This Little World: A Global History of Tudor and Stuart England Through Merchants, Migrants, Sailors, Spies, Pilgrims, and Exiles

Nandini Das presents Tudor and Stuart England as a connected, mobile society rather than an isolated nation defined mainly by monarchs and royal spectacle. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book follows merchants, migrants, sailors, spies, pilgrims, exiles, artists, and diplomats who crossed England's borders, including Venetian glassmakers, African innkeepers, Native American envoys, the Flemish painter Levina Teerlinc, the navigator William Adams, and Elizabeth Key, who challenged slavery and legal inequality in Virginia. By foregrounding people often excluded from traditional national histories, the work places England's development on the cusp of empire within a wider global network. It uses everyday experience alongside broad historical change to question conventional ideas about nationhood, identity, Englishness, and belonging.