Green Seraglios: Tulips, Turbans, and the Global Market

This article reads seventeenth-century texts about the tulip for what they have to say about an expanding global market and the new forms of cultivation and cultural competency linked to that market. A recent import from Turkey, even the tulip's name identified it as a stranger: the word derives from—and in early modern orthography is sometimes identical with—the word "turban," entering European languages as a deformation of the Persian root dulband. In herbals, manuals of garden design, poems, and other texts, the cultivation of Turkish tulips in England comes to embody the problem of the cultural effects of an expanding market—its way of violating national, racial, and religious boundaries; even its denaturalization of the claims of the "native" and the " foreign" in the figure of the migrant flower that accommodates itself to a new soil and a new climate. With particular attention to Andrew Marvell's "The Mower Against Gardens," as well as to the herbals of John Gerard and John Parkinson, the article details how tulip cultivation came to evoke, in a compressed way, a whole nexus of issues centering on cultural identity in an increasingly global economy.