‘This Little World’ and ‘A Golden World’ review

Books, like buses, sometimes arrive in pairs, but fortunately we don’t have to make a decision about which to take. Both of these excellent new volumes provide enlightening perspectives on the social, cultural, and political character of 16th- and 17th-century England, and do so by placing the country in a nexus of global contexts. The two books are not so much studies of an emergent English imperialism per se, as of how, from a date earlier than is usually suspected, life in England was changed by a variety of encounters with the world beyond.

The scope of Nandini Das’ book – its playful title notwithstanding – is the wider of the two works, chronologically as well as geographically. The theme is an ambitious one: the making of English identity, and the desirability of discerning lines of its development in the life stories of individuals coming and going across the country’s borders. Das’ subjects are a deliberately disparate group, linked only by their capacity to unsettle conventional assumptions about Tudor and Stuart England. Who knew (not me) that the first biblical epic composed by an English poet was not Milton’s Paradise Lost but the Kristapurana, an 11,000-verse retelling of the life of Christ by the Jesuit missionary Thomas Stephens, written in Marathi and printed in Goa in 1616? There is bittersweet irony in discovering that the early-modern English, because no one else could speak their language, considered themselves natural linguists, able to master any tongue, in the words of the Elizabethan chronicler William Harrison, ‘as if we were homeborn in those countries’.

Some of the narratives running through Das’ chapters concern immigrants, such as the renegade Italian friar Giordano Bruno, the Sephardic Jewish merchant Antonio Fernandez Carvajal, and the Dutch Protestant Jacques de Hem, part of a community of ‘strangers’ comprising 40 per cent of the population of Norwich by the end of the 16th century. Others involve wayfaring Englishmen of a transgressive character: the Kentish fisherman-turned-Islamic corsair Jack Ward, or the ‘English Samurai’ William Adams.

The most poignant stories belong to women. The case of Matoaka, the Powhatan girl called Pocahontas by the English, is well known, but a less familiar instance of cross-cultural marriage involves Mariam Begum, an Armenian Christian raised at the Mughal Court who in 1613 eloped with the English envoy William Hawkins, and after his death on the homeward voyage married, and later abandoned, the ship’s captain. Elizabeth Key, daughter of an enslaved African woman and an English father, eventually triumphed in a protracted legal battle to establish her freedom, but she lived to see the Virginia Assembly shut this door behind her in a ruling of 1662 that children of Black slaves inherited the status of their mother.

There are, in an elaborate and elegant polyphony of voices, a couple of false notes. The Act of Supremacy was passed in 1559 not 1558, and the Carthusians opposing Henry VIII, though executed horribly, were not burned at the stake. But Das’ command of her material is almost invariably secure and her interpretations at times rise to the transcendent. A discussion of ‘The Ark’, a collection of natural wonders assembled by the father and son both named John Tradescant, ends with reflection on some once-exotic plant specimens brought back by John the younger from Virginia, among them the tulip tree and the Jerusalem artichoke. They become a moving metaphor for how ‘over time, what was once strange can become part of the place that received it, not through forgetting, but through persistence, through flowering’.

The Tradescants’ Ark makes an appearance in Lauren Working’s book too, along with a few others points of overlap. Working’s remit, though considerable, is more circumscribed than Das’: the cultural impact of the Americas on England, specifically London, between the 1570s and the 1630s. Where Das follows individuals, Working is concerned with the trajectory of things, and with using the migrations of plants, animals, artefacts, and objects to uncover ‘the tangible imprints that indigenous peoples across the Americas made on Tudor and Stuart society’.

This book, too, is a determined deconstruction of any notion of a self-generated belle époque. An insightful analysis of a Jacobean painting in the Tate, Nathaniel Bacon’s ‘Cookmaid With Still Life’, points not just to a range of transatlantic foodstuffs on display – marrows, squashes, pumpkins, runner beans – but to how the vibrant red of Bacon’s work was cochineal, a pigment produced from insects harvested and crushed by indigenous labourers in Central America. Other chapters follow the movement of ethnographic watercolours, Aztec codices, and the silver pouring out of the mines at Potosí. There is fascinating discussion of beaver-fur hats, so ubiquitous in Jacobean portraits, and of the potency of feathers, exotic imports of which turbocharged an established industry of complex feather-working. Colombian emeralds were shipped to Europe ‘on an industrial scale’ and appeared to Elizabethans ‘a kind of portable Eden, seeming to carry the fertility and brightness of nature itself’. Nor, Working argues, can the aesthetics of the era be understood without reference to an inward flood of Atlantic pearls, all-purpose adornments for pendants, purses, clothes, book covers, devotional objects, and garden grottoes.

We are urged to remember how these sea gems began their journeys in the canoes of indigenous divers off the coasts of Venezuela and Panama. The dissociation, then and now, of interconnected lives is a recurrent theme of the book. When connections were recognised, they were not generally celebrated. The fashion among young Stuart men for ‘lovelocks’ of hair, worn over the left shoulder, was condemned by the Puritan moralist William Prynne as something copied from ‘the heathenish and idolatrous Virginians’. James I’s condemnation of tobacco involved the recognition on his part of a challenge to English ideals of masculine behaviour. Shall we, he asked, ‘abase ourselves so far as to imitate these beastly Indians’?

Did the Americas really ‘transform’ Renaissance England around the turn of the 17th century? With the exception of tobacco, most of Working’s evidence relates to the impact of luxury commodities on elites. For ordinary people, the truly transformative effects arguably came later in the 18th century’s mass consumption of sugar and the widespread adoption of the potato. Yet the case that we have significantly underestimated the early impact of the New World is persuasively made.

In different ways, these are both political books. Das protests that her work is ‘not an instruction manual for the present’, yet offers a subtle and sensible subtextual commentary on attitudes towards immigration that recognises the threat posed by the stranger to the culturally constructed integrity of the nation, but that also suggests hopeful possibilities for new arrivals ‘being imagined into that story’. Working’s narrative more overtly laments what she regards as a wilful occlusion of non-European actors – Arawak, Algonquian, African, or Inuit – from accustomed portrayals of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

The accents fall somewhat differently – an emphasis on blending and hybridity in Das’ book, on appropriation and exclusion in Working’s – yet each of these texts makes a compelling case for recognising how, in Das’ phrase, ‘the boundaries of the nation have always been porous’. What the books also have in common is the outstanding quality of the writing. It is salutary to be reminded that rigorous scholarly history can also be stylish and lyrical, and to be encouraged to recognise how lucidity of prose is not an optional adornment to historical argumentation but a key element in its persuasiveness.

• This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England
  Nandini Das
  Bloomsbury, 448pp, £25 
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England
  Lauren Working
  Faber, 384pp, £22
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick.