Abstract
Recent studies of early modern trade with the East have highlighted English anxiety about the dangers posed by contact with foreigners, especially non-Christians, and by the consumption of “heathen” goods. In Sick Economies, Jonathan Gil Harris focuses on mercantilist treatises that use metaphors of disease and contagion to describe “foreign” commodities, even as they promote a “global” market as natural and necessary to England’s economic health.1 Kristen G. Brookes analyzes anti-tobacco tracts in her essay “Inhaling the Alien,” and Gitanjali Shahani traces the reception of Indian cottons, such as cambrics and calico, in “‘A Foreigner by Birth’: The Life of Indian Cloth in the Early Modern English Marketplace.”2 Indian fabrics were so popular in the early 1600s that at the end of the century the weavers blamed them for the decline of the domestic wool industry. Partly as a result of the “calico wars,” the English Parliament passed a law in 1721 “prohibiting the domestic consumption of every kind of pure cotton textile.”3 Coffee and tea were greeted with similar ambivalence, embraced by consumers but criticized by the often self-appointed arbiters of morals and the national interest.4 However, opposition voiced by interested groups such as the weavers did not dampen consumers’ desire for these products, and the laws prohibiting their use did not necessarily reduce their consumption.5
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Notes
Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 22.
Kristen G. Brookes, “Inhaling the Alien: Race and Tobacco in Early Modern England,” and Gitanjali Shahani, “‘A Foreigner by Birth’: The Life of Indian Cloth in the Early Modern Marketplace,” in Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700, eds. Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 157–78 and 179–98, respectively. For English debates about tobacco, see also Sandra Bell, “‘The Subject of Smoke’: Tobacco and Early Modern England,” in The Mysterious and Foreign in Early Modern England, eds. Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 153–69.
Shahani, “‘A Foreigner by Birth,’” 194. While pure cotton fabric, mostly from India, was proscribed, “cotton wool” (raw cotton) from Cyprus, Smyrna, and Syria continued to supply English producers of blended fabrics, such as “fustian” (a blend of cotton and linen); see Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (1935; rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964), 74. The word “fustian” derives from “Fostat… a suburb of Cairo where cloth was manufactured”; Oxford English Dictionary [OED], 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), http://dictionary.oed.com, accessed June 7, 2010.
See Shahani, “‘A Foreigner by Birth,’” 194–5, and Roze Hentschell, The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England: Textual Constructions of a National Identity (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 6n13.
Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, The Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India, 1530–1750 (Atlanta, Georgia: The Scholars Press, 1999), 23.
True cinnamon’s poor relation, cassia (Cinnamomum cassia), imported from China, was and is used as a cheaper substitute. See Jack Turner, Spice: The History of a Temptation (New York: Knopf, 2004), xxiii.
Ibid., 43. English merchants also reexported silk and currants to Europe and the New World; see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13.
Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1996), 57.
For instance, in The Alchemist, Subtle promises that the supposed “Spanish count” will show the rich young widow all the sights and fashionable shopping areas of London, including “th’ Exchange,/… [and] the China-houses”; see Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 2nd ed., ed. Elizabeth Cook (London: A.C. Black, 1991) 4.4.48. Future references will be given parenthetically.
Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007), 3.
Jean E. Howard, The Theatre of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 20.
John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, ed. David Crane (London: A&C Black, 1997), 1.2.31–5. Future references will be given parenthetically.
Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 2nd ed., ed. Anthony Parr (London: A&C Black, 1990), 7.105 sd-108. Future references will be given parenthetically by scene and line number. In addition to referring to ancient Middle Easterners (“Philistines” [7.108], “Mesopotamians” [7.78], and “Pharaoh” [7.36]), Eyre also alludes to “Sultan Soliman” and “Tamburlaine” (20.55), “the King of Babylon,” and “Tamar Cham” (21.23).
Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. Edward B. Partridge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 1.1.19–23. The dialog makes it clear that she would have preferred a more homely cap, “a rough country beaver, with a copper-band, like the coney-skin woman of Budge-row” (1.1 20–3). Future references will be given parenthetically.
Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Michael Hattaway (London: A&C Black, 1969), 5.326. Future references will be given by act and line number (there are no scene divisions in the text).
Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, 2nd ed., ed. Elizabeth Cook (London: A&C Black, 1997), 4.2.6–7. Future references will be given parenthetically.
For a discussion of Portuguese activities in connection with the pepper trade, see Bindu Malieckal, “Muslims, Matriliny, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” The Muslim World 95.2 (2005): 297–320, esp. 301–5, and her unpublished conference paper “Muslims, Christians, and Spices: Renaissance Re-Tellings of Religious Conflict in the Indian Ocean, from East Africa to South India,” Seaborne Renaissance: Global Exchanges and Religion in Early Modernity, University of Texas at Austin, February 6, 2010, cited by permission. In the latter, she also notes that some critics argue that England’s “more peaceable” tactics ultimately evolved into an “advanced machinery of control, more destructive than any Portuguese engagement” (9).
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© 2011 Bernadette Andrea and Linda McJannet
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McJannet, L. (2011). “Oranges and lemons say the Bells of St. Clement’s”: Domesticating Eastern Commodities in London Comedies. In: Andrea, B., McJannet, L. (eds) Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119826_12
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