This upcoming First Books event features Benjamin VanWagoner, PhD 2018. His first monograph, Imperial Ventures: Maritime Drama and the Invention of Risk (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), links early modern English drama and empire studies, exploring how staged scenes of maritime peril created a new form of economic uncertainty around the turn of the seventeenth century, amid London’s explosion in commercial colonialism. It shows how maritime drama connected English venturing to economic vulnerability in increasingly systematic ways, helping to develop the economic logic that would come to be codified as risk. In revealing this process, Imperial Ventures establishes the unique protocolonial status of early modern England—in the theater and at sea—and demonstrates how risk became a perverse instrument for justifying Anglophone imperialism.
"Imperial Ventures is a path-breaking study of early modern postcolonialism, examining how risk animated both economic discourses and dramatic representations of peril at sea. The strength of this book lies in its fresh readings of familiar plays as they dramatize the risks and challenges of the new maritime economy buttressing England’s imperialist drives."—Jyotsna G. Singh, author of Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory
"This excellent and erudite book reconsiders early modern maritime drama in terms of imperialism and colonial expansion, brilliantly bringing together new developments in critical thinking about race, slavery, economic risk, and related areas. Anyone interested in oceanic cultures, early modern globalization, ecological imperialism, or the blue humanities should read this book!"—Steve Mentz, author of Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719
