistic alliteration, John Deacon wrote in 1616 of “our carelesse entercourse of trafficking with the contagious corruptions, and customes of forreine nations.” In the process, he sketched an etiology of moral pathology that recalls the transnational nomenclatures and trajectories that distinguish early modern accounts of syphilis:

so many of our English-mens minds are thus terribly Turkished with Mahometan trumperies … thus spitefully Spanished with superfluous pride; thus fearfully Frenchized with filthy prostitutions; thus fantastically Flanderized with flaring networks to catch English fooles; thus hufflingly Hollandized with ruffian-like loome-workes, and other ladified fooleries; thus greedily Germanized with a most gluttonous manner of gormandizing; thus desperately Danished with a swine-swilling and quaffing; thus skulkingly Scotized with Machiavellian projects; thus inconstantly Englished with every new fantasticali foolerie.⁵⁵

These diseases are not simply Turkish, Spanish, or French; by transforming European nationalities from nouns into transitive verbs, Deacon reimagines illness as exogenous conditions communicated across national borders. Such a conception of disease would have been arguably unthinkable outside the growing global networks of trade, migration, and information, which brought different cultures into potentially transformative contact. Even though his first examples are religious and moral, the underlying subtext of Deacon’s catalogue of “contagious corruptions” is economic, referencing as it does the considerable influx into early modern England of foreign goods and migrants, such as Dutch cloth workers.

From a purely positivist standpoint, the mutually implicated histories of invasive disease and global commerce are apparent when one considers the twinned fortunes of trade and epidemics in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In a useful overview, Jean-Noël Biraben has identified six pathocenoses, or epochs of disease, in the history of the West since the classical age.⁵⁶ Nearly all of these are related to changing modes and infrastructures of commerce. Urbanization in antiquity led to epidemics; Roman roadbuilding to the Middle East brought smallpox and then leprosy to the center of the empire; and new trade routes to the Orient brought plague and other diseases to Europe in the thirteenth century. Jared Diamond has conversely shown how “germs,” together with “guns and steel,” were the West’s primary weapons of economic as well as cultural conquest.⁵⁷ But such approaches, useful as they are, tell us little about why early modern English writers and not their classical or medieval predecessors were able to begin rethinking disease as a determinate thing in transnational motion.

Early modern England was not the first nation to experience epidemic disease or the dislocations of international commerce. But it did experience each as simultaneous novelties and crises that tested the limits of old vocabularies and demanded the production of new ones. The turbulent new modes of transnational commerce and the deadly epidemics of plague and syphilis each provided ready vocabularies for representing the forms and effects of the other. The relationship between discourses of disease and national economy, in other words, was not a simple, unidirectional one of cause and effect. Rather, numerous mutual influences obtained. Economic developments helped writers imagine disease as a foreign body (a theme that I will explore particularly with respect to Ben Jonson’s fantasies of the plague); in turn, the new vocabularies of contagious or exogenous disease provided writers with the imaginative resources for an emergent discourse of national and global economy.

As Deacon’s catalogue of “contagious corruptions” makes clear, new understandings of disease as residing in and transmitted by foreign bodies were insistently articulated in many nonmedical domains of early modern discourse. This is nowhere more evident than in the English mercantilist literature of the early seventeenth century. Inasmuch as this corpus of writing displays unprecedented attention to the vicissitudes of England’s commerce with other nations—including the pathologies of trade imbalances, bullion flows, international currency exchange, centers of wealth production, and increased importation of exotic commodities—it displays a heightened interest in the foreign as the potential agent of both economic disease and health. Hence in the same passage where he laments the passing of an old discourse of “commonwealth” in which the prince would regulate the self-sufficient economy by the “ridding out of all distemperate humors,” Gerard Malynes talks of a new world order in which foreign “contagion” has become the standard unit of both pathology and commerce.⁵⁸ Indeed, as I have noted, a significant number of the diseases that mercantilist discourse metaphorically invokes—including syphilis, taint, canker, plague, hepatitis, and consumption—are “contagious” ailments contracted from foreign bodies.

To this extent, mercantilist writers’ fantasies of the body politic’s diseases might seem to resonate with anthropologist Mary Douglas’s highly influential characterization of the body as “a model which can stand for any bounded system.”⁵⁹ The binary spatialities of “inside” and “outside,” “self” and “foreign” that inform Douglas’s analyses of bounded cultural systems have proved equally illuminating in anthropological studies of modern bacteriology and immunology. Emily Martin, for example, has written how “the notion that the immune system maintains a clear boundary between self and nonself is often accompanied by a conception of the nonself world as foreign and hostile.”⁶⁰ As we will see, a similarly xenophobic opposition of self and foreign nonself suffuses mercantilist fantasies of economic pathology: Malynes identifies the commonwealth’s “canker” with the predatory Continental “banker” who seeks to depreciate the value of English coin; Misselden attributes the nation’s “hepatitis” in part to the “Turkish” pirate who plunders English bullion. Yet the binary structures that underwrite anthropological analyses of body metaphors present an insufficient picture of the complex typologies produced in mercantilist discourses of economic pathology. These discourses map not simply a binary opposition of “national” body and “foreign” diseases; as I shall show throughout this book, the latter pair of categories are crucially interarticulated with a third, the “global,” which mercantilist discourse constitutes as the ecosystem within which the national and foreign must communicate (in both commercial and pathological senses). Diseases like Malynes’s “canker” and Misselden’s “hepatitis” may have fueled xenophobia, but they also helped legitimize visions of cosmopolitan economy; like the metaphor of the Asian flu, early modern mercantilist pathologies presumed “natural” patterns of migration across national borders that simultaneously stigmatized the foreign and naturalized the global.

My analysis of this tripartite mercantilist typology—the national, the foreign, and the global—also involves a rather different understanding of pathology from its previous theorizations in the influential work of Georges Canguilhem and René Girard. Both owe a significant if unspoken debt to Emile Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method and his protostructuralist analysis of social pathology.⁶¹ In the work of all three theorists, disease tends to be hypostasized as a generic “disorder” that relationally ratifies “order,” “normality,” or “health.” But as Michel Foucault writes in the preface to The Order of Things, “disease is at one and the same time disorder—the existence of a perilous otherness within the human body, at the very heart of life—and a natural phenomenon with its own constants, resemblances, and types.”⁶² The first part of Foucault’s remark has become sacred writ in much writing about early modern representations of disease; but the second has been more or less completely ignored. Foucault’s insistence that disease is also a “natural phenomenon with its own constants, resemblances, and types” remains a useful caveat not just to theorists of pathology but also to literary and cultural critics who have displayed a tendency to transform early modern diseases into Disease, and who overlook the “types” and distinctions that are the a priori ground of the very logic of “constants” and “resemblances.” Those differences have often evaporated in accounts of the uniformity of disease in premodern discourses of pathology. One common view is that early moderns did not really differentiate between diseases: even a medical historian as scrupulous as Paul Slack argues that “there was little appreciation that individual diseases were separable entities before 1600.”⁶³ It is hard to square this assessment, though, with the perspective of the early modern plague writer Thomas Dekker, who argued that “maladies of the Body, goe simply in their owne Habit, and liue wheresoeuer they are entertainde, vnder their proper and knowne Names; As the Goute passeth onely by the name of the Goute: So an Appoplex, an Ague, the Pox, Fistula, &c.” ⁶⁴ As we will see, many other early modern writers insisted on the multiple “types” of disease even as they adduced resemblances between them.

I wish, then, to offer a more historically and culturally nuanced understanding of early modern disease, one that attends to its status in the period as “a natural phenomenon with its own constants, resemblances, and types.” I thus seek to illuminate not only diachronic transformations in conceptions of pathology but also the synchronic distinctions as well as resemblances between specific illnesses. Hence we will encounter here not Disease but a veritable gallery of early modern diseases—syphilis, taint, canker, serpego, plague, hepatitis, castration (widely considered a pathological affliction by early modern physicians), and consumption. In the process, I will attend to the enormous discursive productivity of these various ailments. Rather than simply ratifying the “normal” through a logic of binary opposition, these diseases could be productive in other, diverse ways. Syphilis, for example, offered writers various ways of imagining the appetite in the sphere of global commerce; taint provided a vocabulary for understanding the border confusions caused by the international flow of currency and people; canker and serpego metaphorically mediated the problem of the origin of money’s value; plague helped figure the transnational migrations of commodities; hepatitis and castration raised questions about the centers of authority in the production and circulation of wealth; and consumption permitted a more comprehensive understanding of venture capital and import-oriented economics.

For all the differences between diseases that I am insisting on, there is still a unifying theme to my argument. By provisionally reimagining disease as a foreign body, people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced new epistemologies within which objects such as the national economy and the global laws of trade could be preliminarily conceived. Hence the early modern English “pathologization” of commerce for which I am arguing was by no means a straightforward demonization, as we might think it to be now. Although mercantilist writers frequently employed images of disease to stigmatize certain economic phenomena, these images equally served as the vectors for a more productive reimagining of international commerce and typologies of the national, the foreign, and the global. If he had been more attentive to the economic nuances of disease and the pathological accents of the economic in the seventeenth century, then, Foucault could have written a supplement to Marx’s famous essay on money and Timon of Athens and called it “The Power of Disease in Bourgeois Society.”

Dramas of National Economy and Disease

The growing seventeenth-century preoccupation with the foreign as a simultaneously pathological and economic phenomenon is evident not just in English mercantilist writing. As my discussion of The Merchant of Venice indicates, it is also prefigured in the drama of the sixteenth century, which repeatedly blurred the boundaries between what we now regard as the separate domains of the medical and the mercantile. This blurring can be seen as early as the Tudor interludes that preceded the drama of the professional London playhouses. In the early Elizabethan entertainment An Interlude of Wealth and Health (c. 1558), the mutual metaphorical implication of disease and economics is the play’s governing conceit. The interlude for the most part imagines wealth and health in medieval fashion—as generic, allegorical concepts stripped of any historical or geographical specificity.⁶⁵ The character Health, for example, asserts that

Welth is good I cannot denay

Yet prayse yourself so much ye may

For welth oftentimes doth decay

And welth is nothing sure. (28–31)

And Wealth likewise characterizes Health in generic terms: “I neuer marke this muche, nor understood / That Helth was such a treasure, and to man so good” (188–89). But lurking in the play is a counternarrative that looks forward to the mercantilist writing of the early seventeenth century. At times, Wealth and Health are presented as nationally specific, even nationalist, figures: “I am welth of this realme” (17, emphasis added); “I welth, am this realmes comfort, / And here I wyll indure” (157–58); “For here I [health] am well cherished” (163).

As soon as the two characters become nationally coded, moreover, they become close allies and even analogues of each other: “Welth for Lybertye doth loboure euer / And helth for Libertye is a great store” (270–71). The allegorical character Remedy observes,

welth, and helth, is your right

names The which England to forbere were very loth

For by welth and helth commeth great fames

Many other renlmes [sic] for our great welth shames

That they dare not presume, nor they dare not be bold

To striue againe England, or any right with holde. (544–49)

The logic of this passage is by no means mercantilist. Indeed, it arguably reproduces the premercantilist discourse of commonwealth, in which the health of the body politic is synonymous with its internally generated wealth. Economic as much as corporeal health is similarly understood here as an endogenous phenomenon, deriving from internal balance; hence even as “other renlmes” covet England’s wealth and health, the latter seem initially to be assets generated entirely within the nation.

But the play also looks ahead to mercantilist understandings of economic health and pathology as corollaries of transnational commerce. The main threats to both Wealth and Health come from two allegorical characters, Illwill and Shrewdwit, who are coded as foreigners. Shrewdwit enters speaking French (350), Illwill speaks Spanish (845–46, 851–52), and both swear Catholic oaths. These two are not the only foreign bodies who threaten England’s wealth and health. One of the interlude’s characters, and indeed its only nonallegorical figure, is a Flemish immigrant named Hans. A mercenary looking for work in England, he is presented as a loutish drunk who speaks in a virtually incomprehensible stage-Dutch. Importantly, he is also linked to economic sabotage: he boasts that wealth no longer resides in England, for “welth best in ffaunders [Flanders], it my self brought him dore” (424). The discourse of the self-contained commonwealth is eclipsed here by that of mercantilist bullionism, according to which national wealth is synonymous with money and hence transferable across countries’ borders. In order to restore health and wealth to a polity that is more nationally than universally coded, Remedy expels Hans from England, exclaiming, “There is to mainy allaunts [aliens] in this reale, but now I / good remedy haue so prouided that Englishmen shall / lyue the better dayly” (760–62). Thus is economic health reconfigured in nationalist terms as liberation from invasive foreign bodies. Yet such xenophobia anticipates the characteristic rhetorical gambit of mercantilist discourse: conflating the economic and the pathological, the play pointedly locates itself on the global stage, but within that stage, the “foreign” is deemed villainous.

In the wake of An Interlude of Wealth and Health, Shakespeare and his contemporaries repeatedly plotted shifting links between the discourses of commerce, disease, and national health. The foreign emerges in their plays as both a pathogenic and a commercial phenomenon, an invasive entity that threatens yet also is crucial to the health of bodies natural, politic, and economic alike. What Walter Cohen has termed the “drama of a nation” repeatedly lays bare the equation of national wealth and health and subjects it to critical scrutiny.⁶⁶ If the “Asian flu” is not just a metaphor but also a character in a dramatic narrative, so too are the pathologized foreign bodies of the early modern stage. An analysis of how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries resonate with mercantilist discourse can thus disclose the dramatic component of that discourse. To this end, Sick Economies considers the various, early permutations of the drama of national economy produced and refined in what I am calling the mercantilist drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

This is not to say that such drama delineates an entity identical to what we would now regard as “the economy.” Nor does it even represent the “English” national economy. Indeed, most of the mercantilist drama I will examine is located in Mediterranean city-states—Ephesus, Venice, Troy, Fez, Tunis—rather than in the English nation-state. Nevertheless, the mercantilist drama’s preoccupations with commerce and disease entail the tripartite typology of the domestic, the foreign, and the global that distinguishes the economic writings of Malynes, Milles, Misseiden, and Mun. By articulating this typology, the mercantilist drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries also voices novel understandings of desire, identity, citizenship, money, value, matter, motion, circulation, state authority, and capital, understandings that have provided the epistemological foundations for our modern, economic conceptions of the nation and nationalism.

Why was the theater the space for such dramas? One might cite historical, institutionally specific reasons for the irruption of economic and medical concerns into early modern English drama. As Jean-Christophe Agnew and Douglas Bruster have argued, the London playhouses were thoroughly implicated in the emergent forms of market capitalism, and these forms suffuse the plays that were staged in them.⁶⁷ Leeds Barroll has reminded us how the playhouses were equally the putative sites of disease, subject to repeated closures by the city authorities who feared that large audiences might be breeding grounds for plague.⁶⁸ It is tempting to speculate that an institution accused by its opponents of not only spreading but causing disease (the Puritan preacher Thomas White had claimed that “the cause of plagues is sinne … and the cause of sinne are playes: therefore the cause of plagues are playes”) may also have had a special investment in debating the etiologies of illness.⁶⁹

But to explain early modern drama’s vocabularies of commerce and disease, we need to do more than just identify extradiscursive, historical “realities” that influenced Shakespeare and his contemporaries. No matter how much the nascent market economy and the plague may have touched the lives of early modern playwrights and their audiences, there is also something literally generic about the drama’s obsession with mercantile and pathological foreign bodies. As I have shown in my earlier discussion of The Merchant of Venice, romance afforded Shakespeare and his contemporaries a medium in which to articulate new visions of global trade. Fredric Jameson has argued that romance from the twelfth century on entails the projection of an Other, a projection that ends when that Other reveals its “name.”⁷⁰ As subsequent critics have noted, romance’s projections and erasures of alterity provide the narrative template for many early modern English fantasies of empire and colonialism. Joan Pong Linton, for example, has demonstrated how romantic topoi mediate representations of Raleigh’s exploits in Guiana and early English ventures in Virginia.⁷¹ I wish to supplement Linton’s analysis by showing how early modern romance’s affiliations to dramas of nationhood are confined neither to the space of the American New World nor to the project of empire building. Romance’s projections and erasures of alterity also offered mercantilist writers and early modern playwrights narrative strategies with which to imagine the commercial nation as well as its transactions with foreign bodies within an overarching global system.

Yet the plays I examine here are not romances in the conventional sense. Notably absent from this book are Shakespeare’s late romances or the romances of Beaumont and Fletcher. The plays that have captured my attention are instead works in which romance is blended with other genres: the Plautine comedy, the Florentine novella, the nationalist epic, the Lucianic satire, the pirate adventure, the London city comedy. In all these generic hybrids, the transoceanic scope of romance serves to articulate and refract the play’s commercial preoccupations. Such exercises in generic contaminatio—a term synonymous in the Renaissance with “infection”—also seem to come ready-fitted with a pathological vocabulary.⁷² And this vocabulary is enlarged and refined by romance’s characteristic “projections” of alterity.

Chapter 2, “Syphilis and Trade,” attends to the mutual implication of early modern discourses of the pox and transnational commerce, with specific reference to The Comedy of Errors. In the process, I argue that the growth of global trade in the second half of the sixteenth century placed considerable pressure on conventional understandings of both pathology and economy. New understandings of syphilis as deriving from foreign nations came into conflict with residual conceptions of illness as an endogenous, appetitive, or humoral state; new understandings of the systemic operations of global commerce problematized the medieval conception of economy as a subset of morality. Shakespeare, I argue, reproduces these conflicts in his comedy. The language of syphilis provides him with a vocabulary that allows him to mediate, albeit problematically, conflicting understandings of trade. He does so, moreover, in a fashion parallel to the rhetorical gambits of protomercantilist economic writers of the sixteenth century such as Thomas Starkey and Thomas Smith.

Chapter 3, “Taint and Usury,” considers how the economic pathology par excellence of medieval Christian ideology—usury—was reconfigured in three early modern texts: Gerard Malynes’s Saint George for England Allegorically Described, the anonymous Dutch Church Libel of 1593, and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. What is voiced in each text is less the conventional condemnation of usury as a form of unnatural breeding than a new, mercantilist problematic of transnational identity for which the “Jew” serves as the unstable signifier. Each text views the Jew as a palimpsest, in which discrete categories of national identity are fused and confused. The resulting transnational contaminations are registered pathologically, as “infections,” “gangrene,” and, most important, “taints.” Yet in each case the hybridization of the Jew (as Turkish, Dutch, or Spanish) works to disavow the textual and historical hybridization of the “gentile” and/or English subject. Mercantilist discourse helps generate yet also subjects to immense pressure the myth of a discrete “national” subject in a time of unprecedented transnational fluidity.

Chapter 4, “Canker/Serpego and Value,” examines the crisis of value prompted by what Malynes called “merchandizing exchange”—European bankers’ playing of the foreign currency markets through the manipulation of rates of exchange. This raised the question: was the value of money intrinsic or extrinsic? Debates about the origins of disease provided writers a vocabulary with which to articulate the conflict over value’s origins. Malynes refers to the problems of “merchandizing exchange” as a “canker,” a disease that, like its close cousin “serpego,” was understood to be both endogenous and invasive. Similarly, when Hector speaks in Troilus and Cressida of “infectious” valuation, he reproduces the disjunctions of the term in contemporary medical discourse, where it was used to designate both humoral disarray and contagion. Indeed, the play’s extensive pathological and mercantile vocabularies repeatedly embody this uncertainty over whether the origins of disease and value are external or internal. Such an uncertainty, however, was one of the consequences of the growth of foreign trade and transnational practices of foreign currency exchange, and thus was symptomatic of the emergent drama of national economy.

These first chapters show how pathological language mediated mercantilist writers’ and Shakespeare’s understandings of the economic. In Chapter 5, “Plague and Transmigration,” I argue that economic developments also affected dramatic understandings of the pathological. Ben Jonson found in the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of the soul, a richly suggestive figure for the dynamics of international trade. In Volpone, movement across the boundaries of national body politics, particularly via their ports, is both a constitutive principle and an occasion for considerable anxiety. A similar anxiety is expressed in medical tracts such as Timothy Bright’s Treatise: Wherein is Declared the Sufficiencie of English Medicines and mercantilist treatises such as Thomas Milles’s writings on national customs policies. Like Bright and Milles, Jonson lends expression to a fear of transmigratory foreign commodities contaminating the body politic through its ports. Jonson’s heightened sensitivity to the transmigrations of things across national borders notably influences his vision of plague and, as a consequence, he brings to partial visibility the mercantile coordinates of what has been widely regarded as the most significant epistemic shift in seventeenth-century medical science: the eclipse of the old Galenic and Aristotelian cosmology of qualities, elements, and humors by the new mechanistic philosophy of quantifiable matter in motion.

Chapter 6, “Hepatitis/Castration and Treasure,” examines how early modern physiologies of blood and semen underwrote economic models of the transnational circulation of bullion. In their extended pamphlet war of 1622–23 concerning the causes of the decay of English trade, Edward Misselden and Gerard Malynes both resorted to pathologies of the blood—most notably, hepatitis—to represent the pathologies of the national economy. Implicit in this exchange is a physiological understanding of the loss of treasure as analogous to castration by external forces, including (in Misselden’s analysis) Turkish pirates in the Mediterranean. This understanding is made explicit in Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West and Philip Massinger’s Renegado. In both these plays’ representations of Barbary piracy, the threat of Europeans’ castration by Moors and Turks looms. Although the two plays’ preoccupation with castration is usually read as expressions of an emergent Orientalist discourse of Islamic savagery, I locate it instead within a specifically mercantilist framework. In Misselden and Malynes’s exchange, physiological analogies function ambivalently, vacillating between visions of the corpus economicum as a self-contained and self-sustaining physiological system with clear centers of wealth production and as a decentralized organism whose lifeblood (and semen) circulates in and out of it. Heywood’s and Massinger’s plays likewise corporeally figure bullion in ways that entail conflicting attitudes toward relations between the state and private venturers in the accumulation of national treasure.

Chapter 7, “Consumption and Consumption,” examines the shifting valences in the early seventeenth century of a particularly important economic and pathological term. “Consumption” was employed in early modern economic discourse almost invariably as a negative pathological metaphor with which to heap opprobrium on commercial practices that depleted or “wasted” the nation’s wealth. But it also brought to visibility emerging practices of conspicuous consumption, whereby exotic luxury commodities were purchased and flaunted by a new kind of subject, the cosmopolitan consumer. Although conventionally regarded as an endogenous, humoral affliction, consumption became increasingly freighted with the exotic in the early seventeenth-century imagination as a result of the growing trade in foreign luxuries. Such an association is visible in the influential economic treatises of the mercantilist writer Thomas Mun. Yet even as Mun vilified foreign luxury commodities, he also sought to reconfigure consumption as a necessary rather than pathological economic practice, and specifically as a mode of venture capital that benefited the English economy. Both these shifts are evident also in Middleton and Dekker’s Roaring Girl, which pushed the meanings of consumption away from the purely domestic wasting of wealth toward the purchase and conspicuous display of foreign goods. Consumption is thus represented less as a wasteful, pathological phenomenon than as a medicinal process whereby a controlled encounter with foreignness safeguards the health of the body politic.

What I offer here, then, are several discursive etiologies of our modern notions of the national, the foreign, and the global. Indeed, the diverse meanings of the term “etiology” are of crucial importance to my argument. Throughout this book, I attempt to clarify the origins of the discourses of national and transnational economy. But inasmuch as etiology has more specifically become that branch of medical science concerned with the causation and origins of disease, I seek also to show how early modern debates about both the nature and the transmission of illness cannot be separated from the early modern emergence of economics as a discrete field of inquiry. In Sick Economies, I argue both that our modern notions of economy have a decidedly pathological provenance and that our modern notions of disease cannot be disentangled from the development of transnational capitalism. If the London commercial stage was the site of the “drama of a nation,” therefore, its economic vocabularies betray traces of new, nationalistic etiologies of disease; equally, its pathological lexicons hint at multiple etiologies of the national economy. In these embryonic dramas, then, we might also see the egg from which the flu-bearing Asian chickens of modern commercial pathology have hatched.