Sick Economies. Jonathan Gil Harris
transnational nomenclatures and trajectories that distinguish early modern accounts of syphilis:
so many of our English-mens minds are thus terribly Turkished with Mahometan trumperies … thus spitefully Spanished with superfluous pride; thus fearfully Frenchized with filthy prostitutions; thus fantastically Flanderized with flaring networks to catch English fooles; thus hufflingly Hollandized with ruffian-like loome-workes, and other ladified fooleries; thus greedily Germanized with a most gluttonous manner of gormandizing; thus desperately Danished with a swine-swilling and quaffing; thus skulkingly Scotized with Machiavellian projects; thus inconstantly Englished with every new fantasticali foolerie.55
These diseases are not simply Turkish, Spanish, or French; by transforming European nationalities from nouns into transitive verbs, Deacon reimagines illness as exogenous conditions communicated across national borders. Such a conception of disease would have been arguably unthinkable outside the growing global networks of trade, migration, and information, which brought different cultures into potentially transformative contact. Even though his first examples are religious and moral, the underlying subtext of Deacon’s catalogue of “contagious corruptions” is economic, referencing as it does the considerable influx into early modern England of foreign goods and migrants, such as Dutch cloth workers.
From a purely positivist standpoint, the mutually implicated histories of invasive disease and global commerce are apparent when one considers the twinned fortunes of trade and epidemics in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In a useful overview, Jean-Noël Biraben has identified six pathocenoses, or epochs of disease, in the history of the West since the classical age.56 Nearly all of these are related to changing modes and infrastructures of commerce. Urbanization in antiquity led to epidemics; Roman roadbuilding to the Middle East brought smallpox and then leprosy to the center of the empire; and new trade routes to the Orient brought plague and other diseases to Europe in the thirteenth century. Jared Diamond has conversely shown how “germs,” together with “guns and steel,” were the West’s primary weapons of economic as well as cultural conquest.57 But such approaches, useful as they are, tell us little about why early modern English writers and not their classical or medieval predecessors were able to begin rethinking disease as a determinate thing in transnational motion.
Early modern England was not the first nation to experience epidemic disease or the dislocations of international commerce. But it did experience each as simultaneous novelties and crises that tested the limits of old vocabularies and demanded the production of new ones. The turbulent new modes of transnational commerce and the deadly epidemics of plague and syphilis each provided ready vocabularies for representing the forms and effects of the other. The relationship between discourses of disease and national economy, in other words, was not a simple, unidirectional one of cause and effect. Rather, numerous mutual influences obtained. Economic developments helped writers imagine disease as a foreign body (a theme that I will explore particularly with respect to Ben Jonson’s fantasies of the plague); in turn, the new vocabularies of contagious or exogenous disease provided writers with the imaginative resources for an emergent discourse of national and global economy.
As Deacon’s catalogue of “contagious corruptions” makes clear, new understandings of disease as residing in and transmitted by foreign bodies were insistently articulated in many nonmedical domains of early modern discourse. This is nowhere more evident than in the English mercantilist literature of the early seventeenth century. Inasmuch as this corpus of writing displays unprecedented attention to the vicissitudes of England’s commerce with other nations—including the pathologies of trade imbalances, bullion flows, international currency exchange, centers of wealth production, and increased importation of exotic commodities—it displays a heightened interest in the foreign as the potential agent of both economic disease and health. Hence in the same passage where he laments the passing of an old discourse of “commonwealth” in which the prince would regulate the self-sufficient economy by the “ridding out of all distemperate humors,” Gerard Malynes talks of a new world order in which foreign “contagion” has become the standard unit of both pathology and commerce.58 Indeed, as I have noted, a significant number of the diseases that mercantilist discourse metaphorically invokes—including syphilis, taint, canker, plague, hepatitis, and consumption—are “contagious” ailments contracted from foreign bodies.
To this extent, mercantilist writers’ fantasies of the body politic’s diseases might seem to resonate with anthropologist Mary Douglas’s highly influential characterization of the body as “a model which can stand for any bounded system.”59 The binary spatialities of “inside” and “outside,” “self” and “foreign” that inform Douglas’s analyses of bounded cultural systems have proved equally illuminating in anthropological studies of modern bacteriology and immunology. Emily Martin, for example, has written how “the notion that the immune system maintains a clear boundary between self and nonself is often accompanied by a conception of the nonself world as foreign and hostile.”60 As we will see, a similarly xenophobic opposition of self and foreign nonself suffuses mercantilist fantasies of economic pathology: Malynes identifies the commonwealth’s “canker” with the predatory Continental “banker” who seeks to depreciate the value of English coin; Misselden attributes the nation’s “hepatitis” in part to the “Turkish” pirate who plunders English bullion. Yet the binary structures that underwrite anthropological analyses of body metaphors present an insufficient picture of the complex typologies produced in mercantilist discourses of economic pathology. These discourses map not simply a binary opposition of “national” body and “foreign” diseases; as I shall show throughout this book, the latter pair of categories are crucially interarticulated with a third, the “global,” which mercantilist discourse constitutes as the ecosystem within which the national and foreign must communicate (in both commercial and pathological senses). Diseases like Malynes’s “canker” and Misselden’s “hepatitis” may have fueled xenophobia, but they also helped legitimize visions of cosmopolitan economy; like the metaphor of the Asian flu, early modern mercantilist pathologies presumed “natural” patterns of migration across national borders that simultaneously stigmatized the foreign and naturalized the global.
My analysis of this tripartite mercantilist typology—the national, the foreign, and the global—also involves a rather different understanding of pathology from its previous theorizations in the influential work of Georges Canguilhem and René Girard. Both owe a significant if unspoken debt to Emile Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method and his protostructuralist analysis of social pathology.61 In the work of all three theorists, disease tends to be hypostasized as a generic “disorder” that relationally ratifies “order,” “normality,” or “health.” But as Michel Foucault writes in the preface to The Order of Things, “disease is at one and the same time disorder—the existence of a perilous otherness within the human body, at the very heart of life—and a natural phenomenon with its own constants, resemblances, and types.”62 The first part of Foucault’s remark has become sacred writ in much writing about early modern representations of disease; but the second has been more or less completely ignored. Foucault’s insistence that disease is also a “natural phenomenon with its own constants, resemblances, and types” remains a useful caveat not just to theorists of pathology but also to literary and cultural critics who have displayed a tendency to transform early modern diseases into Disease, and who overlook the “types” and distinctions that are the a priori ground of the very logic of “constants” and “resemblances.” Those differences have often evaporated in accounts of the uniformity of disease in premodern discourses of pathology. One common view is that early moderns did not really differentiate between diseases: even a medical historian as scrupulous as Paul Slack argues that “there was little appreciation that individual diseases were separable entities before 1600.”63 It is hard to square this assessment, though, with the perspective of the early modern plague writer Thomas Dekker, who argued that “maladies of the Body, goe simply in their owne Habit, and liue wheresoeuer they are entertainde, vnder their proper and knowne Names; As the Goute passeth onely by the name of the Goute: So an Appoplex, an Ague, the Pox, Fistula, &c.” 64 As we will see, many other early modern writers insisted on the multiple “types” of disease even as they adduced resemblances between them.