ABSTRACT
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is set between 1640s Puritan America, the colony which became an empire, and a nineteenth-century introductory narrative, thus eliding the eighteenth-century trading empire based upon Salem and the Far East, which was the foundation of Hawthorne’s family fortunes and of the economy of maritime New England. Two rewritings of the novel explore the economic conditions and consequences of transnationalism, whether in the recreation via cyberspace of the Salem Indies trade on the Coromandel coast (Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World) or the transformation of an Oregon valley into an Indian Utopian ashram (John Updike, S.). Both novels are the focus for an exploration of the instrumentalisation of culture in the organisation of corporate and transnational workforces, the status of neohistoricist revisionism and the use of historical source material in the discussion of the ‘long chronology’ of globalisation in earlier imperial practices. In both, the problems of handling information and the human sense of domination by data are key emphases.
