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This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England
'A perspective-altering take on a world we usually think of in far more domestic terms. A ground-breaking masterwork' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
'Triumphant . . . Cinematic . . . No one who reads this book will ever see Tudor and Stuart history in the same light again' JOHN GUY, LITERARY REVIEW
'Many books claim to be a new way of looking at history, but this book truly is' FINANCIAL TIMES
The prize-winning author uncovers the revelatory global story of Tudor and Stuart England - told through the merchants, migrants, sailors, travellers and spies who helped forge a nation.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forged a powerful image of England – Shakespeare's 'scepter'd isle', proud and apart, defined by royal spectacle and myth. But beneath this familiar narrative of ruffs and gowns, kings and queens, lies a more complex and connected reality.
England at this time was far from insular. Travelling in and out of the country were Venetian glassmakers with English wives, African innkeepers and Native American envoys. There were people like the Flemish artist Levina Teerlinc, probably the only painter to be employed by four English monarchs. There was William Adams, a Kentish navigator who became Japan's first English samurai. And there was Elizabeth Key, daughter of an enslaved mother in the colony in Virginia, who battled in the courts for herself and her son.
Drawing on extensive archival research, attentive to the textures of daily life, yet alive to the sweep of history, This Little World offers a startlingly new, globally resonant vision of England's past and what it meant to be English. It is a story of a nation in the making – on the cusp of empire – told through the traces of those often written out of it. In reframing England's story within a wider world, it challenges us to rethink some of our most fundamental about nationhood, about identity, and above all, about belonging.
'Triumphant . . . Cinematic . . . No one who reads this book will ever see Tudor and Stuart history in the same light again' JOHN GUY, LITERARY REVIEW
'Many books claim to be a new way of looking at history, but this book truly is' FINANCIAL TIMES
The prize-winning author uncovers the revelatory global story of Tudor and Stuart England - told through the merchants, migrants, sailors, travellers and spies who helped forge a nation.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forged a powerful image of England – Shakespeare's 'scepter'd isle', proud and apart, defined by royal spectacle and myth. But beneath this familiar narrative of ruffs and gowns, kings and queens, lies a more complex and connected reality.
England at this time was far from insular. Travelling in and out of the country were Venetian glassmakers with English wives, African innkeepers and Native American envoys. There were people like the Flemish artist Levina Teerlinc, probably the only painter to be employed by four English monarchs. There was William Adams, a Kentish navigator who became Japan's first English samurai. And there was Elizabeth Key, daughter of an enslaved mother in the colony in Virginia, who battled in the courts for herself and her son.
Drawing on extensive archival research, attentive to the textures of daily life, yet alive to the sweep of history, This Little World offers a startlingly new, globally resonant vision of England's past and what it meant to be English. It is a story of a nation in the making – on the cusp of empire – told through the traces of those often written out of it. In reframing England's story within a wider world, it challenges us to rethink some of our most fundamental about nationhood, about identity, and above all, about belonging.
436 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 28, 2026
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June 2, 2026Books, 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’.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick.
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’.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick.
September 2, 2026
An absolutely extraordinary history.
At a moment when right-wing nationalists are questioning Britain's post imperial identity evermore, Nandini Das' book is a complete eye-opener in the formation of English identity.
It covers the century from 1550-1650 when Britain was transformed into an emergent imperial power. By the end of the book, the British Empire proper (and indeed even the British union) has yet to emerge. Plassey and the conquest of India is still a century away.
Yet evermore Englishmen and women are moving to the Americas, and a sense of Englishness is gradually forming. The book takes place at a time when none of the certainties of british history were yet known. Who counts as English? Did English Catholics? What about French Hugenot protestants? These questions only increase over time as Britain becomes ever more entangled in a global world.
What should England make of the pre-imeprial englishmen, for example, who had found employment elsewhere? Was the English samurai Adams still really English? What about the Ottoman treasurer of Algiers, Hassan Aga, who was actually a man from Bristol who ahd been castrated, enslaved, and converted to Islam before rising up the ranks of imperial Algeria?
The Tudor and Stuart world, it seems, was much
more global than we realise!
At a moment when right-wing nationalists are questioning Britain's post imperial identity evermore, Nandini Das' book is a complete eye-opener in the formation of English identity.
It covers the century from 1550-1650 when Britain was transformed into an emergent imperial power. By the end of the book, the British Empire proper (and indeed even the British union) has yet to emerge. Plassey and the conquest of India is still a century away.
Yet evermore Englishmen and women are moving to the Americas, and a sense of Englishness is gradually forming. The book takes place at a time when none of the certainties of british history were yet known. Who counts as English? Did English Catholics? What about French Hugenot protestants? These questions only increase over time as Britain becomes ever more entangled in a global world.
What should England make of the pre-imeprial englishmen, for example, who had found employment elsewhere? Was the English samurai Adams still really English? What about the Ottoman treasurer of Algiers, Hassan Aga, who was actually a man from Bristol who ahd been castrated, enslaved, and converted to Islam before rising up the ranks of imperial Algeria?
The Tudor and Stuart world, it seems, was much
more global than we realise!
August 19, 2026
The book title which another reviewer describes as "playful" is more than a little misleading and anyone who comes along expecting to find a Peter Ackroyd style "history" is very likely to be disappointed. Instead of a history of the Tudor and Stewart period, the book comprises a series of essays covering lesser known individuals who lived during the period. Some of these essays are more interesting than others but overall I found the book hard work. As examples of content, one chapter focuses on a slave seeking freedom; another on a court portrait artist; there is a chapter on a jewish merchant; and another on a rare (for the time) female author. I don't think this type of volume constitutes a "history" but presumably Bloomsbury Publishing believe that a title of "a collection of essays" would be far less commercial. I bought this book on the basis of having read the author's excellent book on the early English trading with India and on the positive side, (i) I did finish it; (ii) there has obviously been a lot of detailed research gone into the volume; (iii) I did learn things that I didn't know before. On that basis, it seemed to me that it would be unreasonable to give a 2 star rating.
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