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.

'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
'A page-turning history of how a nation was defined' PHILIPPA GREGORY

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.

"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" - Literary Review

"Tells the story of Britain through people often left out of the accounts: the migrants, merchants, pilgrims and exiles" - Independent, Books of the Month

"It is high time for this arresting new history of England" - Bookseller