The front matter to “Cities of the World Ocean,” the second of three parts of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Plane, recounts the founding of Villa Navidad (“Christmas City”), the first European settlement in the Americas by Christopher Columbus and the Taino people, using wooden planks salvaged from the shipwrecked Santa Maria. The story serves to introduce the importance of humanity’s use of solar energy delivered by the winds and currents of the World Ocean to dramatically expand and merge all of Earth’s urban worlds into Earthopolis, a truly planetary Urban Planet for the first time. This development, a hinge between pre-modern and modern eras, rested on state violence delivered worldwide against city walls by gunpowder cannon; on the theft of massive amounts of land, labor, and wealth involved in the birth of global capitalism; and on the globalization of religious and secular knowledges and consumer culture that had impacts on the natural environment worldwide, including the World Ocean itself.

When most people think of early America, they imagine a geographical region that encompasses the present-day United States. Like previous chapters in this volume, the present chapter encourages a broader conception of the region by, in this case, illuminating the importance of the Caribbean as a physical space and as an idea in early American literature. The Caribbean was a battle ground for empire. Consequently, those texts written in and about the region can tell us a great deal about European exploration and settler colonialism, transatlantic slavery, capitalism and modernity, colonial resistance, and the diasporic, migratory patterns of people, which are themes that pervade early American literature in general. This chapter, then, offers an overview of that literature, highlighting the literary contours of a Caribbean America. The discussion homes in on the anglophone Caribbean and its place within the literary imagination of English-language texts of early America and addresses three questions: How do English-language texts of early America imagine the Caribbean? How do we read those texts within the wider field of early American literature? And why does it matter?

The question of rights for non-Christians emerged out of a theocratic papalist conception of world order during the medieval crusades typified by the canon lawyer Sinibaldo Fieschi (later Pope Innocent IV). It then informed the dominant and ambivalent legal view of Christian-infidel relations in Latin Christendom represented in very different ways by both Innocent IV and his creative commentator, Polish jurist Paulus Vladimiri. This chapter considers the political translation of Innocent’s canon legal opinion on Christian-infidel relations to support the Iberian cause of missionary war in spreading the faith through Crown and Empire across the Atlantic. Theocratic world order, as articulated by Spanish royal jurists and conquistadors like Juan López de Palacios Rubios and Hernán Cortés, chiefly rested its justification for European expansion on the right of punishing infidels for their violation of natural law, the sin of idolatry above all. Infidels had dominium, in principle, but Europeans could claim superior jurisdiction over them when they presented obstacles to the spreading of religion and civilization.

Chapter 6 focuses on Panama and “Pan-Americanism.” US-based ideas of Pan-American unity rivaled a more Latin American ideal founded by Simón Bolívar in the 1820s. Yet, both were premised on the concept of nation-states cooperating to achieve particular ends. Anarchists envisioned a hemispheric-wide anarchist Pan-Americanism that functioned below the nation-state level and which they witnessed daily in Panama as multinational radicals from around the Americas traveled to work on the canal. But here the twin demons of Pan-American state repression (the Panamanian and Canal Zone governments) thwarted a leftist-inspired rent strike and anarchist efforts to launch the first hemisphere-wide anarchist congress.

This chapter examines the role of apocalyptic thought during the Renaissance, which was marked by both continuity with medieval apocalypticism and innovation. It includes consideration of its impact on sober humanist scholarship, fierce Reformation debates regarding the papacy, apocalyptic optimism associated with exploration and missionary expansion in the New World, and esoteric speculation about the figure of Enoch.