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Sponsor Narrator 2
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Charlotte Vosper
When we think of the Tudor period, for many of us, images of the glittering court come to mind. Henry VIII standing square or Elizabeth I draped in her pearls. But there's another side to this history. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Nandini Das traces the lives of ordinary early modern people to reveal a world of constant movement and migration. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Nandini explains that beyond the monarchs and courtiers, Tudor and Stuart, England was actually being shaped by the ordinary people who crossed its borders.
You open the book with the letters of Claes van Verviken, an ordinary Flemish hatmaker, and of Hassan Aga, treasurer to an Ottoman governor. Why are these letters significant? How does this set the tone for your book? What is it about?
Nandini Das
Thank you, Charlotte.
Interviewer
You know, we think we know about Tudor England. Henry's wives and codpies, Elizabeth's jewels, Shakespeare's sceptred isle.
Nandini Das
And there was a moment of doubt when I started my book instead, with
Interviewer
not all that glamour and sensationalism, but with a hat maker complaining about lard.
Nandini Das
This is Claes, who's a Flemish hat
Interviewer
maker, writing home to his wife from Norwich in 1567 and urging her to come quickly to England.
Nandini Das
Except that he says she must remember
Interviewer
to bring two wooden butter dishes, because here, he says, they cook with lard, with pig's fat.
Nandini Das
And it's such a small detail. It's a matter of taste and habit and homesickness. Anyone who has packed about, you know, tin of Pringles when they're going on their year away or something like that will immediately understand the pull of it. It's funny and intimate and domestic, but
Interviewer
it tells us something profound. I think Klais is a fitting opener
Nandini Das
for me, precisely because he's not important. He isn't a diplomat, he isn't a
Interviewer
courtier or a king.
Nandini Das
And then, of course, the book pivots, as you said, to Hassan Agha, this man who was once, we are told,
Interviewer
Sampson Rowley of Bristol, a merchant's son
Nandini Das
who reappears in the archives as the treasurer to an Ottoman governor in Algiers, an Englishman in a turban. And all of a sudden, the Tudor
Interviewer
world isn't a sceptered isle anymore. It's a web stretching right the way
Nandini Das
from Norwich to North Africa. And that's what really attracted me.
Interviewer
There are so many of them.
Nandini Das
Venetian glass makers, Dutch seamstresses, English samurais, African servants, Jewish merchants. Even the words and objects that we think of as being quite conventionally English. Tulips in the garden, sugar in your tea, tobacco in pipes. All of those came to England through global networks. So that's probably why I wanted to start with those letters. Those letters shatter that island myth in a way. Tudor England isn't and never was an
Interviewer
insular prelude to empire.
Nandini Das
It wasn't even an island nation, if
Interviewer
you think of it. It had always shared space with Wales
Nandini Das
and with Scotland, and it was already a node in a really global transcultural web. And that's what the book argues, that
Interviewer
the nation didn't precede mobility in fact, it took shape through that mobility of people both in and out of the country.
Nandini Das
So.
Charlotte Vosper
So this is a history of migration, belonging and identity. So let's start with a setting which might feel a little bit more familiar to our listeners, the Tudor court. If we were to step back in time into the court of Henry viii, what evidence would we see of multiculturalism?
Nandini Das
That is exactly where so many of us start, our familiarity with this part
Interviewer
of history, because the Tudors in school, teaching of history is such a central foundational.
Nandini Das
And the things that immediately come to
Interviewer
mind are really familiar images.
Nandini Das
Henry VIII squaring himself up like a
Interviewer
boxer in a codpiece. Elizabeth standing like a goddess over a map of the nation in all her pearls and jewels and finery, perhaps.
Nandini Das
And those all give us a sense
Interviewer
of Tudor England as something almost monumental, self contained, complete.
Nandini Das
But those images are really propaganda, and propaganda requires labor.
Interviewer
And that labor came significantly from artists. Some English, of course, we know. But a huge percentage of the work that went into that labor came from immigrants, artists, and artisans.
Nandini Das
It meant importing skill. And this was really important for Henry viii. We have to remember that the Tudors were still a very young dynasty, and both Henry VIII and his father, Henry
Interviewer
vii, the founder of the dynasty, were punching above their weight.
Nandini Das
They were competing against the vast imperial
Interviewer
missionary of people like Charles V in Europe.
Nandini Das
But both of those first Tudor kings
Interviewer
realized and knew this really well that what mattered was perception.
Nandini Das
Except that they didn't call it perception.
Interviewer
They called it magnificence. And that magnificence was created through people like Flemish painters and Italian financiers, that kind of people. You know, we know about Hans Holbein, but Holbein is just one among many.
Charlotte Vosper
Just to probe a little bit further, what view of Englishness and the English monarchy did the Tudor court try to project during Henry VIII's reign?
Nandini Das
The view that the Tudors would like
Interviewer
to project primarily came down to two things, power and stability. That they were powerful and they were here to stay. And these were crucial for them.
Nandini Das
And as I said, you know, there were multiple artisans who were working on gold and jewelry and clothing for Henry VIII in this period. But the key thing that I focus
Interviewer
on are the painters, the images that last.
Nandini Das
And Lavinia Tirlink, who forms the focus of my opening kind of chapter in
Interviewer
story that I tell in book, is very much one of them.
Nandini Das
She appears in the records of the tudor monarchy around 1546, almost incidentally. You know, it's a really brief note of appointment. Mistress Lavena Turling Paintrix. We don't know for certain which paintings she produced. Her paintings are scattered throughout the parliamentary records and the court rolls and courtly
Interviewer
documents of the period.
Nandini Das
But that invisibility almost is precisely why
Interviewer
I was so fascinated by her, because
Nandini Das
she stands as a symbol of all those figures whose presence you can just about discern through the corner of your eye, almost as you look at those
Interviewer
portraits of Henry or Elizabeth or Mary Tudor in this period.
Nandini Das
Of course, I've mentioned Holbein already. He is absolutely a really illustrative figure
Interviewer
in this respect about the power that the artist's brush could wield.
Nandini Das
We know that not only through his portraits of Henry, but of course, through his role in things like producing portraits of the women that Henry may or
Interviewer
may not want to marry, for instance.
Charlotte Vosper
Absolutely. And I think there's some irony in the idea that actually you've got immigrants being the people who are painting and projecting this image of consolidated Englishness and a strong Tudor monarchy. How did contemporaries view these people who were immigrants, working in amongst them, alongside them, in their daily lives? In the book, you mention the categories of stranger and alien. I just wonder if you could explain about that a little bit.
Interviewer
Absolutely.
Nandini Das
So, firstly, we should make it quite clear that stranger and alien at this
Interviewer
point were not vague insults or science fiction references in any way. They were technical categories. So an alien or stranger was someone
Nandini Das
from a land beyond the control of
Interviewer
the English king, who had arrived in England and therefore would pay higher duties, higher taxes, would have certain restrictions on their freedom.
Nandini Das
Quite often there was a distinction made
Interviewer
between a stranger who was from another country and a foreigner who might be English, but from just another taxpaying region. So in those senses, you could argue that Shakespeare, a man who had been born and brought up and had a house in Stratford, was a foreigner in London, because he wasn't born and brought up and paid his taxes in London itself.
Nandini Das
A denizen would be another category. For instance, a denizen is someone kind of comparable to a permanent resident today, someone who had purchased limited rights, but you could also, by paying significantly more,
Interviewer
get yourself an act of Parliament which naturalized you as a citizen, and then, by effect, by all rights, you would
Nandini Das
be comparable to anyone who had been
Interviewer
born and brought up in England.
Nandini Das
So, as you can see, there are
Interviewer
a whole load of gradations there, in a way.
Nandini Das
And you see that circulating throughout this period in popular discourse, in entertainment, in
Interviewer
all sorts of ways.
Nandini Das
So, for instance, in 1517, a London preacher famously preached a sermon that incited
Interviewer
one of the biggest riots against immigrants in London, the evil Mayday riots.
Nandini Das
And he talked about aliens and strangers
Interviewer
who steal the bread from the mouths of our children.
Nandini Das
On the other hand, in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, you have a man who faces execution precisely because he's a stranger, except that he's ultimately revealed not only
Interviewer
to be a brother, but the twin of one of the citizens of the city that he had survived in. And that doubleness runs throughout this period. This is what I find so very fascinating.
Nandini Das
In early modern England, a stranger could
Interviewer
be a tax liability, someone who is siphoning off state resources, the scapegoat for a riot.
Nandini Das
But it could just as easily be
Interviewer
the neighbor next door, the man or woman you married and loved, the teacher
Nandini Das
who taught you your letters or your
Interviewer
sums, the friend who brought you ale
Nandini Das
when you were unwell and knew your children's names and stood in as a witness at their baptism. So the stranger could be a scapegoat.
Interviewer
They could be a neighbor, stranger, could be a kin.
Nandini Das
The stranger, in fact, could be you stepping off a ship in Venice or
Interviewer
in Algiers, or in Goa in India. The category never settled. And that's what's fascinating about it. It keeps continuously shifting throughout this period. And as it shifts, it rewrites what it means to be a nation.
Charlotte Vosper
So we've essentially got this population living in England, many of which are strangers and aliens, as you've explained, some of them involved in creating this image of Englishness and projecting a view of a stable Tudor monarchy. How did that notion of state sanctioned Englishness change when the Reformation came along? And suddenly we've got the division of religion coming into play.
Interviewer
The Reformation absolutely changes the grammar of Englishness.
Nandini Das
Pre Reformation, belonging was largely, you could say, loyalty to the monarch and to a given dynasty.
Interviewer
It was your birthright. Belonging was measured by where you were born. Perhaps you could hold private views and
Nandini Das
still serve the Crown. We have seen that happening for a
Interviewer
significantly long period, even within Henry VIII's reign.
Nandini Das
But the break with Rome absolutely unsettles
Interviewer
that framework, because suddenly allegiance is not
Nandini Das
simply to a king, but to a
Interviewer
religious sentiment, to a religious faith. And that faith becomes entangled with nationality. Questions of loyalty.
Nandini Das
To be English increasingly means to be Protestant. Then it means to be Catholic, then it means to be Protestant again. So there's a lot of oscillation going
Interviewer
on, and that makes the boundary between an insider and an outsider increasingly more fraught. What happens if you're an English Catholic under Protestant rule?
Nandini Das
Are you as English as your Protestant neighbors? Some of the Protestant neighbors would argue that you weren't English at all and your citizenship should be stripped from you. So for instance, one of the figures I follow in the book is a man called Thomas Stevens, who I'm absolutely
Interviewer
fascinated by and have been fascinated by for a long, long time.
Nandini Das
Stevens is a young Catholic and he escapes from England and ends up in
Interviewer
Goa in western India.
Nandini Das
And there, far from England, he's the
Interviewer
first Englishman to write a biblical epic, 50 years before John Milton's Paradise Lost.
Nandini Das
But he writes it in Konkani and
Interviewer
Marathi, the languages of western India.
Nandini Das
So in his identity, those things, those strands of what Englishness mean, become significantly, depending on your perspective, either messier or
Interviewer
richer in some ways. And that's entirely the doing of that post Reformation aftermath.
Charlotte Vosper
So essentially the Reformation brings in another avenue for negotiating what counts as Englishness.
Interviewer
Absolutely.
Nandini Das
And this is something that I argue throughout the book, actually, over that 150
Interviewer
year span that this book covers.
Nandini Das
What I traced is essentially a shift of allegiance conceived primarily as a personal
Interviewer
bond between either the soil, the land and a subject, or a monarch and a subject to much more complicated ideas of civic status, participation and rights.
Nandini Das
And religion is one of those things
Interviewer
that complicate that issue.
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Charlotte Vosper
Moving away from the realm of theological divisions between Catholicism and Protestantism, how did ordinary people negotiate the boundaries of what it meant to be English? I know we touched on this a little bit with your discussion of strangers and aliens, but could immigrants expect assimilation into Elizabethan England?
Nandini Das
Yes, I think once you move away from kings and bishops, belonging looks much less doctrinal and much more practical. As anyone who reads the book will
Interviewer
realize, I've spent far too long poring
Nandini Das
over letters written and exchanged among displaced
Interviewer
families, both English and non English, and
Nandini Das
they cover things that we can identify with. They worry about work. They miss familiar food. They think about new fashions that they need to absorb. They worry about rumors of the death
Interviewer
and marriages and pregnancies of loved ones who are far from them.
Nandini Das
They join guilds and baptize their children. Assimilation isn't automatic, but it's hugely possible. It was worked through labor, through marriage
Interviewer
and language and parish life.
Nandini Das
So for instance, one of the people I follow is a merchant called Jacques
Interviewer
the Hem, who lands up in Norwich.
Nandini Das
And Norwich, of course, throughout this period
Interviewer
takes in huge waves of migrants from Protestant migrants from the Low Countries, so Dutch and Flemish communities. And they are not the only ones. There are multiple cities across England who
Nandini Das
essentially put together the list of preferred
Interviewer
immigrants to supply skills and jobs for which their own populations cannot supply the need.
Nandini Das
So if you walk into St. Michael at plea in Norwich today, you'd be standing in the parish where Jacques de
Interviewer
Hem lived, and he was very much a very noticeable member of the community during the 1590s, when there was a harvest crisis. He sources grain for Norwich from Amsterdam during the fear of the Spanish Armada,
Nandini Das
when all the cities are having a
Interviewer
muster of able bodied men to protect the city's resour.
Nandini Das
He puts his name in that muster,
Interviewer
along with his other immigrant Dutch contemporaries.
Nandini Das
He buys the freedom of the city
Interviewer
for himself and for his family.
Nandini Das
He enters the names of his children
Interviewer
in the city's registers. So that's the classic story of the good immigrant. In some ways he's industrial and useful and loyal. But there is another side of the story, of course.
Nandini Das
Rodrigo Lopez, who is Portuguese born, a
Interviewer
Jewish Christian convert, has a meteoric rise. He is Elizabethan, England's celebrity doctor. He sees everyone who is worth knowing, including the Queen. And then the tide turns.
Nandini Das
One day he's writing a grumpy letter
Interviewer
to his son's headmaster complaining about his son's handwriting. The next day he's been arrested for
Nandini Das
treason, has this very high profile case tried against him and is executed. And in a blink, the Lopez family's
Interviewer
fortunes have been overturned.
Nandini Das
Usefulness offers him a protection until it doesn't. But people like them aren't marginal curiosities. Even the English language evolves in this period.
Interviewer
We talk about Shakespeare creating new words, but so much of that language is
Nandini Das
also the work of one of Shakespeare's
Interviewer
contemporaries, a man called John or Giovanni Florio. He's a second generation Italian immigrant and he really knows firsthand how it felt to be on the receiving end of that accommodation, or assimilation, whatever you might want to call it.
Nandini Das
There's a wonderful moment where he says in one of his books that I know they have a knife to my throat.
Interviewer
They believe that an Italian Englishman is a devil incarnate.
Nandini Das
But at the same time, he insists that he might be Italian in tongue, but he's also English at heart. Italus aure Anglo spectore, he says, and
Interviewer
it's a huge thing for him, and I find that absolutely fascinating.
Nandini Das
Florio puts this across so wonderfully that
Interviewer
within him there's space both for his Italian heritage and his English allegiance.
Nandini Das
Being a member of two nations, two
Interviewer
cultures, doesn't divide him, it makes him richer. And that's also a story that I
Charlotte Vosper
want to tell that really complicates the idea of Englishness which people typically have for this period. I think moving on chronologically after Elizabeth I's death, James I's reign brought with it questions of allegiance for English and Scottish people. Did national identities clash as Scotland was unified with England under one monarch?
Nandini Das
Well, when James I comes to the English throne in 1603 as a Scot,
Interviewer
that alone kind of completely unsettles that grammar of belonging.
Nandini Das
And we can actually trace that through
Interviewer
the legal records of this period.
Nandini Das
Suddenly, the question isn't only who is English, but about birthright. Does where you're born, who you're born to matter?
Interviewer
And how much becomes a really key thing in James's reign. What made you English?
Nandini Das
Is it the fact that your parents were English? What about your grandparents, then? Or is it the fact that you
Interviewer
were born in England?
Nandini Das
And this happens with a lot of
Interviewer
James's Scottish subjects, for instance, who come over with him and then have children in England. But then again, on the flip side, what happens when an Englishman has a child abroad? Where did that child's allegiance lie?
Nandini Das
Did it matter if the child's mother
Interviewer
wasn't English, for instance?
Nandini Das
So these were debates around the right
Interviewer
of soil and the right of blood, two ways in which you could measure or map belonging.
Nandini Das
And you could see that English identity
Interviewer
itself was stretching far beyond the island.
Nandini Das
So, for instance, I talk about William
Interviewer
Adams, who's the real life inspiration behind the blunt English hero of James Clavell's Shogun.
Nandini Das
Adams is an English sailor who sails
Interviewer
in a Dutch ship, arrives in Japan,
Nandini Das
and was living in Japan advising the emperor, married to a Japanese woman, deeply embedded in a foreign political system. And yet, when he writes, and here again, we come to a letter, when he first finds out that the English
Interviewer
believe he's dead, and he finds a means of sending a letter back to the East India Company back home in London, that letter home begins with him saying, I am a Kentish man.
Nandini Das
And that's so hugely resonant that this
Interviewer
man, who now has a new name, a new language, a new family thousands of miles away, still measures himself through
Nandini Das
his roots in Kent.
Charlotte Vosper
It's an incredible example. And I'd like to just ask you a little bit more about that. How people's sense of allegiance and belonging and Englishness changed as people were able to travel and trade with other countries during the 17th century, like William Adams.
Nandini Das
Well, people like William Adams and his
Interviewer
children, in fact, the children he had in Japan, complicate that issue of birthright. They complicate that issue of a national identity.
Nandini Das
And he, of course, is just one
Interviewer
among hundreds who are traveling abroad with the various trading companies in these days.
Nandini Das
And that's something that we perhaps don't really quite often acknowledge.
Interviewer
The scale of the sheer kind of presence of trade within international geopolitics in this period and the way it facilitated connection and exchange and therefore complicated identity.
Nandini Das
And one of the spaces where that
Interviewer
identity is really complicated is on the high seas.
Nandini Das
It is all very well to talk about your right of soil, but what
Interviewer
happens when there is no soil under your feet?
Nandini Das
Just the creaking, groaning planks of a ship. And it's a ship that is manned,
Interviewer
and they would be manned because it was a predominantly male profession in this period by a hugely multilingual, multicultural community. Shipboard life was immensely risky.
Nandini Das
So you wouldn't have a single ship
Interviewer
manned or crewed by an English, predominantly English crew. It would be multicultural. So that complicates that idea of where
Nandini Das
does Englishness slip away? Does the fact that William Adams wears
Interviewer
a kimono and eats Japanese food and seems to enjoy Japanese music mean he's not English anymore?
Nandini Das
This is something that the East India
Interviewer
Company captain who arrives in Japan in 1611, worries about. How far can he trust this man who looks English but doesn't quite seem English to him?
Charlotte Vosper
In a similar vein to travel and trading, how did people adapt notions of nationhood as the English colonies became more established and the imperial venture solidified throughout the 17th century?
Interviewer
You're quite right to bring that up,
Nandini Das
I think, because particularly as the 17th
Interviewer
century progresses, that is another dimension that becomes increasingly urgent and also increasingly fraught,
Nandini Das
because Englishness, ironically becomes something that is
Interviewer
enforced far more stringently in those contested territories, first in Ireland and then across the Atlantic. Ireland, of course, is England's rehearsal space in terms of that colonial identity.
Nandini Das
And it's particularly interesting how issues of
Interviewer
language and religion and belonging kind of come together in those colonies in Ireland in those negotiations.
Nandini Das
So, for instance, Elizabeth Carey is, by
Interviewer
all rights, if you look at her early life, a typical aristocratic English girl. Yes, she is significantly kind of bookish, and we know that from contemporary records. But she's married off at 15. She's an heiress who marries a more aristocratic but cash strapped courtier.
Nandini Das
And she soon has children and is
Interviewer
shipped off to Ireland following her husband, who becomes the Lord Deputy of Ireland. So he is very much part of, and in fact the leader of the colonizing forces in Ireland.
Nandini Das
All her actions in Ireland come from a very good place, but go terribly
Interviewer
haywire in various ways.
Nandini Das
She talks about the necessity of English
Interviewer
control and order, while at the same time herself rebelling against that English control and order, because it is in Ireland,
Nandini Das
we suspect, where she becomes increasingly familiar with Catholicism.
Interviewer
And then she returns back to England and very publicly, sensationally converts to Catholicism.
Nandini Das
She's disowned by her own family, by
Interviewer
her mother, she's disowned and divorced by her husband, her children are taken away from her. And all through this she sticks to
Nandini Das
her faith, so she's hugely important for
Interviewer
understanding the implicit presence of the English in Ireland. She's so heavily caught up in both
Nandini Das
that colonization, but also, ironically, in the flexibility and the freedom that she herself
Interviewer
appropriates for herself as a Catholic in Protestant England.
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah, I think Elizabeth Carey is a brilliant example of contemporary negotiating the ideas of colonisation, of what it means to go and live in Ireland.
Interviewer
She's also a typically complicated case because she has deep sympathy for the Irish,
Nandini Das
but also has this absolute sense of
Interviewer
her English superiority that she knows better. So she is an absolutely wonderful example of that doubleness. This is not a binary of being either pro or anti colonial, It's a
Nandini Das
really messy, complicated mixture of the two.
Interviewer
By the time we move to Virginia in North America, of course, the question becomes even more brutal, what is English blood worth ultimately?
Nandini Das
So, for instance, I trace the story of one particular woman, Elizabeth Key, who's the daughter of an Englishman, a slave
Interviewer
owner and an enslaved African mother.
Nandini Das
And she brings a case to the
Interviewer
Virginia High court claiming her freedom because the court, by law, has to recognize paternal Englishness. In other words, a that the father
Nandini Das
is the more important parent where a
Interviewer
child's identity is concerned, and be that an Englishman or an English woman cannot be a slave. And Elizabeth Key uses those two, the conjoined power of those two arguments to claim that she is a free woman and so is her children. They have to be free because her father was English. The colony agrees and she's given her freedom.
Nandini Das
But then soon after, the colony changes the law and enslavement becomes hereditary through the maternal line. So if you have an enslaved mother,
Interviewer
you are doomed to enslavement.
Nandini Das
This is a moment I find profoundly
Interviewer
important because this is the moment where belonging becomes racialized. For some people, it's going to be easier to belong than to others. And that ease of belonging depends on which race you belong to, on your appearance, on your background.
Nandini Das
But also what these stories reveal is that colonization and empire didn't just expand
Interviewer
English identity, it transforms it. It shapes, continues to be changed from year to year, not only within England, but beyond it, in North America, in India, in Japan, in various far flung
Nandini Das
places, wherever the English had set foot.
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah, I think complexity is a common theme that we keep coming back to in these stories, taking together the stories that we've spoken about so far. Elizabeth Key, Elizabeth Carey, Thomas Stevens, William Adams. Is there a common factor which defines the nature of identity, of migration, of belonging in this history?
Interviewer
That's such a lovely question, and I
Nandini Das
think that's, in a way, the argument that holds the book together. What I try really to put across and what emerges from this history is that national identity is not a settled
Interviewer
inheritance that is disturbed by mobility. It is actually something that is clarified by that mobility. So every time a stranger appears or an Englishman becomes a stranger abroad, the state has to articulate who he is or she is, who counts, who doesn't,
Nandini Das
and those articulations accumulate.
Interviewer
Belonging is never final throughout this history of 150 years that I trace. It is granted and contested and revoked and renegotiated. That instability is the story, the stranger, the exile, the denizen, the naturalized citizen, the child born on the wrong side of a boundary. All of these figures, I think, demonstrate
Nandini Das
just a simple key fact, which is
Interviewer
that what appears natural or what we appear to take for granted, national identity is, in fact, contingent. It's granted and withdrawn in response to mobility.
Nandini Das
And yet the story is not just
Interviewer
one of exclusion either.
Nandini Das
When the gardener John Tradescant and his son, for instance, traveled to Russia and North Africa and Virginia and planted the lilac and the horse chestnut tree in English soil, those plants were foreign arrivals, like so many of their human counterparts. Yet today we call them archetypally English. The garden and the nation naturalizes what was once alien.
Interviewer
It reforms itself in response to that movement.
Charlotte Vosper
That's a really powerful idea. That instability is the story that we're telling here. Another continuity that actually stood out to me when I read the book is that often in these stories we're telling, there is the notion or the specter even, of a stranger. That's something that consistently comes up. What does that tell us that that figure keeps reoccurring in this history? Can we take anything positive from that, do you think?
Interviewer
Absolutely.
Nandini Das
I think if there's one thing that this book tries to communicate is that it tells us that the stranger is
Interviewer
not just someone who arrives at a nation's door.
Nandini Das
It's also the person who leaves it. So in these stories, the stranger is
Interviewer
Lavinia Tirling at court, or Jacques the Hem in Norwich.
Nandini Das
Yes, but it's also William Adams writing from Japan, Thomas Stevens writing in Goa. English settlers in Ireland, merchants in Venice, sailors in Algiers, the pirates on the high seas. The English are as often the strangers abroad as they are the hosts at home. And that reciprocity is quite crucial, I
Interviewer
think, because it destabilizes any simple story, any binary structure that we might want to set up of inside versus outside.
Nandini Das
And what that reveals is that national identity is relational in Other words, it becomes visible. Not when everyone fits and there's only a single story, but precisely when someone
Interviewer
doesn't fit, or when you yourself no longer fit.
Nandini Das
The migrant, the exile, the expatriate force.
Interviewer
That question, what travels with you?
Nandini Das
Is it Englishness? And if it is, is that Englishness?
Interviewer
Soil, language, loyalty, memory? What is it?
Nandini Das
And there is something positive, I think, in that understanding, in that recurrent pattern that we trace. It shows that belonging has never been a close inheritance. It has never been something that is
Interviewer
absolutely owned by some and withheld from others. It has always been worked out in
Nandini Das
movement, through encounter, through adaptation, sometimes conflict. The stranger, whether they are incoming or outgoing, is not an anomaly in the story of the nation. They are part of the mechanism through
Interviewer
which the nation tells its story.
Charlotte Vosper
Bringing this story up to today, then, does this history speak to our modern political climate, do you think?
Interviewer
That's always such a tempting question, isn't it? But I'm cautious about drawing neat parallels
Nandini Das
purely because the 16th and 17th centuries,
Interviewer
quite explicitly aren't the. There are different pressures.
Nandini Das
The political structures, the scale of movement,
Interviewer
the language of rights are very different.
Nandini Das
But what history can offer, I think, is perspective. One of the striking things about this period is how familiar the certain rhythms feel. Economic strain, religious conflict, political uncertainty. These are the things that repeatedly sharpen
Interviewer
anxieties about who belongs.
Nandini Das
The language hardens and then boundaries are debated. And yet those same societies remain deeply
Interviewer
dependent on movement and exchange. That tension isn't new.
Nandini Das
What the book suggests, I would say, is not a lesson, because history can't
Interviewer
really, despite all we hope, teach us a lesson. What it can offer are patterns.
Nandini Das
Political communities repeatedly recalibrate the terms of
Interviewer
belonging when faced with mobility and change. I think sometimes we tend to forget that the nation has always been argued over. It has been administered and contested, but it has also been reshaped and enriched by encounter.
Nandini Das
And that is ultimately what this early modern period reminds us of.
Charlotte Vosper
That reminder is definitely an important one in our modern day. Now, finally, something which we have touched on a little bit, but I was hoping we could just pull out a little bit more, is how do the stories in your book complicate the well worn Tudor histories centered on monarchs and courtiers? What do you hope the impact of this history will be?
Nandini Das
You know, those well worn Tudor and Stuart histories are where my fascination with this period started.
Interviewer
And I'm still fascinated by them, because who wouldn't be?
Nandini Das
These are huge, towering figures. Those stories matter, but they can also make the nation look as if it
Interviewer
were shaped only from the center outward.
Nandini Das
What this book shows is that England was also being made in workshops and parishes and on the streets of London
Interviewer
and Southampton and Portsmouth, in courtrooms, by migrants and gardeners and schoolteachers and writers and all of those people.
Nandini Das
My title comes from Shakespeare, from John of Gaunt's Speech in Richard ii, where
Interviewer
England is called this little world.
Nandini Das
And that speech quite often tends to
Interviewer
be taken out of context. It's seen as this wonderful celebration of a golden England in the past. But here's the thing. Even in John of Gaunt's Speech, it is not only in the past, but it's a broken ideal that you can
Nandini Das
only just about reach for.
Interviewer
It's a lament of a very fragile vision of an England that was crumbling rapidly under political pressure and greed and all of those things.
Nandini Das
So that's what I want to convey. If the book has an impact, I hope it's this. That readers stop seeing national identity as something declared from above or from the centre, and start recognizing it as something
Interviewer
that is forged repeatedly through encounter. It's really about that tension between imagining England as an island and discovering that
Nandini Das
it was already global.
Charlotte Vosper
That was Nandini Das speaking to Charlotte Vosper. Nandini is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Her book, this Little A New History of Tudor and Stuart England, is full of even more stories about the early modern people who negotiated identity, belonging and migration.
Host: Charlotte Vosper
Guest: Professor Nandini Das
Date: June 16, 2026
In this episode, Charlotte Vosper speaks with Professor Nandini Das about “This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England.” The conversation delves beneath the familiar narratives of monarchs and courtiers to explore how ordinary people—immigrants, exiles, artisans, religious refugees, and traders—shaped what it meant to be “English” in the 16th and 17th centuries. Together, they interrogate notions of migration, identity, and belonging, exposing the myth of an insular “sceptered isle” and revealing national identity as fluid, negotiated, and continuously reshaped through encounter and movement.
Nandini Das’s account is rich in nuance, balancing the erudition of a historian with an eye for the emotional texture of letters and ordinary lives. She invites listeners to see national identity not as a top-down or static inheritance but as a patchwork, always argued over and reshaped by exchange—where both inclusion and exclusion, stability and instability, are essential to the story. The episode builds a compelling case for viewing the making of “England” as inextricably linked to migration, encounter, and the persistent presence of the stranger, with resonances for our own times of anxiety and movement.
For further reading and stories of ordinary early modern people, Nandini Das’s book "This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England" is recommended.