Future History: Global Fantasies in Seventeenth-Century American and British Writings by Kristina Bross (review)

Kristina Bross's wide-ranging analysis of seventeenth-century British and American writing is politically engaged, carefully researched, and methodologically innovative, even speculative, in the theoretical approaches it interrogates and adopts. As she notes in her preface, "the texts that are the focus of my analysis are the literature of an early moment of globalization that in many ways parallels our own, right down to debates about the legality of torture" (xi). Bross's "lens on the past" is deeply grounded by the "events of [her] own moment" (xi) and this intimately energizes and informs every aspect of her exploration of English archives and the technologies and fantasies that shaped globalization in the early modern period. Her preface briefly contextualizes the way such "presentist motivation" has impacted early American studies, noting both the dangers and affordances that deliberately incorporating a consciousness of the present into one's study of the past offers. By way of Roland Barthes's concepts of studium and punctum, Bross develops her concept of "the Archive": this "can masquerade as a repository of objective truth" because "archival materials are created by particular technologies that make them seem complete or even 'objective'" (xiii); it can immure the past and "shelter to forget" (xv). One of Bross's goals is to puncture the assumption that "people in earlier times" were isolated and conditioned only by local allegiances: her "rather idiosyncratic literary history … encodes the personal and discursive connections among early modern English writers and travellers" (xv) and analyzes how "in their works they navigated the changing political, economic, and … religious systems … that connected them from the West to the East Indies," though "such imaginative work is always contingent on its own contexts, even our own" (xv–xvi).

Bross's study consists of a theoretical introduction followed by five discrete chapters that are each accompanied by a coda. Each chapter offers "a historicized analytical framework," while the codas explore Bross's research paths, "analyzing the archival scaffolding that makes early modern material available" (18) and facilitating "inscriptions of the global imaginary that are hard to categorize or fit into a literary history and that depend heavily on critical speculation" (19). Chapter 1 examines a pamphlet debate about eschatological status during the 1650s and "demonstrates the way that East-West connections mattered even in works that had little direct concern with English experiences in America or Asia" (24). The global vision of these pamphlets is rooted in Christian prophetic understandings of the coming millennium: the first, A Brief Description of the Future History of Europe, from Anno 1650 to An. 1710 (London, 1650), which gives Bross her title; the second, William Lilly's Monarchy or No Monarchy in England (1651). The coda analyzes an annotated copy of Lilly's pamphlet held by Purdue University, and Bross examines the implications of its cataloguing as a work of economic history. She then seeks to interpret the marginal notes in this copy, suggesting that they "constitute a third voice in the debate and dialogue about millennialism initiated by Lilly and the author of Future History" (47). These form the basis for a speculative extrapolation: "I've named the voice in my head that speaks these words in the margins Elizabeth Wilcocks, though I readily admit that I've no evidence that she wrote any of them," but by imagining the marginal comments "as connected, they create a compelling dialogue that gets us out of the closed print conversation between Lilly and the author of Future History" (52).

Chapter 2 demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary interrogation if one is properly to study "global currents of thought and belief" (53) by way of Thomas Gage's travel narrative The English-American His Travail by Sea and Land (1648). Bross categorizes Gage as both an early modern cosmopolitan and as an expert: someone who could "adapt and learn from the examples of rivals and predecessors" and offer the "specialized knowledge" necessary for the...