Abstract
In this erudite study, Ben VanWagoner defines his task as ‘literary archaeology’ (p. 2) as he charts the invention and emergence of risk as an economic concept in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama. Imperial Ventures aims to provide fresh insight into ‘how English culture understood its own imperial project’ (p. 4) and the book's focus on the London stage is an apposite one. At the time, the theatre was itself an intrinsically risky business in many senses – subject to a myriad of unpredictable economic, physical, religious and moral perils that might affect both producers and consumers of drama. The Globe and The Fortune playhouses burnt to the ground in catastrophic fires, respectively in 1613 and 1621, for instance. Playgoers were exposed not only to dangerous ideas in the stories dramatised on stage, but also to the risks of pickpockets, disease, prostitution and rowdy crowds by attending theatrical performances at all, according to the warnings of anti-theatrical polemicists.
These affinities and shared challenges help us to understand the reasons why drama of the period was obsessed with plots that featured oceanic hazards in a wide variety of forms from the pirates in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601) to the sex trafficking in Pericles (1609), from the captivity and subjection of The Island Princess (c. 1619–21) to the shipwreck and proto-colonial debates of The Sea Voyage (1622). The building of playhouses – and their rebuilding after fire – often used the same investment principle as early modern maritime ventures: shares in a joint stock company. This may, VanWagoner suggests, also have deepened theatre's interest in showing the ways the perils of the sea impacted on people in the lives of the characters it depicted on stage, as well as on the objects and things that were put at risk. Understanding and managing uncertainty were priorities in both oceanic and theatrical spheres during a period of European history that was characterised by rapid economic, as well as imperial and colonial, expansionism.
Using Shakespearean drama as a touchstone, but also ranging widely beyond it in the less well-known plays of his contemporaries, including those by Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, Robert Daborne, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, amongst others, Imperial Ventures maps the ‘conceptual development of risk, from natural hazards (shipwreck) through social ones (pirates and news), and, finally, to political contingency (enslavement and colonial subjection)’ (p. 28). Through sophisticated close readings of characters and scenes across its five well-paced chapters, the book asks big and important questions about how and why, and with what consequences, drama about this emergent oceanic economy made possible commercial, imperial and colonial systems that established brutality and exploitation as intrinsic to English venturing. The book is both complex and rewarding to read, and it is engagingly written in a lively style. It also includes 20 well-chosen illustrations. Because they are all reproduced in black and white, and some are just a quarter page in size (such as Jacques Callot's Slavenmarkt on p. 168 for instance), their details are sometimes hard to see and appreciate, serving readers more as reference points for the future.
In the last 30 years or so, the so-called ‘new naval history’ has sought to challenge reductive understandings of naval history as merely a sub-genre of military history that focuses almost exclusively on naval hagiography or nation-state-focused histories of navies. Instead, the ways that mariners across time have related to economic histories of labour relations, global capitalism and commerce, operated within national and transnational histories, and variously interacted as social, political or cultural actors with society ashore, have all received sustained attention from scholars. Ocean histories have likewise become less Europeanised or anthropomorphic. Imperial Ventures is thoroughly grounded in this important work and its implications, but VanWagoner also brings something distinctive to current debates in this study's laser focus on the development of concepts of risk in the proto-colonial imaginary. Readers interested in maritime history and culture, oceanic studies, new naval history, environmental history, proto-colonialism and postcolonialism, as well as early modern drama and Shakespeare studies will find much of value in this study. It is a deep dive and, at times, a challenging read as the book ranges across – sometimes dense – critical and philosophical thinking, economic theory, and indeed, to activism as it encourages readers to question ‘our own values, our exposure to peril, and who “we” are’ (pp. 241–2).
What is also important about this book is that it lays bare the career challenges facing new generations of humanities academics, and the risks this new normal poses for the academy more broadly. About 10 years post PhD, and with a strong first book behind him, VanWagoner just a few years ago would realistically have expected to be in a tenure track or permanent academic position at this point of his career, depending on the academic system of the country in which he was geographically based. That he remains professionally contingent, clearly with mentors, colleagues and friends aplenty, but ‘little formal support’ (p. 321) from the institutions that employ him precariously, should be as troubling to his readers as the book's concluding message is powerful. ‘Which forms of precarity, what sorts of contingency, what uncertainties concern you, and who is implicated?’ VanWagoner questions, before hopefully, but perhaps uncertainly, finally asking ‘So, are we in this together?’ It is a call to arms to the academic profession, which I hope will be heeded.