Over the centuries, merrie Tudor England has often been imagined as a place of happy insularity. Thanks in no small part to the efforts of “first Brexiteer” Henry VIII, the 16th century has been seen as an age when English men and women extricated themselves from complicated issues of foreign influence. In this view, men like Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh went thrusting out into the world to claim already inhabited territories in the name of Elizabeth I, but back home the country remained as impermeable as the body of its Virgin Queen.
Two new books give the lie to this image of Tudor and Stuart England, highlighting instead the culture’s porousness, and the influences that, in an age of nascent imperialism, could and did cut both ways. Nandini Das’s This Little World reveals the sprawling lives of the many individuals who crossed England’s borders, in both directions, from Virginia to Tokyo. Lauren Working’s A Golden World assumes a tighter focus on American material belongings that made their way to England, carrying with them the muffled but unmistakable voices of indigenous makers. Together, the books offer a fascinating insight into the mutability of identities and objects, in an age when the world was turning out to be bigger and fuller than previously imagined.
Across 17 compact chapters, A Golden World highlights small groups of belongings and raw materials: canoes, tamed parrots and monkeys, featherwork headdresses, sealskin parkas, beaver fur, and red cochineal pigment. From these, Working weaves not only stories of their acquisition and reuse, but also of their original cultivation and crafting. Incorporating the lives these “travelling objects” led prior to their arrival in England allows her to highlight the contributions of indigenous experts in farming, mining, hunting and crafting to the European Renaissance. Although their names and life histories have been omitted from the archive, their skill shines through – for example in manoeuvrable canoes and ingeniously designed parkas, visible today in portraits of Inuit captives, painted after their arrival in England.
These portraits were commissioned to promote the brutal enterprises of the Cathay Company, whose activities in Canada were part of a search for the elusive North-West Passage to China (then called Cathay). But Working inventively reads these and other records of acquisitive colonial ambition for the glimpses they offer of indigenous knowledge, processes and values. This knowledge persists and even flourishes in plain sight if only we learn how to look, and Working is an authoritative guide. Students of Renaissance art are used to tracing the impact of Italian culture across Europe, but Working demonstrates that, in fact, much of what we imagine to be the typical Renaissance and baroque aesthetic can be linked to influences emerging from the Americas. Even the word “baroque” itself, as Working points out, came first into English via the Portuguese term for a notably large and irregular pearl (barroco) – perhaps via the less lovely Spanish term berruca, from the Latin verruca, a wart – before it came to stand for the overblown stylistic sensibility of an entire age.
Some American imports were so successfully adopted in England that it is now quite startling to read of their origins. The thousands of pearls that litter the portraits of Elizabeth and her courtiers may have grown in Venezuelan oysters, retrieved by trafficked divers brought from West Africa and Brazil. Tall, wide-brimmed capotain or pilgrim’s hats are now most popularly associated with the gunpowder plotter Guy Fawkes and the Mayflower pilgrims. Yet the felt that composed them was typically made from beaver fur, imported to London in vast quantities from the Atlantic coast, sometimes to return there again on the heads of English colonists. Even the lovelock, a single strand of hair hanging down at the left shoulder, sported by everyone from Shakespeare’s patron Henry Wriothesley to Charles I, was thought to have its origins in the hairstyles of Algonquian shamans.
The metamorphoses that distant places threatened to exert on English identity were debated even at the time. Lovelocks drew accusations of lasciviousness, effeminacy and pagan influences. Meanwhile, James I’s treatise A Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604), often held up as a prescient warning about the health dangers of smoking, was motivated as much by a coloniser’s anxiety about the ways indigenous culture might change those sent from his kingdoms to “civilise” it: should we, he asked, “without blushing, abase our selves so farre, as to imitate these beastly Indians…?”
The unfixedness of national identity is a running thread in This Little World, too, an ambitious and wide-ranging narrative of Tudor and Stuart migration. Arguing that the issue of belonging was never fully settled, but always a matter of “ongoing negotiation”, Das examines the opportunities and vulnerabilities that shaped the lives of those who crossed borders. She moves, sometimes vertiginously, from micro-histories of single lives to the broader political picture. She shows that individual stories had far-reaching consequences for conceptions of nationhood. In her view, England’s paradoxical combination of insularity and global ambition gave it “a particularly sharp appetite for defining itself through constant calibration against others”, but also the “capacity to renew itself” and constantly reimagine its own boundaries.
Many of Das’s chapters centre on differences that cut deeper than national or language boundaries. She discusses Jewish immigrants, who negotiated places to worship openly and to bury their dead, and English Catholics, labelled traitors by their own country. Some were driven abroad permanently, like Thomas Stephens, who enrolled as a Jesuit in Rome in 1575, before arriving in Goa as a missionary in 1579. A firm believer in the importance of learning local languages, he published the Kristapurana, an 11,000-verse creation story and life of Christ, in the local high-literary language Marathi, adopting the form of the Hindu Puranas and the Ovi poetic metre of Marathi narrative poems. The poem became so significant to the region’s Indian Catholics that it was later recited “as a mark of resistance against European rule”.
As with the anxieties provoked by American tobacco and indigenous hairstyles, the extent to which Englishness could survive contact with foreign cultures animates several of Das’s epic narratives. She deftly knits together the stories of William Adams, an English navigator turned Japanese samurai, and the infamous pirate Jack Ward, who converted to Islam and served the Ottoman navy from Tunis. Both lives have passed into popular legend: Adams through James Clavell’s 1975 novel Shōgun; Ward in folk song and, distantly, as inspiration for Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. In both cases, as Das points out, the success of their assimilation into their adopted cultures left English correspondents suspicious about their true allegiances.
Other characters in Das’s book will be less familiar to the general reader. A chapter on artistic influences centres not on the German-born Hans Holbein the Younger but on the elusive figure of Levina Teerlinc. The daughter of a famed manuscript illuminator, she moved from Flanders to England in the 1540s with her husband, where she ultimately served every Tudor monarch from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I. Records of her life in London are sparse, but we know she was employed, with her husband, on a salary higher even than Holbein’s. Further records of her talents survive in the New Year Gift Rolls, lists of presents given to the monarch on 1 January, including a “small picture of the trynitie” for Mary I in 1556. Unfortunately, no firmly identified works by Teerlinc survive, one of the many ways that Teerlinc was and is, as Das points out, an “invisible woman”. As a foreigner, a married woman and an artist, she also experienced a kind of freedom: “the kind that came from officially not existing”.
Neither book tells the expected story of colonial exploitation and acquisitiveness – though there is plenty of that too. What startles, beyond the objects and people, and the vastness of the distances they traversed, is the ordinariness of so many encounters. As Das explains, it was not uncommon for people to cross borders. The lives of those who did were characterised not so much by the cataclysmic moment of leaving or arriving, but by the “daily work of persistence”.
In the Tudor and Stuart era, the metaphors of horticulture – transplanting, grafting – reflected English anxieties about interbreeding with “strangers”. But they also illuminate the process by which something foreign can become naturalised. Period debates about identity, and about the inheritance of citizenship – whether through jus soli (the right of the soil) or jus sanguinis (the right of blood) – will seem disconcertingly familiar to contemporary readers. As Das points out, these stories “are not instruction manuals for the present”, but “if belonging is not a natural condition, it cannot be claimed by some and be withheld from others”. Identity is an ongoing negotiation, constructed by choice. As both authors show, the stories we choose to remember and the elements of the narrative we choose to accentuate are part of that construction. English culture has always been porous, but that has always been one of its greatest strengths.
Christina Faraday is the author of The Story of Tudor Art: A History of Tudor England through Its Art and Objects (Apollo)
This Little World
Nandini Das
Bloomsbury, 448pp, £25
A Golden World
Lauren Working
Faber & Faber, 384pp, £22
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[Further reading: The British aristocracy has never been so wretched]
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This article appears in the 10 Jun 2026 issue of the New Statesman, How Britain lost control