This Little World - Nandini Das

'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 TIMESThe 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
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