Staging the Global in the Street

Abstract

This chapter turns to the East India Company's emergent spice trade to examine how Middleton's 1617 Show staged England's global access to eastern commodities while simultaneously bringing English appetites for them under scrutiny. It explores the global transformations of English civic space, especially in London, focusing on how the Show stages the Spice Islands as well as a class of laboring Indians, who were new to seventeenth-century civic pageantry. Middleton's Show becomes an important document for tracing the cultural and social impact of the changing dynamics of the early modern spice trade. The chapter builds on a growing critical interest in the Indian Ocean region and the shared economic and demographic exchanges between Asia and Europe during the global Renaissance. Middleton's The Triumphs of Honor and Industry appears to showcase these strides made in the spice trade, involving both the Grocers' Company as well as the newer East India Company.