A study of British imperialism’s imaginative geography, exploring the pairing of India and the Atlantic world from literature to colonial policyIn this lively book, Ashley Cohen weaves a complex portrait of the imaginative geography of British imperialism. Contrary to most current scholarship, eighteenth-century Britons saw the empire not as separate Atlantic and Indian spheres but as an interconnected whole: the Indies. Crisscrossing the hemispheres, Cohen traces global histories of race, slavery, and class, from Boston to Bengal. She also reveals the empire to be pervasively present at home, in metropolitan scenes of fashionable sociability. Close-reading a mixed archive of plays, poems, travel narratives, parliamentary speeches, political pamphlets, visual satires, paintings, memoirs, manuscript letters, and diaries, Cohen reveals how the pairing of the two Indies in discourse helped produce colonial policies that linked them in practice. Combining the methods of literary studies and new imperial history, Cohen demonstrates how the imaginative geography of the Indies shaped the culture of British imperialism, which in turn changed the shape of the world.

Narratives of Europe’s sixteenth-century westward expansion often tell of how the Americas came to be known as a distinct land mass, a continent separate from Asia and uniquely positioned as new ground ripe for transatlantic colonialism. But this geographic vision of the Americas was not shared by all Europeans. While some imperialists imagined North and Central America as a new and undiscovered land, the Spanish pushed to define the New World as part of a larger and eminently flexible geography that they called las Indias, and that by right, belonged to the Crown of Castile and León. Las Indias included all of the New World as well as East and Southeast Asia, although Spain’s understanding of the relationship between the two areas changed as the realities of the Pacific Rim came into sharper focus. At first, the Spanish insisted that North and Central America were an extension of the continent of Asia. Eventually, they came to understand East and Southeast Asia as a transpacific extension of their empire in America called las Indias del poniente, or the Indies of the Setting Sun. The Indies of the Setting Sun charts the Spanish vision of a transpacific imperial expanse, beginning with Balboa’s discovery of the South Sea and ending almost one hundred years later with Spain’s final push for control of the Pacific. Padrón traces a series of attempts—both cartographic and discursive—to map the space from Mexico to Malacca, revealing the geopolitical imaginations at play in the quest for control of the New World and Asia.

Between 1717 and 1731, the French Company of the Indies (Compagnie des Indes) held a virtual monopoly over Louisiana culture and trade. Among numerous controls, its administrators oversaw the slave trade, the immigration of free and indentured whites, negotiations with Native American peoples, and the purchase and exportation of Louisiana-grown tobacco. In Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana, Erin M. Greenwald situates the colony within a French Atlantic circuit that stretched from Paris and the Brittany coast to Africa's Senegambian region to the West Indies to Louisiana and back. Focusing on the travels and travails of Marc-Antoine Caillot, a company clerk who set sail for Louisiana in 1729, Greenwald deftly examines the company's role as colonizer, developer, slaveholder, commercial entity, and deal maker. As the company's focus shifted away from agriculture with the reversion of Louisiana to the French crown in 1731, so too did the lives of the individuals whose fortunes were bound up in the company's trade, colonization, and agricultural mission in the Americas. Greenwald’s focus on Caillot provides an engaging microhistory for readers interested in the culture and society of early Louisiana and its place in the larger French Atlantic world.

A COMPANION TO THE GLOBAL RENAISSANCE An innovative collection of original essays providing an expansive picture of globalization across the early modern world, now in its second edition A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500–1700, Second Edition provides readers with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of both macro and micro perspectives on the commercial and cross-cultural interactions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Covering a uniquely broad range of literary and cultural materials, historical contexts, and geographical regions, the Companion’s varied chapters offer interdisciplinary perspectives on the implications of early modern concepts of commerce, material and artistic culture, sexual and cross-racial encounters, conquest and enslavement, social, artistic, and religious cross-pollinations, geographical “discoveries,” and more. Building upon the success of its predecessor, this second edition of A Companion to the Global Renaissance radically extends its scope by moving beyond England and English culture. Newly-commissioned essays investigate intercultural and intra-cultural exchanges, transactions, and encounters involving England, European powers, Eastern kingdoms, Africa, Islamic empires, and the Americas, within cross-disciplinary frameworks. Offering a complex and multifaceted view of early modern globalization, this new edition: Demonstrates the continuing global “turn” in Early Modern Studies through original essays exploring interconnected exchanges, transactions, and encounters Provides significantly expanded coverage of global interactions involving England, European powers such as Portugal, Spain, and The Netherlands, Eastern empires such as Japan, and the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires Includes a Preface and Afterword, as well as a revised and expanded Introduction summarizing the evolving field of Global Early Modern Studies and describing the motifs and methodologies informing the essays within the volume Explores an array of new subjects, including an exceptional woman traveler in Eurasia, the Jesuit presence in Mughal India and sixteenth-century Japan, the influence of Mughal art on an Amsterdam painter-cum-poet, the cultural impact of Eastern trade on plays and entertainments in early modern London, Safavid cultural disseminations, English and Portuguese slaving practices, the global contexts of English pattern poetry, and global lyric transmissions across cultures A wide-ranging account of the global expansions and interactions of the period, A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500–1700, Second Edition remains essential reading for early modern scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.

Cricket is an enduring paradox. On the one hand, it symbolises much that is outmoded: imperialism; a leisured elite; a rural, aristocratic Englishness. On the other, it endures as a global game and does so by skilful adaptation, trading partly on its mythic past and partly on its capacity to repackage itself. This ambitious new history recounts the politics of cricket around the world since the Second World War, examining key cultural and political themes, including decolonisation, racism, gender, globalisation, corruption and commercialisation. Part One looks at the transformation of cricket cultures in the ten territories of the former British Empire in the years immediately after 1945, a time when decolonisation and the search for national identity touched every cricket playing region in the world. Part Two focuses on globalisation and the game’s evolution as an international sport, analysing: social change and the Ashes; the campaigns for new cricket formats; the development of the women’s game; the new breed of coach; the limits to the game’s global expansion; and the rise of India as the world’s leading cricket power. Cricket: A Political History of the Global Game, 1945-2017 is fascinating reading for anybody interested in the contemporary history of sport.

Examines early modern Spanish contributions to international relations by focusing on ambivalence of natural rights in European colonial expansion to the Americas.

This book offers a concise and cutting-edge repository of essential information on new independent Indian films, which have orchestrated a recent renaissance in the Bollywood-dominated Indian cinema sphere. Spotlighting a specific timeline, from the Indies’ consolidated emergence in 2010 across a decade of their development, the book takes note of recent transformations in the Indian political, economic, cultural and social matrix and the concurrent release of unflinchingly interrogative and radically evocative films that traverse LGBTQ+ issues, female empowerment, caste discrimination, populist politics and religious violence. A combination of essential Indie-specific information and concise case studies makes this a must-have quick guide to the future torchbearers of Indian cinema for scholars, students, early career researchers and a global audience interested in intersecting aspects of cinema, culture, politics and society in contemporary India.