"Many books claim to be a new way of looking at history, but this book truly is." ―Financial Times

"A thoughtful and thorough history." ―The Times (UK)

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. Beneath this familiar narrative of ruffs and gowns, kings and queens, however, lies a more complex and connected reality.

England at this time was far from insular. Traveling 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 of 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, Nandini Das 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. Yet 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.