A Golden World

A wonderfully stylish, gloriously technicolour book - NANDINI DAS
An absolute joy to read - DR STEPHANIE PRATT
Rich, original, and eye-opening - ALICE HUNT
A sparkling cabinet of curiosities - CAROLINE DODDS PENNOCK

From rumours of lost Amazonian cities of gold to the silver running through the mountains of Bolivia, hopes for dazzling wealth fuelled the imperial fantasies of the Tudors and Stuarts. But while stories of treasure ships and privateers like Walter Raleigh have become entrenched in national myths - what did Elizabethans actually know about Mexico, the Amazon rainforest, or the Chesapeake? How did Indigenous people and knowledge enter the art, fashion, and literature of Shakespeares time - and at what cost?

A Golden World illuminates how the Americas became a visible and material presence in English culture, through a range of unexpected objects: from tobacco leaves strewn in playhouses to a boy wearing a pearl earring. Award-winning historian Lauren Working presents an altogether new history of the golden age of 16th century England, that considers the desire for power, land and resources in the first era of colonization, alongside the craft and labour of those in the Americas who contributed to the English Renaissance as we know it.