Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England

What did it mean to be a stranger in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England? How were other nations, cultures, and religions perceived? What happened when individuals moved between languages, countries, religions, and spaces? Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility analyses a selection of terms that were central to the conceptualisation of identity, race, migration, and transculturality in the early modern period. In many cases, the concepts and debates that they embody - or sometimes subsume - came to play crucial roles in the articulation of identity, rights, and power in subsequent periods. Together, the essays in this volume provide an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the development of these formative issues.

Nandini Das is a literary scholar and cultural historian, and Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Exeter College. She has published widely on early modern English literature and cross-cultural encounters, as well as travel writing in general, including Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570-1620 (2011), and the Cambridge History of Travel Writing (2019), co-edited with Tim Youngs. She is Principal Investigator of the ERC-TIDE project. João Vicente Melo is a JIN research fellow at Universidade Pablo de Olavide, Seville and Trade and Diplomacy lead on the TIDE project. He has published works on early modern cross-cultural encounters, intercultural diplomacy, Anglo-Iberian colonial rivalries, early modern European ethnographies on South Asia and Africa, and religious and political accommodation in the Iberian colonial systems. Lauren Working is a researcher on the TIDE project at the University of Oxford. Her first book, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (2020), explores the influence of English plantation and cross-cultural exchanges in the Americas on taste and politics in early seventeenth-century London. She has published on topics including global intoxicants, plantation archaeology, female agents, and the colonial imaginary in wit poetry. Haig Smith is a Research Associate at the University of Oxford and Law and Governance lead on the TIDE project (Travel, Transculturality, and Identity in Early Modern England, 1550-1700). He has written on several topics relating to religion and English overseas expansion into India, North America, and the Levant in the early modern period, including the forthcoming Religion and Governance in England’s Emerging Colonial Empire, 1601-1698.