This paradox was a crucial development in the emergent discourses of nationhood. Rather than a discrete geographical, linguistic, cultural, or legalistic entity defined sui generis, the English nation of mercantilist writing was now defined in terms of its wealth within a global framework. In this respect, the long-standing discourse of “commonwealth,” which preceded the mercantilist discourse of the nation, influenced but also crucially differed from it. For political writers from John of Salisbury in the twelfth century to Thomas Starkey in the sixteenth, “commonwealth” was a term that tended to designate the nation’s moral rather than economic condition. Thomas More lent “commonwealth” a literal financial sense in Utopia, but even for him the term retained a largely moral thrust: to hold wealth in common, Raphael Hythlodaeus argues, is the ethical basis of Utopian polity.23 Here, as in nearly all its incarnations, the “commonwealth” is equated primarily with the internal, self-sufficient resources—ethical as well as financial—of the nation. By contrast, mercantilist formulations of the nation insist on how its wealth is necessarily the product of transactions across national borders. Although the mercantilists frequently referred to the English national economy as the “commonwealth,” their chief investment was less in that term’s “common” than in its “wealth,” and specifically “wealth” as the outcome of international trade by private merchants. “What else makes a Common-wealth;” asks Misselden in The Circle of Commerce, “but the private-wealth, if I may so say, of the members thereof in the Exercise of Commerce amongst themselues, and with forraine Nations?”24 Even as it regards “forraine Nations” with suspicion, then, mercantilist writing repeatedly valorizes the global, although the forms of that economic cosmopolitanism are to be carefully monitored and controlled by the crown.
Early modern commerce’s ambivalent relationship to the foreign, I shall argue, necessitated new narrative forms within economic writing. To modern eyes, one of the more striking aspects of early modern mercantilist discourse might be its theatrical register. Critiquing Malynes’s allegations about the economic ills wrought by bankers and currency exchangers, Thomas Mun observes curtly: “I think verily that neither Doctor Faustus nor Banks his Horse could ever do such admirable Feats, although it is sure they had a Devil to help them; but wee Merchants deal not with such Spirits.”25 If Mun, like Marx, saw the history of political economy narrating itself in the registers of (Marlovian) tragedy and farce, other mercantilists tended to shape their analyses to the imperatives of another dramatic genre: romance. This is particularly so with Gerard Malynes, as is evidenced by the title of his first published pamphlet, Saint George for England Allegorically Described (1601). Unlike patriotic Tudor writers who glorified England’s language, law, history, or geography, Malynes advanced an economic nationalism based primarily on praiseworthy practices of commerce. His unconventional brand of patriotism can be seen most clearly in Saint George for England Allegorically Described, in which he recasts the English patron saint as the champion of a damsel in distress, English Treasure, who is defined less by her location than by her vulnerability to the transnational dragon of usury.26
Other mercantilist writers may have avoided such overtly melodramatic fantasies of risk and rescue, but the language of romance is a recurrent feature of their writing nonetheless. In his treatise The Custumers Alphabet and Primer (1608), for example, Thomas Milles characterizes “Trafficke” (i.e., England’s foreign trade) as “our swete … Mistresse” who, “distempered and distrest,” is in urgent need of “remedy” from her male champions.27 The connection between the languages of romance and commerce is equally evident in the mercantilists’ use of the word “adventure.” By the late sixteenth century, “adventure” had come to signify both romantic quest and commercial venture. The Merchant Adventurers of England arguably freighted the two meanings in their name; Thomas Mun wrote of the merchant’s stirring “adventures from one Countrey to another,” deliberately blurring the term’s romantic and commercial senses.28 A similar pair of connotations also attached to the word “hazard,” which could refer not only to the risk taken by the romantic quester but also to a commercial venture and a popular gambling game.29 The romantic conventions of perils overcome, (male) protection of distressed (female) parties, and treasure gained all lent a fairytale veneer to the mercenary ambitions of mercantilism. Just as importantly, the conventions of romance also allowed for the simultaneous demonization of foreigners and the validation of transnational laws of commerce.
The power of dramatic romance not just to accommodate but to articulate this mercantilist paradox is illustrated by the Belmont subplot of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. As many readers have noted, the entire play foregrounds the links between the “hazards” of merchant adventurism and of romance.30 “In Belmont,” says Bassanio, the man who must “hazard all he hath,” “is a lady richly left” (1.1.160):
And many Jasons come in quest of her.
O my Antonio, had I but the means
To hold a rival place with one of them,
I have a mind presages me such thrift
That I should questionless be fortunate. (1.1.171–75)
Thus begins the play’s insistent exposure of the commercial underpinnings of questing. As Bassanio suggests in this passage, a romantic venture needs venture capital. The fairytale-like subplot of the caskets is framed from the outset by its mercantile conditions of possibility: to enter the contest, this play’s Prince Charming has had to obtain sponsorship from a sugar daddy. “We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece,” brags Graziano in Belmont (3.2.240), but his turn as a romantic quester fails to conceal the commercial means—and ends—of that role. The Jasons’ Argos, then, cannot help but blur into Antonio’s argosies.
Like the mercantilists, the Venetian Jasons’ quest has a nationalist as well as commercial dimension, not least because of the parade of suitors whom Portia inventories in the second scene of act 1. In what might seem like an unholy marriage of the Eurovision Song Contest and the Love Connection, Portia is both the M.C. and the prize in a game show that has previously attracted contestants from Naples, France, Germany, England, Scotland, and, if critics are right about the County Palatine’s nationality, Poland. This contest is not in Shakespeare’s nominal source, Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone. Nor are the two princes, Morocco and Aragon, over whom the Venetian Bassanio eventually triumphs. The latter pair are in some ways stock figures from romance—the swaggering Saracen who boasts of his violent exploits with his scimitar, the chivalrous Iberian aristocrat whom Cervantes was to pillory a decade later. But their inclusion also consolidates the play’s transnational frame of reference, which corresponds to that of late sixteenth-century European commerce. In beating out Morocco and Aragon for Portia’s hand, Bassanio is the winner in a contest against representatives of two of England’s major trading adversaries, the Islamic North African states and Spain. Belmont thus attracts global adventurers who, for all their exoticism, are the specular images of Antonio and his more nakedly commercial ambitions, which dispatch argosies to Ottoman Tripolis and Spanish Mexico as well as to England and the East Indies.
Despite this national rivalry, Portia’s suitors are bound by a universal law analogous to, yet different from, Malynes’s lex mercatoria: the ius patris dictated by Portia’s father, which governs the terms of the lottery. No matter how much Portia may revile her foreign suitors, she and they willingly accede to her father’s law, which demands that they never marry if they choose the wrong casket: “To these injunctions every one doth swear / That comes to hazard”