Imperial Ventures: Maritime Drama and the Invention of Risk

Links early modern English drama and empire studies, exploring how staged scenes of maritime peril created a new form of economic uncertainty

Imperial Ventures links early modern English drama and empire studies, exploring how staged scenes of maritime peril created a new form of economic uncertainty around the turn of the seventeenth century, amid London’s explosion in commercial colonialism.

While the hazards of global maritime trade became increasingly apparent during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the word ＂risk＂ did not enter English usage until around 1660. The prevailing scholarly narrative has linked uncertainty to concepts such as ＂chance,＂ ＂accident,＂ and ＂providence,＂ but this book reveals that these fragmentary concepts were reordered into an economic abstraction, and that the theater was a key site for that process. Playwrights reached for ways to represent this new uncertainty, and audiences watched perilous voyages set in colonial contexts and dramatized in increasingly typical forms. Imperial Ventures is organized by these forms, with five chapters examining scenes of shipwreck, pirates, enslavement, colonial subjection, and perilous news across a wide range of early modern plays.

Benjamin VanWagoner shows how maritime drama connected English venturing to economic vulnerability in increasingly systematic ways, helping to develop the economic logic that would come to be codified as risk. In revealing this process, Imperial Ventures establishes the unique protocolonial status of early modern England--in the theater and at sea--and demonstrates how risk became a perverse instrument for justifying Anglophone imperialism.

Benjamin VanWagoner is a Core Lecturer at Columbia Univeristy.