Book Review: <i>Imperial Ventures: Maritime Drama and the Invention of Risk</i> by Benjamin VanWagoner VanWagonerBenjamin, Imperial Ventures: Maritime Drama and the Invention of Risk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025. xii + 32

In this erudite study, Ben VanWagoner defines his task as 'literary archaeology' (p. 2) as he charts the invention and emergence of risk as an economic concept in late sixteenthand seventeenth-century drama.Imperial Ventures aims to provide fresh insight into 'how English culture understood its own imperial project' (p.4) and the book's focus on the London stage is an apposite one.At the time, the theatre was itself an intrinsically risky business in many sensessubject to a myriad of unpredictable economic, physical, religious and moral perils that might affect both producers and consumers of drama.The Globe and The Fortune playhouses burnt to the ground in catastrophic fires, respectively in 1613 and 1621, for instance.Playgoers were exposed not only to dangerous ideas in the stories dramatised on stage, but also to the risks of pickpockets, disease, prostitution and rowdy crowds by attending theatrical performances at all, according to the warnings of anti-theatrical polemicists.These affinities and shared challenges help us to understand the reasons why drama of the period was obsessed with plots that featured oceanic hazards in a wide variety of forms from the pirates in Hamlet (c.1599-1601) to the sex trafficking in Pericles (1609), from the captivity and subjection of The Island Princess (c.1619-21) to the shipwreck and proto-colonial debates of The Sea Voyage (1622).The building of playhouses and their rebuilding after fireoften used the same investment principle as early modern maritime ventures: shares in a joint stock company.This may, VanWagoner suggests, also have deepened theatre's interest in showing the ways the perils of the sea impacted on people in the lives of the characters it depicted on stage, as well as on the objects and things that were put at risk.Understanding and managing uncertainty were priorities in both oceanic and theatrical spheres during a period of European history that was characterised by rapid economic, as well as imperial and colonial, expansionism.Using Shakespearean drama as a touchstone, but also ranging widely beyond it in the less well-known plays of his contemporaries, including those by Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, Robert Daborne, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, amongst others, Imperial Ventures maps the 'conceptual development of risk, from natural hazards (shipwreck) through social ones (pirates and news), and, finally, to political contingency (enslavement and colonial subjection)' (p.28).Through sophisticated