This Little World
A New History of Tudor and Stuart England
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This Little World
Narrated by:
Nandini Das
Pre-order Now for £15.54
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Narrated by:
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Nandini Das
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By:
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Nandini Das
'A perspective-altering take on a world we usually think of in far more domestic terms. A ground-breaking masterwork' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
'A page-turning history of how a nation was defined' PHILIPPA GREGORY
'A glimmering vision of a Tudor and Stuart England we hardly know, yet which immediately feels essential' ALEX VON TUNZELMANN
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.©2026 Nandini Das (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
Many books claim to be a new way of looking at history, but this book truly is, as Das draws on extensive archival research to enrich and complicate the picture by telling the stories of those who lived through it (Breeze Barrington)
Triumphant . . . Nandini Das has a cinematic writing style in which zoom shots and closeups coexist. She allows her characters to speak for themselves, reassessing their beliefs from multiple vantage points. The reader is never less than transfixed by her breadth of expertise, storytelling skills and commingling of historical and literary evidence . . . No one who reads this book will ever see Tudor and Stuart history in the same light again (John Guy)
Tells the story of Britain through people often left out of the accounts: the migrants, merchants, pilgrims and exiles (Martin Chilton)
A page-turning history of how a nation was defined by the people it welcomed or persecuted. Tudor and Stuart England through the eyes of incomers and exiles – and beautifully written (PHILIPPA GREGORY, author of Normal Women)
A wonderful gallery of precisely drawn yet constantly surprising Tudor and Stuart portraits, like an album of perfect Hilliard miniatures that dazzle us with their cosmopolitan attitudes and globalised lives. Taking us from English Jesuits in Goa to Italian renaissance scholars in Oxford via an English eunuch in Ottoman Constantinople and a Kentish Samurai in seventeenth-century Edo, this is a perspective-altering take on a world we usually think of in far more domestic and provincial terms. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, Nandini Das has written another ground-breaking masterwork (WILLIAM DALRYMPLE, author of The Golden Road and The Anarchy)
A beautifully constructed and thought-provoking book that provides a fresh, vibrant perspective on the Tudor and Stuart age. As well as telling the wider story of immigration and exploration, of the forging of national identity, it brings to light an exquisitely drawn cast of characters – artists, merchants, musicians and more – whose lives intersected with the ‘scepter’d isle’ of Shakespeare (TRACY BORMAN, author of The Stolen Crown)
Das’s history feels as it thinks. Her book separates itself from histories of the period by seeing into the past as a prism for us to understand our present and thereby shape our future (FRED D'AGUIAR, author of The Longest Memory)
In this revelatory book, Nandini Das opens up a glimmering vision of a Tudor and Stuart England we hardly know, yet which immediately feels essential (ALEX VON TUNZELMANN, author of Fallen Idols)
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