This Little World

From the prize-winning author comes a ground-breaking, 150-year history of Britain from the court of Henry VIII to Cromwell‘s Protectorate. A certain idea of England was defined during the Tudor and Stuart eras. ‘This scepter‘d isle‘, as Shakespeare told theatre-goers, was a ‘precious stone set in the silver sea‘. This vision of splendid isolation lives on today, with its familiar images: the ruffs and gowns, Henry VIII in commanding pose, Elizabeth I turning into a myth before our eyes. Yet for all the talk of islands and walls, the reality was anything but insular. Travelling in and out of England at this time were Venetian glassmakers with English wives, gurus with Wiltshire accents in rural India, 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 presumed lost at sea for years, only to resurface in Japan as the country‘s first English samurai. And there was Elizabeth Key, daughter of an enslaved mother in the English colony in Virginia, who battled in the courts to win English citizenship for herself and her son. Grounded in extensive archival sources, attentive to the textures of individual lives, yet alive to the sweep of history, This Little World offers a startlingly new vision of England‘s past and of what it meant to be English. It is the story of a country on the cusp of nationhood and empire, that calls into question some of our most fundamental ideas – about nationhood, about identity, and above all, about belonging.