ABSTRACT
The claim that corporations, especially the global trading companies, were acting in the national interest by securing trade or dominion became commonplace through the seventeenth century. Ideas of ‘corporate nationhood’ were established through the directions to explore and subsequent grants of land or territorial monopoly in charters. In this chapter, I demonstrate how the epic poem (especially Milton’s Paradise Lost, Sylvester’s translation of the Divine Weeks and Works and Fanshawe’s translation of Os Lusiados) became a key cultural marker of this idea of corporate or mercantile nationhood.
