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 uncertaintyImperial 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 dramati