Other Englands: Utopia, Capital, and Empire in an Age of Transition

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hogan, Sarah (Professor of English), author.

Title: Other Englands : utopia, capital, and empire in an age of transition / Sarah Hogan.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017050813 | ISBN 9781503605169 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503606135 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: English fiction—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and criticism. | Utopias—England—History—16th century. | Utopias—England—History—17th century. | Utopias in literature. | Capitalism in literature. | Imperialism in literature.

Classification: LCC PR830.U7 H64 2018 | DDC 823.009/372—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050813

Cover design: Bruce Lundquist

Cover image: Detail from John Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine: Presenting an Exact Geography of the Kingdomes of England, Scotland, Ireland,... (1611–12).

OTHER ENGLANDS

Utopia, Capital, and Empire in an Age of Transition

SARAH HOGAN

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

To Matt, my fellow traveler

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Origin Stories

1. Thomas More’s Peninsula Made an Island

2. Uneven Development in Bacon’s New Atlantis

3. Utopia, Ireland, and the Tudor Shock Doctrine

4. Dispossession and Women’s Poetry of Place

5. Reforming Utopia in Macaria and Areopagitica

Conclusion

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not exist if not for two utopian scholars and educators of desire with whom I was fortunate to study. More than a decade ago, Crystal Bartolovich first planted the seeds of my interest in utopian literature and thought, in a memorably rigorous seminar at Syracuse University. Later, at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), I was also lucky to study the tradition with James Holstun, who proved to be an ideal mentor to cultivate this interest. Jim and Crystal remain for me critical utopians, and moreover, models of engaged, activist-oriented Marxist scholarship and pedagogy to which I can only hope to aspire.

Institutional support, from many sources, brought this project to fruition. I am grateful, principally, to all my colleagues in the English department at Wake Forest University who have encouraged and debated these ideas at many turns, and especially to Jessica Richard, Dean Franco, Olga Valbuena, Susan Harlan, Joanna Ruocco, Omaar Hena, Amy Catanzano, Judith Madera, Gale Sigal, Gillian Overing, and Ryan Shirey. In recent years, no one has supported this project and my career more than my senior colleague Herman Rapaport, who offered probing feedback on every page of this manuscript. I would like to thank, too, several institutional bodies at Wake Forest University, especially the Dean’s and Provost’s Offices, the Humanities Institute, and the Reynolds Fund for generously supporting the research at the heart of this book, in the form of Archie, Faculty Development, Faculty Publication, and Summer Writing grants, and also through a Junior Research Leave. I also owe a world of gratitude to the diligent, patient staff at Stanford University Press, especially to Emily-Jane Cohen, who was willing to gamble on a first book, and also to Faith Wilson Stein and Elspeth MacHattie.

Utopias are usually arrived at through the vehicle of discourse, and often in the company of friends. This study is no exception. Many of these chapters have benefited from stimulating, spirited conversations at the annual meetings of the Society for Utopian Studies, and from participation in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 2016 seminar on More’s Utopia. I know this project to be improved by the suggestions, questions, and original ideas offered by fellow scholars in search of utopia, especially Christopher Kendrick, Phillip Wegner, Antonis Balasopoulos, Cathy Curtis, Zoë Hristova-Sutherland, Jude Welburn, and the late, loved Nicole LaRose. Former professors Randy Schiff, Andrew Stott, and Scott Stevens, and my former colleagues and dear friends in the English Department at Drake University, were also knowledgeable sources of support early in this research pursuit.

Several friends—but especially Amy O’Shaughnessy, Benjamin Gardner, Guy Witzel, J. J. Butts, Amy Licht, Erik Waterkotte, Aimee Mepham, and Leah Benedict—have talked me through the more challenging moments of this labor, while their good company daily reminds me of the better nature of humankind. In countless dérives around the side streets of Winston-Salem, Joanna Ruocco has proven to be the best interlocutor for exploring and imagining other worlds. My large, loud, affectionate families—Hogans, Garites, Gunthers, Cocuzzis, Piers, and Wolfes—have also provided encouragement and kindness in more ways than I can possibly acknowledge here. In particular, the treasured friendship of my three sisters, Amy, Betsy, and Catherine, and their weekly pep talks, saw this project through from its infancy to its completion. And to my wise, loving parents, Jack and Mary Hogan, thank you for always believing in the minds of your daughters and supporting their aspirations.

This book is dedicated to Matt Garite, a bibliophile, psychonaut, flower-punk, ecotopian, and editor extraordinaire, whose companionship, I’m convinced, remains the very best state of being.

INTRODUCTION: ORIGIN STORIES

In 1609, Robert Gray, an Anglican preacher and a propagandist for the Virginia Company, writing from the comfort of his home in London, would recruit overseas adventurers by promising them all happie and prosperous successe, which may either augment your glorie, or increase your wealth, or purchase your eternitie.¹ This was the same year the Sea Venture wrecked on the coast of Bermuda, while Jamestown’s settlers, faced with the prospect of starvation, were forced to resort to cannibalism. But like the children of Joseph, assured of a new homeland by Joshua, Gray’s readers were instructed to flie out and looke abroad for a kingdom providentially bestowed upon a great people, if only they were willing to cross seas, level mountains, and vanquish America’s brutish savages. His readers’ happiness had been discovered and rhetorically envisioned; now they would need only to realize it.² Though recent ages in England had felt no urgent need for expansion, or so Gray asserts, multitude, or what we would now call overpopulation, occasions his biblically framed injunction to emigrate. Behind his vision of the New World as New Canaan is then a vision of an implied present gone wrong, or at the very least, a less than utopian England.

Indeed, Good Speed to Virginia, like so many sermons advocating for early seventeenth-century settlement, overoptimistically imagines the early English colony as a solution or remedie to England’s demographic and social crises, particularly unemployment and dispossession.³ Gray describes the English body politic’s illness and ailments as follows:

Our multitudes like too much bloud in the body, infect our countrey with plague and pouertie, our land hath brought foorth, but it hath not milke sufficient in the breast thereof to nourish all those children which it hath brought forth, it affordeth neither employment nor preferment for those that depend vpon it: And hereupon it is, that many seruiceable men giue themselues to lewd courses, as to robbing by the high way, theft, & cosoning, sharking vpon the land, piracie vpon the Sea, and so are cut off by shamefull and vntimely death: others liue prophanely, riotously, and idely, to the great dishonour of Almightie God, the detriment of the commonwealth.⁴

There are echoes of Thomas More’s near-sociological correlation of unemployment with crime here, yet in Gray’s tract, the country’s not-too-distant past—like Nova Britannia—might also be said to be an alterae terrae, or a more Golden Age, since this plagued nation once yéelded vnto all that were in it a surplussage of all necessities when the Commons of our Country lay free and open for the poore Commons to inioy, . . . [and] there was roome enough in the land for euery man, so that no man néeded to encroch or inclose from another.⁵ Contrasted with a contemporary England that has birthed more children than it can rear, an imaginary, romanticized, and irrevocably lost past offers a second fiction to counterbalance Virginia’s redemptive plantation. Gray gestures both backward to a feudal commons and outward to a land of limitless property (because not yet claimed) in order to envision a more peaceful, plentiful future commonwealth that will immortalize its settlers, purge England of its excesses and crimes, and all the while, increase the nation’s collective wealth.

I do not start with this tract because it offers a novel colonial or nationalist fiction, but because it might be said to exemplify the rhetorical rule. In the propaganda of early empire, idealized fictions of an English past and future belie an England made strange to itself—historically as well as geographically. Caught in the purgatorial limbo of its self-generated mythical histories and its fictions of millennial-colonial destiny, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England is represented in a state of transitional indeterminacy. Gray is not alone in this regard; as Andrew Escobedo—building on Walter Benjamin’s, Benedict Anderson’s, Michel Foucault’s, and Michel de Certeau’s theories of homogeneous time—has explained, Renaissance writers often find the national present eerily empty, temporally isolated from both past and future, and consequently, they evoke the impression of historical difference, temporal provisionality, and even anachronism.⁶ In other words, for many early modern subjects, just as for Hamlet, their moment seemed a time out of joint.⁷

This sense of self-alienation, this perception of difference, has several overdetermined causes that historians and cultural critics of the redubbed early modern era have long identified: demographic growth, yes, but also religious reformation, a royal consolidation of power, the epistemic shift occasioned by Atlantic exploration and discovery, and as Gray himself suggests, the economic transformations that marked the end of feudal Britain, like the enclosure of the commons. My concern in this study is mainly with the means by which England’s agrarian, mercantile, and imperial transformations created both crisis and hope, and crucially, an impression of systemic social difference that would generate a future-oriented historical consciousness articulated through fictions of state. This experience of the present as Other, as transitional and provisional because both territorially and historically estranged from an English past, I will suggest, prompted writers to compose totalizing, utopian fictions of difference and economic improvement, both ambivalent and earnest.

This is to say, the personal experience of social transformation—as loss or gain—need not only have triggered nostalgia; living memory often combined with a proleptic, worldly curiosity and, just as often, a violent will to make history anew. For every nostalgic writer like John Stow, who summoned up the ghost of a past world to redress the unequal balance of the new,⁸ there were also those who sought solutions in sites beyond London’s ruins, and others, still, who actively welcomed a changeable world, willfully leaving the known one behind. Colonial and/or utopian discourses like Gray’s sermon are a case in point: here, the New World is cast as a chance for both England and its subjects to begin again.

What this suggests is that for promoters of exploration and expansion, time had a spatial character, and thus, the representation of other worlds could be put to use in the ideological construction of the future or as a means for unmaking the present. In an effort to encourage mass migration and new social experiments abroad, the future was often projected beyond the shores of the British Isles. Utopian fictions, like the travel and colonial writing they discursively mimicked, begin with this spatio-temporal conceptualization, playfully posing the possibility of an England that is and is not yet, and while nowhere, it is simultaneously here and elsewhere. This book will argue, then, that the spatial irony of early English utopias formally and ideologically registers the transitional, indeterminate present of what would become a capitalist world economy. And moreover, that the novelty of early modern utopias—specifically, their tendency to privilege the systemic reform of institutions as the means for (re)forming both individuals and communities—must be understood as a representational engagement with historical change in the abstract as well as the felt, experiential sense.

Historicizing Utopia

In Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson defines utopia as a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and the systemic nature of the social totality.⁹ Jameson’s definition aptly captures what distinguishes most early modern utopias from previous traditions of the ideal society—namely, the emphasis on social systems as opposed to either philosophical idealism or prelapsarian myths—while still leaving the term utopia open enough to account for multivalent, interchangeable meanings as either a literary genre, historical project, mode of thinking, social desire, or even an innate human propensity. As Ruth Levitas has charted, utopia in its diverse incarnations has historically constituted a discursive concept, a literary form, and a social function aimed toward transformation, to which we might add, a communal project actualized in the world.¹⁰ While some literary critics have taken a more hard-line approach to the project of defining utopia, arguing like J. C. Davis for structural understandings of utopia against the imprecision of other writers, the conjunctural,¹¹ or historical, approach to defining utopia has won out in recent years. Following in the wake of Frank and Fritzie Manuel’s seminal Utopian Thought in the Western World, critics have tended toward historical analyses which recognize the persistence of symbolic and residual utopian forms, as well as the . . . ‘hot’ motivation generated by immediate socioeconomic and political factors.¹² Because the historical context against which utopias take shape leaves such an indelible imprint on the utopia in question, usually as the social order being reproached (or, as Louis Marin and Jameson have argued, neutralized),¹³ historical analysis becomes an unavoidable concern. In other words, despite the lingering, popular misconception of utopia as an implausible, other-worldly discourse, it is in fact a most historical, this-worldly form.

The narratives of Renaissance utopias tend to work by way of socio-spatial juxtaposition, representing the ideal through a critical interrogation of the real. In the spatial play of two islands or two societies—sometimes explicitly or sometimes only implicitly evoking the real—the utopia gives fictive form to an authoring context which Christopher Kendrick has identified as an overdetermined economic modality.¹⁴ In the case of sixteenth-century England, this modality involves the coexistence of late feudal and early capitalist productive forces. In fact, a long line of critics, including Karl Kautsky, Louis Marin, Jameson, Richard Halpern, and Kendrick, have noted as much, situating utopias (and Thomas More’s founding work in particular) within moments of historical conjuncture, with special concern for locating the origins of the genre—or at least its rebirth—in the origins of capitalism.¹⁵ This contextualization requires no great stretch of the imagination when one recalls what is arguably the most straightforward passage in More’s playfully ambiguous Utopia: Raphael Hythlodaeus’s attack on the dispeopling enclosures of Henrician England.¹⁶

In Book One, Hythlodaeus tells the literary personas of More and his humanist companion from Antwerp, Peter Giles, about a past conversation he had with a lawyer at the house of Cardinal Morton. He offers his views on the reputed justice of the English penal system in this dialogue within a dialogue. For Hythlodaeus, the English execution of thieves is not only unjust, it is a facile remedy to the nation’s social ills.¹⁷ He instead suggests that rising rates of idleness, vagrancy, and crime in England are the result of peasant dispossession, not moral depravity. He cites the enclosure of arable land for pasture and the gentry’s greed as the real sources of England’s problems. In an ironic reversal that mocks the lawyer’s logic, he charges the sheep of England with an insatiable appetite that is ruining the livelihood of commoners and undermining the commonwealth’s stability:

Your sheep . . . that commonly are so meek and eat so little; now, as I hear, they have become so greedy and fierce that they devour men themselves. They devastate and depopulate fields, houses, and towns. For in whatever parts of the land sheep yield the finest and thus the most expensive wool, there the nobility and gentry, yes, and even some abbots though otherwise holy men, are not content with the old rents that the land yielded to their predecessors. Living in idleness and luxury without doing society any good no longer satisfies them; they have to do positive evil. For they leave no land free for the plough: they enclose every acre for pasture; they destroy houses and abolish towns, keeping only the churches—and those for sheep barns.¹⁸

There is a quick slippage here from England’s voracious sheep—who consume both the commonwealth and its populace—to a nobility that breeds overconsumption and acts according to an unnatural desire for ever-increasing profits. The carnivorous sheep of Book One stand in for enclosing—and metaphorically, cannibalistic—landlords and the idle rich of More’s England, who embody the moral corruption, religious error, and legal injustice of Tudor society. Hythlodaeus goes on to explain that as pales and hedges are thrown up by landlords, husbandmen are thrust out on their own.¹⁹ In what we would now identify as a systemic account of crime, More explains how necessity compels the dispossessed to wander, beg, or steal for their daily bread—regardless of the threat of capital punishment. Despite the humor and ambiguity that characterizes More’s humanist book, Hythlodaeus’s indictment seems to escape the ambiguous conceit of the work to present a moment of irrefutable critique.

In contrast, the Utopian island’s state of near full employment and communal property—as described in the second book of More’s Utopia (which was, famously, composed before the first)—quite explicitly outlines a society where theft is not only prevented, it is ostensibly not possible, given the absence of private property. In this way, More subtracts European practices from his imaginary island, and repurposes the masses of dispossessed English whom he discusses in Book One. As such, the fictional society of Utopia offers a vantage point from which to view the injustices of England itself, suggesting that to at least some extent, the utopian form emerges as a critical interrogation of what Marx would later call primitive accumulation—the historical theft of land that initiates the capitalist wage relation. Indeed, Marx himself would cite More’s satire on sheep in his chapter on so-called primitive accumulation in Capital.²⁰

For Kendrick, whose work is strongly influenced by Marin’s Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, and by Jameson’s own extensions of Marin’s poststructuralist, psychoanalytical work, passages like the one above suggest that the liminal, quasi-feudal, and quasi-capitalist social relations of sixteenth-century England enable More to imagine modes of production . . . in their interrelation.²¹ Richard Halpern, too, in The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, examines Utopia as an expression of capitalism’s preconditions, a context he describes throughout his book as a structural decoding and deterritorializing crisis of dispossession and chronological dislocation, which had not yet settled into a system of accumulation generated by the wage relation.²² In all of these accounts, More’s moment is one of conjuncture and overdetermination, in which a late feudal, relatively localized structure of production is increasingly defamiliarized and abstracted as the result of the rise of centralized monarchical rule, monetarization, commodity production, and the dispossession of petty producers.²³ These readings of More’s book, then, highlight the spatial play of islands as a neutralization of sociohistorical contradictions—as opposed to an ideological resolution of them—that is, at least in part, a figuration and a reaction to an English transitional context that was both a moment of loss and progress.

To locate the origins of More’s Utopia in the context of capitalism’s original moments is by now a well-rehearsed argument, especially among Marxist literary scholars and theorists. However, while Marin, Jameson, Kendrick, and Halpern serve as important, ground-clearing precursors to this study, they have by no means exhausted this position in their sophisticated, theoretical insights into the mechanism of Utopia and its conditions of possibility. Other Englands will expand on this tradition in at least three specific ways: first, as a genuine genre study of early modern utopias that looks beyond More to consider a fuller range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century utopian responses to capitalism’s uneven development—including utopian works that represent more marginalized viewpoints on such changes; second, by looking beyond Marx and engaging throughout with competing histories of proto-capitalism offered (and disputed) by twentieth- and twenty-first-century British Marxist historians, world-systems theorists, and materialist feminists; and third, by thinking of the early modern utopian tradition and capitalism as always already implicated in an imperial imaginary that seeks outside solutions and spatial fixes to domestic crises. After all, the island and Atlantic imaginaries of most early modern utopian fiction suggests that even as early as 1516, domestic problems provoked oceanic explorations for solutions, as well as global alternatives and perspectives. In terms of methodology, then, this study will borrow from postcolonial, feminist, geocritical, and cultural materialist frameworks, in an effort to extend the Jamesonian utopia-in-transition thesis to a developing, dialogical tradition of utopian literature.

In many Marxist readings, More’s book is treated as both the exception and the rule, which may explain why it remains for a survey of the genre of early English utopias to test out the transition thesis; Utopia is at one and the same time both the most brilliant because ambiguous and original English utopia and the example that establishes a pattern to be adapted by nearly every other work in the tradition. While the novelty of More’s Utopia—a main point of consideration in the first chapter of this study—partially explains our tendency to privilege it in discussions of the discourse, genre-defining exercises and historical studies obviously require a comparative approach, both to reveal enduring trends and interrogate assumptions of uniformity. Consequently, I examine the idiosyncrasies in the form and content of each alternative social model, and approach utopia as a genre that is dialogically constructed in each intertextual iteration.²⁴ Indeed, as capitalist practices of production, exchange, and expansion became more commonplace by the early seventeenth century, the concerns and forms of utopian literature also alter, often more explicitly aligning with an emerging ideology of improvement. Raymond Williams’s Keywords explains the sixteenth-century association of improvement with profitable operations in connection with land, but likewise notes that by the seventeenth century, the word was taking on a more general meaning of making something better²⁵—a definition that tellingly suggests emergent capitalism’s own developing utopian rhetoric. In this comparison, the idealization and reorganization of labor and property will be shown to be a predominant, even primary feature of the early genre—not just of More’s Utopia—suggesting that historically pertinent problems like unemployment, dispossession, and the material and ideological crises of emergent capitalism drive the early modern utopian imagination. The very diverse perspectives and aesthetics of the utopian spatial narratives by Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, Isabella Whitney, Aemelia Lanyer, Francis Bacon, Gabriel Plattes, and John Milton that are examined in this study all reinvent systems of labor and property, while productive forces are shown to create possibilities for new collectivities—whether these solidarities are national, regional, class-based, occupational, gendered, or religious. Early English utopias, I will seek to demonstrate, were uniquely systemic narratives, reimagining the socioeconomic changes witnessed by their authors.

While the mechanism of utopia is crucial to this inquiry (in terms of elucidating the cultural work utopia performs by asserting the possibility of difference), a materialist approach to the tradition seems to require more attention to the imaginary societies as they are schematized and charted in each text. The blueprint utopia, however, has been a favorite whipping boy in the twentieth-century turn against utopia—in anarchic and liberal critiques as much as in the anti-communist, Cold War variety. Russell Jacoby makes precisely this point in his study of Hannah Arendt’s, Karl Popper’s, and Isaiah Berlin’s writings on democracy, where the model orders of early utopias are often equated with a will to domination; utopianism here becoming virtually synonymous with national socialism or Marxist totalitarianism.²⁶ In twenty-first-century recuperations of utopia, such as Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future and Jacoby’s two books on the topic, The End of Utopia²⁷ and Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age, this equation between utopianism and authoritarianism is identified as a major obstacle to radical social movements and Leftist thought. Thus, Jameson and Jacoby rally the Left back to utopian thought by way of a strategic redefinition. Utopia is instead resuscitated by what Jameson—in the tradition of Jean-Paul Sartre—dialectically calls an anti-anti-utopianism,²⁸ and what Jacoby refers to as iconoclastic utopianism,²⁹ a mode of utopian thinking or an impulse he traces to Frankfurt School intellectuals like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and (perhaps more convincingly) Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse. In Jacoby’s account, in particular, the reputation of utopia has been sullied by the blueprint utopian tradition, a static, self-limiting style of utopianism that strives for social engineering. Writing on the failures of this tradition, Jacoby states:

[B]lueprints not only appear repressive, they also rapidly become dated. Even with the best of wills, they rapidly tether the future to the past. In outfitting utopia, they order from the catalog of their day. With their schedules and seating arrangements, their utopias stand condemned not by their capaciousness, but by their narrowness, not by their extravagance but their poverty. History soon eclipses them.³⁰

Jameson, as a literary critic, does not share in Jacoby’s wholesale dismissal of the blueprint form—after all, Archaeologies of the Future concerns the history of utopian science fiction—but his concern is precisely with the way in which all utopian thought is eclipsed by history and tethered to the present. In this failure to imagine a wholly Other future, or in our poverty of imagination, Jameson finds a utopian impulse nonetheless. By calling attention to the limits on the thinkable or the representable, he argues that utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment.³¹

No contemporary thinker has done more for Utopian Studies than Fredric Jameson, but I will suggest here that the diminishment of blueprint utopias seems to risk erasing the imaginative power of literary utopias—especially early examples from the genre—and to overlook the remarkably sociological and systemic perspective of utopian fictions, peculiar especially to those authored in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To ignore the specificity of utopian plans is to overlook was what so novel about the early modern tradition: the idea that life is profoundly shaped by institutional formations and that scholars, poets, and dramatists might themselves reimagine centers of power, community formations, or geopolitical identity. I would add that descriptive utopian fictions, however dated or impoverished they may now appear, from our vantage point of hindsight, often uncannily schemed worlds that were to come—an assertion that the following readings of Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (chapter 2), Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland (chapter 3), and Gabriel Plattes’s Macaria (chapter 5) hope to bear out. As such, these works, along with more truly radical blueprints like Gerrard Winstanley’s The Law of Freedom, seem to possess a practical, historical function that hints not just at the limits of the possible or the epistemological but at a future in the making.

But just as importantly, I will also explore how early English fictions of alterity demonstrate a range of subjective and class responses to the lived experience of emergent capitalism, from ambivalent or staunch critiques to anxious anticipations of a more extensive, complete expansion of capitalist policies like enclosure, colonial dispossession, free trade, the division of labor, and the gendering of labor and property. This is an insight that Marxist critics of utopia have tended to repress, preferring instead to cast utopia as an inherently anticapitalist form, spirit, or praxis.³² In viewing utopia as the antithesis of ideology (as Karl Mannheim does) or as the communal, compensatory mechanism that pairs with ideology in all cultural works (as Bloch and Jameson have argued), utopia is often conflated with a longing for communism.³³ But as Marina Leslie points out, one of the defining characteristics of utopian literature is the tendency for each subsequent work within the genre to fashion itself as an explicit or implicit rejection of the model offered by every other utopia, meaning that utopias give expression to diverse and competing dreams for a better world.³⁴ Indeed, a close look at the early tradition of utopian writing also stands as a reminder that capitalism has historically required its own utopias, if for nothing else than the winning of subjects’ consent to its cause.³⁵ Especially in a moment of capitalism’s genesis, an improving, mercantile or imperial vision of another Britain possesses a kind of anticipatory power that puts literary innovation at the service of an emergent social order. This is not to claim, as was once the fashion, that Renaissance utopias possess a prophetic power, but instead to argue that culture possesses a social function that intervenes in historical praxis just as much as it represents it. One need only consider Vasco de Quiroga’s settlement in New Spain, or Oliver Cromwell’s campaign against the Irish, or the founding of the Royal Society to recognize that writers like More, Spenser, and Bacon exerted their own kind of influence. This study, then, will focus predominantly on the early history of capitalist utopias, and in some chapters, examine utopian fictions as a literary counterpart to early political economy and colonial propaganda.

Raymond Williams’s cultural materialist scheme is therefore an important source for this study of early English utopias. While Williams defends the importance of epochal analysis, he also insists that cultural critics must recognize not only ‘stages’ and ‘variations’ but the internal dynamic relations of any actual process.³⁶ In discussing the role of culture within social formations, Williams argues that no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention.³⁷ In other words, culture is composed not only of dominant ideologies but also of oppositional or alternative experiences, meanings, desires, and beliefs. In Williams’s account, counter-hegemonic possibilities include the residual ways of living and thinking held over from past societies, as well as emergent forms or values. Williams’s concept of structures of feeling is therefore particularly useful for the study of utopia, especially when one considers Bloch’s theory of utopia as a form of anticipatory consciousness.³⁸ Like Bloch, Williams complicates old notions of ideology, which even in twentieth-century redeployments too readily collapse culture, politics, and belief into a reflective expression of class position. Williams, however, recognizes modes of production as historical formations in process, and just as crucially, he identifies culture as a site of social struggle in which existing contradictions can be contested or torn asunder just as easily as resolved. While works of art are explicit and finished forms, Williams explains that art itself is never in the past tense because it belongs to a historically specific moment that is only ever experienced in process.³⁹ Thus, he cautions that the literary critic should be careful not to assume the primacy of art either as an ideological, fixed form or as a purely subjective or idiosyncratic aesthetic. He argues instead that art, language, and literature are inalienable elements of a social material process, and that they are active agents in constituting practical consciousness. The plurality of structures is significant, for as Williams defines them, structures of feeling concern meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs are in practice variable (including historically variable), over a range from formal assent to private dissent.⁴⁰ In this sense, cultural works can possess an anticipatory impulse; they need not belong to an already established, solidified social formation with its congealed ideologies, but can function as a kind of pre-emergence, as meanings that press the limits of consciousness and semantic possibility.⁴¹