This Little World opens with a description of the riots of 1517, an explosion of pent-up hostility and resentment against ‘strangers and aliens’. Recently arrived migrants from France and the Low Countries were blamed for aggravating the poverty and want suffered by locals. That Easter, a rabble-rousing preacher had called for Londoners to remedy this injustice: ‘As birds would defend their nest, so ought Englishmen to cherish and defend themselves, and to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weale.’ Soon afterwards, on the May Day holiday, apprentices gave drunken, unruly vent to their frustration in riots. Five hundred years flash by and so little has changed.
In her first book, Nandini Das explored the origins of the British Empire through a single Englishman of the early 1600s, Sir Thomas Roe, striking out into the wider world to make his fortune. One of the clever things about Courting India was how Das turned the tables on Roe, who in his memoirs made himself out to be a bold and decisive ambassador. Viewing Roe through the eyes of the people hosting him in Mughal India revealed him – and England, at the same time – to be hapless and ineffectual, far less great than he imagined.
