“Oranges and lemons say the Bells of St. Clement’s”: Domesticating Eastern Commodities in London Comedies

Abstract

Recent studies of early modern trade with the East have highlighted English anxiety about the dangers posed by contact with foreigners, especially non-Christians, and by the consumption of “heathen” goods. In Sick Economies, Jonathan Gil Harris focuses on mercantilist treatises that use metaphors of disease and contagion to describe “foreign” commodities, even as they promote a “global” market as natural and necessary to England’s economic health.1 Kristen G. Brookes analyzes anti-tobacco tracts in her essay “Inhaling the Alien,” and Gitanjali Shahani traces the reception of Indian cottons, such as cambrics and calico, in “‘A Foreigner by Birth’: The Life of Indian Cloth in the Early Modern English Marketplace.”2 Indian fabrics were so popular in the early 1600s that at the end of the century the weavers blamed them for the decline of the domestic wool industry. Partly as a result of the “calico wars,” the English Parliament passed a law in 1721 “prohibiting the domestic consumption of every kind of pure cotton textile.”3 Coffee and tea were greeted with similar ambivalence, embraced by consumers but criticized by the often self-appointed arbiters of morals and the national interest.4 However, opposition voiced by interested groups such as the weavers did not dampen consumers’ desire for these products, and the laws prohibiting their use did not necessarily reduce their consumption.5