Colonial Investments: The Global Coordinates of the English Political Imaginary, 1628–1668

<p>The main question my dissertation attempts to address is: what role did the expansion of English colonial trades play in the transformation of English society and government between the Petition of Right and the early years of the Restoration (1628-1668)? My thesis is that during this period, colonial expansion rose to the level of a general national interest and that many early seventeenth-century texts index the complexities and tensions of this development. As a small but very organized group of merchants, peers, and MPs mobilized the military and financial technologies of colonization to support Parliament’s war against Charles I, their ventures in the Indian and Atlantic oceans resonated in the halls of Westminster and the chambers of state finance. In the crucible of civil war, they forged a fiscal-military state that would form the basis of a future British empire. My project explores the textual traces of this transformation in the parliamentary debates, poems, pamphlets, and petitions of the period.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York

Year dc:date.available

2023

Author dc:creator

• Nikolic, Nathan D

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Peter Hitchcock

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Feisal Mohamed
• Herman Bennett

• Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America
• Literature in English, British Isles
• Political History
• early modern England
• political economy
• colonial trade
• transatlantic
• new world slavery
• imperial formation

Repository record dc:identifier

https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5429

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:academicworks.cuny.edu:gc_etds-6529