Introduction: Toward A New Globalism in Early Modern Studies

JEMCS 2.1 (Spring/Summer 2002) A Special Issue on Representations of Islam and the East Introduction: Toward A New Globalism in Early Modern Studies Daniel Vitkus This special issue of The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies is a project that originated at the annual meeting of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies in November of 2000. Each of the articles published here iswritten by an active member of the Group, and I think it is fair to say that these doc uments manifest both the work and insight of those individuals and the collective spirit of dialogue and intellectual exchange that has characterized the Group. As Jonathan Burton, one of the contributors to this special issue, points out, "the commercial, diplomatic, and military impor tance of the Islamic world, and particularly of the Ottoman Empire, has moved rapidly to prominence in early modern studies." This set of essays on "Representations of Islam and the East" reflects and responds to that growing interest. The obsession with New World colonial histories that has gripped early modernists, espe cially since the 500th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the Americas in 1992, seems now to be expanding and globalizing to include investigations of other contacts and exchanges between Europeans and "alien" cultures in Turkey and the Middle East, Africa, Persia, India, the Moluccas, and even China. This new interest in all sorts of cross-cultural encounters, including those that do not fit the classic model ofWestern colonizer and non Western colonized, constitutes a "new globalism" in early modern studies. This growing trend among scholars is clearly allied to the "new economic criticism" that looks at global systems of economic change and struggle and how those systems interact with and affect cultural production of all kinds. The new globalism, which is concerned with larger, systemic changes in cultures and vi The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies economies, and with the interlocking and interactive aspects of cross-cultural encounters in world history, is an approach that helps us see the relevance of early modern history to the greatest question of our own time?the globalization of capitalism in post modernity. The aggressive expansion of Spain and Portugal after the Reconquista, and then the emulative, expansionist efforts of the English, the Dutch and the French that followed, beginning in the late sixteenth century?these form the origins of our present global economic system, which is now in the final phase of a long histori cal process. That process began with the Portuguese voyages to the East, with the channelling of the energy that completed the Spanish Reconquista into new conquests abroad that took place after Columbus showed theway, and with the expansion ofEnglish com merce in the Mediterranean and then the Americas. As Noam Chomsky would put it, 2002 is year 510 and "the conquest contin ues," not only in the "New World,* but now everywhere. As Chomsky has pointed out, the "new world order" did not begin with the end of the Cold War, but with the onset, in the fifteenth centu ry, of an aggressive, globalizing capitalism that has now reached a point of postmodern crisis and culmination.1 Marx and Engels* Communist Manifesto is quite prophetic in this regard: The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in com modities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolution ary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.2 Add to this list of events the crucial phase of English commercial expansion into the Mediterranean during and after the Elizabethan period, and you have a quick but accurate summary ofWestern European capitalism's early international phase. This is the basic historical narrative that still stands, in spite of the (understandable but sometimes counterproductive) complaints about teleologies and master narratives. The new globalism returns to this history invigorated, not paralyzed, by the powerful methodological tools of poststructuralism, and ready to render new accounts of texts and their relations with larger...