Cosmopolitan Empires

Perhaps no field of inquiry in the humanities has seen as much crossing of old disciplinary boundaries in recent years as have early modern studies. Thus, there has been an increasing tendency on the part of scholars of the (English) Renaissance to look outward and (mainly) westward across the Atlantic;¹ of early Americanists (traditionally beholden to their tasks of explaining the “colonial” origins of a later “American” literature) to look eastward, toward the “Atlantic” imperial culture of which they were a part;² of scholars in “English” (whether their expertise be in American or British literature, in the Renaissance, or the eighteenth century) to read texts traditionally claimed by other modern languages, such as “Spanish” or “French”; and, vice versa, of scholars of Romance languages to take account of developments in English studies.³

Much of this recent breakdown of old disciplinary borders has been due to a renewed interest in the issue of “empire”—an interest that has gained fresh currency in an age when decolonization, transnational migration, and multinational capitalism are steadily challenging the political and demographic underpinning of the modern nation states. Thus, scholars have increasingly exposed the inadequacy of nationalist literary histories for an understanding of the early modern period by illustrating the imperial background in the formation of early modern nation states and the cosmopolitan dynastic connections of many of the key literary and political figures of a period that was still pervasively polyglot. The discovery and conquest of America, in particular, was a thoroughly “trans-” (or, more accurately “pre-”) national and trans-linguistic process, often involving Italian explorers who had moved west and, though frequently only in tenuous command of the languages there, offered their services and expertise at the courts of Spain, England, and Portugal; German financiers and printers, many of them—like the Crombergs—living in Spain; courtly aristocrats and dynasts, such as the Spanish Habsburgs with close ties to the English House of Tudor; English adventurers, such as Sir Francis Drake or Sir Walter Raleigh, intimately familiar with the Spanish language and even friendly with noblemen in Spain; and poets such as Sir Philip Sidney, who was a cousin not only of the Spanish poets Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and Garcilaso de la Vega but also of the Peruvian mestizo historian Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca. As one literary historian has recently put it, the early modern literary world was a “transatlantic family” (R. Greene 226).

In the cosmopolitan and trans- (or pre-) national world of European expansionism in the Americas, Spain and Portugal presented late-coming nations aspiring to empire, such as that of France and England (as well as, later, the United States), with an example that was foundational albeit “ambivalent and contradictory”: on the one hand, Englishmen and Frenchmen aimed to emulate the Iberian example in the New World; on the other, they tried to supplant the Iberian ascendancy in the Americas by denning themselves against it. This is the recurrent theme of Jonathan Hart's recent trilogy on European expansionism and colonialism, a series of books, all published by Palgrave in the course of only three years, that represent an impressive feat in scholarly productivity.

The first (and best) volume in this series, Representing the New World, is intended as an “essay in the historiography of expansionism” that means to “show the rhetorical complexity” of the texts in this historiographic archive and to “demonstrate the significance of translations in both disseminating and shaping knowledge surrounding the colonization of the New World” (1, 7). It begins with a survey of the some of the well-known issues surrounding the European discovery of America, such as Pope Alexander VI's division of the New World between Spain and Portugal, the French and English challenges to...