"England's Internal Colonies provides a valuable study of the impact of England's colonial ventures in the Mediterranean and the atlantic on what Netzloff defines as 'the internal colonialism' within Britain and Ireland. The balance between the chapters, the firm grounding in the Marxist critique of imperialism, and a challenging theory of 'nationhood' make this book important for both literary scholars and early modern historians. It is to Netzloff's credit that England's Internal Colonies succeeds in balancing careful historical research with literary analysis: the fascinating examination of The Tempest is a case in point." - Nabil Matar, Florida Institute of Technology
"In England's Internal Colonies, Mark Netzloff employs an imaginative and original approach to problems of fundamental historical importance in the early modern period. With an impressive and deft command of historical scholarship, and a similarly broad immersion in a range of primary sources, including archival materials, ballads, plays, maps, and a variety of prose tracts, Netzloff demonstrates the connections between internal and external events, shedding light on the process and nature of overseas expansion and colonization in these formative decades by embedding external events within a shifting national context. England's Internal Colonies represents an extraordinary accomplishment." - Alison Games, Department of History, Georgetown University
Introduction: 'We have Indians at Home': Internal Colonialism in Early Modern England 'The universal market of the world': Capital Formation and The Merchant of Venice A Nation of Pirates: Piracy, Conversion and Nation Space Venting Trinculos: The Tempest and Discourses of Colonial Labour 'Counterfeit Egyptians' and Imagined Borders: Jonson's The Gypsies Metamorphosed and the Union of the Realms Forgetting the Ulster Plantation: John Speed's The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain and the Colonial Archive Conclusion: The Unmaking of the English Working Class
MARK NETZLOFF is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.