ABSTRACT
As an experiment in responsible presentification, the chapter suggests a reading of Edward Young’s naval lyrics – especially “Imperium Pelagi” (1730) – which have justly been regarded as poetic failures, as globalization poems. Even these obscure eighteenth-century texts can be meaningfully discussed in the light of twenty-first-century globalization debates, which can be shown to have their roots in the early eighteenth century. As a highly illuminating document in the eighteenth-century rivalry between the opposing doctrines of mercantilism and free trade, “Imperium Pelagi” is revealed to be highly conflictive in that it oscillates between celebrating trade as beneficial to all on the one hand and a proto-nationalist discourse of competition and British naval power on the other. In contrast to Young’s professed originality in treating this topic, the texts are shown to be part of an ongoing discourse even in their time. Moreover, “Imperium Pelagi” turns out to contain what appears a prescient anticipation of twenty-first-century fears of Chinese dominance in international trade. In discussing these issues, the chapter argues that historicizing and presentifying approaches must by no means be mutually exclusive if the roots of present-day concerns can be traced to intellectual contexts of the text in question.
