Future History Global Fantasies in Seventeenth-Century American and British Writings

Future History traces the ways that English and American writers oriented themselves along an East-West axis to fantasize their place in the world. The book builds on new transoceanic scholarship and recent calls to approach early American studies from a global perspective. Such scholarship has largely focused on the early national period; Bross's work begins earlier and considers the intertwined identities of America, other English colonial sites and metropolitan England during a period before nation-state identities were hardened into the forms we know them today, when an English empire was nascent, not realized, and when a global perspective such as we might recognize it was just coming into focus for early modern Europeans. The author examines works that imagine England on a global stage in the Americas and East Indies just as--and in some cases even before--England occupied such spaces in force. Future History considers works written from the 1620s to the 1670s, but the center of gravity of Future History is writing at the mid-century, that is, writings coincident with the Interregnum, a time when England plotted and launched ambitious, often violent schemes to conquer, colonize or otherwise appropriate other lands, driven by both mercantile and religious desires.

Kristina Bross is an Associate Professor of English at Purdue University and the author of Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (Cornell UP, 2004).

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction- "America is as properly East as China"

Chapter 1- "A Universall Monarchy": Millennialism, Translatio and the Global Imagination

Coda- Tis Done!

Chapter 2- "Of the New-World a new discoverie": Thomas Gage Breaks the Space-Time Continuum

Coda-"A Query"

Chapter 3- "These Shall Come from Far": Global Networks of Faith

Coda- A Nonantum Life

Chapter 4- "Why should you be so furious?": Global Fantasies of Violence

Coda- "Wicked Weed"

Chapter 5- "Would India had beene never knowne": Wives Tales in the Global English Archive

Epilogue- Unmanning England in Dryden's Amboyna

Bibliography