Future History

<em>Future History</em> traces the ways that English and American writers oriented themselves along an East-West axis to fantasize their place in the world. The book builds on new transoceanic scholarship and recent calls to approach early American studies from a global perspective. Such scholarship has largely focused on the early national period; Bross's work begins earlier and considers the intertwined identities of America other English colonial sites and metropolitan England during a period before nation-state identities were hardened into the forms we know them today when an English empire was nascent not realized and when a global perspective such as we might recognize it was just coming into focus for early modern Europeans. The author examines works that imagine England on a global stage in the Americas and East Indies just as--and in some cases even before--England occupied such spaces in force. <em>Future History</em> considers works written from the 1620s to the 1670s but the center of gravity of <em>Future History</em> is writing at the mid-century that is writings coincident with the Interregnum a time when England plotted and launched ambitious often violent schemes to conquer colonize or otherwise appropriate other lands driven by both mercantile and religious desires.<br>