Gold ... hither swims\u27: Trade and Literature in england of the 1650s

David Armitage has characterized the first British Empire as Protestant, commercial, maritime and free. Blair Hoxby has seen in the poetry of the 1650s the burgeoning of a positive conception of trade. Reading poems and entertainments written in the 1650s -Edmund Waller’s ‘A Panegyric to My Lord Protector’, William Davenant’s The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, and so on- this essay investigates further the discursive configuration surrounding trade. It argues that there were still other discourses and literary tropes than Armitage’s four that could be drawn on in describing the first Empire, and that among them trade was exceptional in that it was presented negatively, as something other than itself