The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature

A Globalization and Liberal Cosmopolitan Approach to Donne and Milton

Mingjun Lu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317038498
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Literature

The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature examines how English writers responded to the cultural shock caused by the first substantial encounter between China and Western Europe. Author Mingjun Lu explores how Donne and Milton came to be aware of England's participation in 'the race for the Far East' launched by Spain and Portugal, and how this new global awareness shaped their conceptions of cultural pluralism. Drawing on globalization theory, a framework that proves useful to help us rethink the literary world of Renaissance England in terms of global maritime networks, Lu proposes the concept of 'liberal cosmopolitanism' to study early modern English engagement with the other. The advanced culture of the Chinese, Lu argues, inculcated in Donne and Milton a respect for difference and a cosmopolitan curiosity that ultimately led both authors to reflect in profound and previously unexamined ways upon their Eurocentric and monotheistic assumptions. The liberal cosmopolitan model not only opens Renaissance literary texts to globalization theory but also initiates a new way of thinking about the early modern encounter with the other beyond the conventional colonial/postcolonial, nationalist, and Orientalist frameworks. By pushing East-West contact back to the period in 1570s-1670s, Lu's work uncovers some hitherto unrecognized Chinese elements in Western culture and their shaping influence upon English literary imagination.

Chapter 1
Global Silver-Gold Flows: The Chinese Resonance of Donne’s “Unfil’d Pistolets”

With the rise of modern China, how to deploy global strategies to tap into the high growth engine powered by the Chinese economy has become the top agenda of almost every Western country. The United States is rebalancing to Asia, with a view to arresting China’s growing importance in international economy and relations. The European Union regards China as a key source of strength that can help revitalize its sluggish economy, and Canada is seeking any means possible to project a commercial presence in the Chinese market. People from different countries, whether big or small, are flocking to China as if attracted by an irresistible magnet. History is repeating itself. Similar stories happened about 400 years ago when Ming China was also looked up to by Western countries as the lodestar of world economy. This chapter studies the literary implications of the early modern globalization dominated by the Chinese economy. The transnational trade triggered by the “race for the Far East,” and the global market dominated by Ming China’s insatiable demand for the precious metals produced in the New World, I propose, constitute the powerful “material base” that helped shape the global perspective of early modern cosmopolitans like Donne.

According to the historian W. A. Raleigh, Hakluyt’s seemingly formless Principal Navigations is governed by a “single thread of interest”—“the long struggle of the nations of Europe for commercial supremacy and the control of the traffic with the east.” Following this “thread,” we can find that “there is the same glitter of gold and precious stones, the same odour of far-fetched spices” in “all the dreams of the politicians and merchants, sailors and geographers, who pushed back the limits of the unknown world” (PN 12:2–3). Ever since Magellan discovered the southwest way “across the Pacific to the Philippins” in 1519–21, Raleigh remarks, “the aim of the European navigators was not to explore or settle America, rather to discover a passage whereby America might be avoided, and a way opened to the lands beyond.” “Cathay, the ultimate goal of all Eastern travel,” Cipangu [Japan], “the richest island in the world for gold and spices,” and the Spice Islands in Southeast Asia, proved to be those “lands beyond.” (PN 12:4) Together, these three eastern regions along the Pacific Rim constituted a powerful magnet that orientated the “race for the Far East.”

The topic of this chapter concerns the economic and social implications caused by this fascination with Chinese gold and the Western rivalry for the Eastern market. Representations of precious metals are everywhere in Renaissance literature, but most studies deal with their origins in trade either within the European continent or between Europe and the New World.¹ Adding the Far East to the picture, I explore how the Europe-America-China global commerce of gold and silver is reflected in Donne’s image of “unfil’d Pistolets” (31) in his elegy “The Bracelet” (1593–94).² Metaphors of coins pervade Donne’s poems and sermons, which indicates his unusual concern with financial and economic issues.³ But his particular image of Spanish coinage, that is, “unfil’d Pistolets,” signals an attention not only to European but also the global trade of precious metals in the early modern period. In “The Bracelet,” Donne writes,

Or were they Spanish Stamps, still travailing,

That are become as Catholique as their King;

These unlick’d beare-whelps, unfil’d Pistolets,

That, more than cannon-shot, availes or lets,

Which, negligently left unrounded, looke

Like many-angled figures in the booke

Of some greate Conjurer, which would enforce

Nature, as these do Justice, from her course (29–35)

The word “pistolet” refers to “a Spanish gold escudo,” especially the “double-escudo.”⁴ In 1537, Charles V (1500–58) decreed that gold coins were denominated in “escudos” and silver coins in “reales.”⁵ One gold escudo equaled two silver coins of eight reales. So the famous “piece of eight [reales] always refers to the largest silver—never gold—coin of everyday circulation,” and the term “double-escudo” means “always gold, never silver.”⁶ The “piece of eight” was also called a “peso,” a Spanish word that originally meant “weight” but later became “the name of the standard monetary unit of silver (and sometimes gold) in many Spanish American countries.”⁷ In the Renaissance, a large amount of Spanish bullion flowed into England so much so that “it was Spanish Coin—the ubiquitous pistolets—which constituted the lion’s share” in royal mints.⁸ The Spanish background is thus crucial to understanding Donne’s “unfil’d Pistolets,” but most studies focus on their political and military connotations, and rightly so, given those wars and diplomatic negotiations financed by “Spanish Stamps.”⁹

The worldwide flow of Spanish bullion in the early modern period, however, necessitates viewing its influence from a global rather than Eurocentric perspective. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez claim that “imperial Spain can be fully understood only within the context of an emerging, silver-centered global economy.”¹⁰ According to John J. TePaske:

American silver was so ubiquitous that merchants from Boston to Havana, Seville to Antwerp, Murmansk to Alexandria, Constantinople to Coromandel, Macao to Canto, and Nagasaki to Manila all used the Spanish peso or piece of eight (real) as a standard medium of exchange; these same merchants even knew the relative fineness of the silver coins minted at Potosi, Lima, Mexico, and other sites in the Indies thousands of miles away.¹¹

Given the “ubiquitous” presence of Spanish bullion, a regional or national approach to Donne’s pistolet cannot do justice to its full implications. Timothy R. Walton observes that “silver pesos and galleons became potent symbols of how Europe was fastening its grip on the rest of the world.”¹² Donne’s pistolet proves to be one of those “potent symbols” that evoke at once the colonial ambitions of the Europeans and a global commercial network catalyzed by those ambitions. But few have noticed the global dimension of Donne’s Spanish stamps. Though Shankar Raman claims that “Spanish colonial gains do not remain confined to Spain’s domains,” he restricts their circulation only to “the political and religious body of Europe.”¹³ Coburn Freer holds that “Donne is one of the first English poets to sense the vast economic changes coming over Europe in general and England in particular,”¹⁴ but he does not associate these changes with the early modern global trade set off by the discovery of American mines.

Situating Donne’s pistolets within the worldwide flow of gold and silver and especially in relation to the Chinese market in the early modern period, I adopt the globalization framework to study Donne’s image of Spanish coinage. For Flynn and Giráldez, only when Spanish “galleons” or “treasure fleets” started to cross the Pacific and head towards Manila did the world become truly global. In reality, “the only avenue available for Spanish participation in Asian trade was via Mexico, over the Pacific Ocean,” because the direct “Europe-Asia trade” of American bullion was controlled by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the English.¹⁵ Since the so-called Manila Galleons connected the Atlantic and the Pacific for the first time in history, Flynn and Giráldez claim, the establishment of the Manila colony by the Spanish in 1571 marked the “birth” of early modern globalization. Drawing upon Flynn and Giráldez’s theory, I propose that Donne’s image of unfiled pistolets captures a global economy dominated by Ming China, the largest “demand-side” of American silver.¹⁶ I will study how Donne’s depiction of Spanish coinage draws in, through the rich associations of such metaphors as “veines” (38) and “unlick’d beare-whelps,” the various strands that tied the European economies to a global market of precious metals.

In “The Bracelet,” Donne represents a threefold loss caused, either directly or indirectly, by Spanish stamps—personal, national, and global. Above all, the deluge of Spanish pesos has augmented not only the business of trading uncoined metals but also the practice of melting coined money back into “bullion,” that is, uncoined gold or silver in bars or ingots. For Donne’s speaker, both customs tend to cost the very subsistence of his life—“my guard, my ease, my food, and my all” (50). Beyond the personal loss, the robust “travailing” of Spanish coins also wreaks havoc upon national economy, debilitating “France” and “Scotland,” and “mangle[ing]” the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands (40–41). Last but the least, in stating that the Spanish bullion “run[s] through th’ earths every part, / Visit[s] all Countries” (18–19), Donne evokes its global circulation and impact. In this chapter, I aim to show that the economic crisis of the European countries Donne represents in his elegy is not an isolated event; rather, it is part of the chain effect of the debasement of silver in Ming China, a devaluation caused by none other than the global currency of the Spanish stamps.

Donne’s “many-angled” pistolets elicit, above all, the larger context of Spain’s discovery of gold and silver in American mines, the primary supply market in the early modern global trade. The sixteenth century witnessed Spain opening up a series of rich mines in Peru and Mexico, which yielded such staggering volumes of precious metals that “the official imports registered at Seville indicate that between 1500 and 1650 over a hundred and eighty tons of gold and sixteen thousand tons of silver were sent from the New World to Spain.”¹⁷ Mints close to local mines were built in Mexico in 1535 and in Peruvian Lima and Potosí between 1565 and 1574.¹⁸ During the reign of Phillip II (1554–98), to expedite output, these colonial mints launched the so-called cob coinage.¹⁹ “Cobs” are gold or silver coins struck “in hit-or-miss fashion on planchets (blanks) of irregular shape and uneven surface” in American mints.²⁰ “Unfiled pistolet” was a special form of these colonial cobs. Walton remarks, “Mint workers hammered the silver into a thin bar, cut off chunks roughly equivalent to the weight of the coins, and then trimmed and stamped the coins by hand.”²¹ Donne’s adjectives such as “unfil’d,” “unlick’d,” “unrounded,” and “many angled” graphically capture the most striking feature of American cobs—their “rough” and “irregular” forms. Both silver and gold cobs were impressed with “Spanish Stamps” and subsumed under the general term bullion.²² As Donne notices, American cobs were purposefully or “negligently left unrounded.” In fact, part of the popularity of colonial cobs came from their very irregularity. American mints produced “asymmetrical” rather than “rounded” coins because, Daniel Sedwick and Frank Sedwick explain, “most cobs were not struck primarily for circulation but as an expedient means for sending bullion in fixed quantities, easily divisible and accountable, back to the treasuries in Spain and ultimately to the melting pots of Europe.”²³

Alongside the Europe-New World nexus, Donne’s pistolets also evoke the New World-China-Europe lap of the global commerce. It is now a consensus among revisionist historians that China played a predominant role in early modern global economy, especially through its dominance of the silver trade. Hobson calls China’s primacy in early modern silver trade a “global system of arbitrage,” “‘global’ because it took the form of a continuous loop that went from the Americas, across Eurasia to China and back westwards to Europe.”²⁴ For Pomeranz, if China had not “absorb[ed] the staggering quantities of silver mined in th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: China in Early Modern Globalization: A Liberal Cosmopolitan Model
• 1 Global Silver-Gold Flows: The Chinese Resonance of Donne’s “Unfil’d Pistolets”
• 2 The Anyan Strait: Donne’s Global Vision and Theological Cosmopolitanism
• 3 Chinese Chronology and Donne’s Apologetic Exegesis in Essayes in Divinity
• 4 The Resonance of Chinese Antiquity in Milton’s Paradise Lost
• 5 Webb’s Chinese Linguistic Model and the Primitive Language in Milton’s Paradise Lost
• 6 The Mongol Tartars’ World Imperialism and Milton’s Vision of Global Governance
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index