This book brings together significant earlier scholarships on how England's overseas trade contributed to both economic growth and cultural transformation in the early modern period. It advances on the earlier work by incorporating more recent methodologies such as global systems theory and consideration of 'things in motion'; new topics such as the development of an insurance industry, the market for Newfoundland salt-cod, and the significance of censorship in trade discourse; and relatively obscure literary texts such as Baptist Goodall's "The Tryall of Travell" and Walter Mountfort's "The Launching of the Mary".It contributes to two growing bodies of literary criticism: the new economic criticism and object criticism. It especially advances the latter body of criticism by considering the systems and structures that make the movement of things meaningful, such as an emergent insurance industry, a system of food circulation among sailors, and an emerging racialized system of labor expropriation.This collection explores the relations between literature and the economy in the context of the unprecedented expansion of England's long distance trade in the early modern period.