This Little World

'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 ideas: about nationhood, about identity, and above all, about belonging.

Nandini Das is professor of Early Modern English Literature and Culture and Fellow of Exeter College at Oxford University. Her most recent book, Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire, was longlisted for the Cundill Prize, shortlisted for the Duff Cooper and Wolfson History Prizes, and won the British Academy Book Prize. It was also a Spectator, Prospect and History Today Book of the Year. A BBC New Generation Thinker, she regularly contributes to and presents television and radio programmes, including Tales of Tudor Travel on BBC Four. In 2025, she was awarded an OBE for services to Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities and to Public Engagement.