London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a surprisingly diverse place, home not just to people from throughout the British Isles but to a significant population of French and Dutch ...immigrants, to travelers and refugees from beyond Europe's borderlands and, from the 1650s, to a growing Jewish community. Yet although we know much about the population of the capital of early modern England, we know little about how Londoners conceived of the many peoples of their own city. Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London seeks to rectify this, addressing the question of how the inhabitants of the metropolis ordered the heterogeneity around them.
Rather than relying upon literary or theatrical representations, this study emphasizes day-to-day practice, drawing upon petitions, government records, guild minute books and taxation disputes along with plays and printed texts. It shows how the people of London defined belonging and exclusion in the course of their daily actions, through such prosaic activities as the making and selling of goods, the collection of taxes and the daily give and take of guild politics. This book demonstrates that encounters with heterogeneity predate either imperial expansion or post-colonial immigration. In doing so it offers a perspective of interest both to scholars of the early modern English metropolis and to historians of race, migration, imperialism and the wider Atlantic world. An empirical examination of civic economics, taxation and occupational politics that asks broader questions about multiculturalism and Englishness, this study speaks not just to the history of immigration in London itself, but to the wider debate about evolving notions of national identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Following the loss of Surinam to the Netherlands in 1667, the English Crown attempted to evacuate those of its subjects living in the colony under Dutch rule. In doing so, its representatives laid ...claim to members of the Jewish population, who Surinam's English governors had previously declared to be “considered as English-born.” In the resulting dispute between the English and Dutch over who could be removed, Crown officials embraced articulations of subjecthood forged in the colony that differed from metropolitan norms. In asserting that Surinam's Jews remained subjects of the king, and by implying that they would continue to do so once evacuated, the English delegation departed from the Crown's frequent rejection of the wider efficacy of colonial naturalization. Surinam's Dutch governor, meanwhile, dismissed the assertion that members of the “Hebrew nation” could be subjects of an English king, arguing that subjecthood and nationality were identical and that only those of the English nation could be removed. The dispute between the English and the Dutch over the status of Surinam's Jews reminds us that English subjecthood was shaped by colonial settings and by the contested status of groups who found themselves transferred between imperial powers.
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The response of early modern Londoners to Jewish immigrants unfolded in a context of ethnic and religious diversity. Jews arriving in London from the 1650s on found their reception coloured by prior ...reactions to both French and Dutch Protestants and Spanish Catholics. Such attitudes towards previous migrants from the Continent were at least as important as anti-semitism or philo-semitism. These factors point to the complexity of early modern migration, to the links that Londoners drew between different immigrant groups, and to the fact that no single stereotype existed in isolation. Early modern English people created difference relationally, reflecting the everyday population movements and the longstanding multiculturalism of the city in which they lived.
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While medieval law stressed both blood and place of birth as determinants of subjecthood, by the last decades of the sixteenth century London's civic authorities defined Englishness on the basis of ...one's lineage, enacting measures against the children and grandchildren of strangers. The people of early modern England inherited mixed legal approaches to difference rooted in both common and civil law, stressing a mixture of soil and blood. Legal notions of nationality relying on place of birth had existed at least as far back as the thirteenth century. The City also moved to ensure that the sons of strangers paid taxes and duties at higher levels than those ascribed to English subjects. All sought a way around the exclusion of the English-born sons of strangers from the freedom of the City, or from particular duties or taxes. And in this respect, all unintentionally bolstered a notion of belonging grounded in birth.
This chapter defines the stage upon which early modern Londoners created difference. Hans Pemable was one of thousands of overseas immigrants in London. Some stayed to make the city their home, while ...others departed for further destinations within the British Isles or returned to Continental Europe. When Hans Pemable arrived in London in 1572 he would have found himself in a city in the midst of explosive growth. While England increased its population by 24 percent between 1600 and 1650, London grew by 88 percent. London grew because of English migrants, not Continental immigrants. The percentage of strangers in the city was always dwarfed by the number of residents born elsewhere in the realm. For French and Dutch Protestants, war and religious persecution on the Continent provided the most frequently-articulated reasons for immigrating to London. London had long attracted people from beyond the British Isles.
In December 1656, Cromwell gave permission for a Jewish place of worship and burial ground, and London's small Jewish community moved into the open. The Quaker Margaret Fell, in a published letter to ...Menassah Ben Israel in 1656 urging Jewish immigration, referred to England as 'a land of gathering, where the Lord God is fulfilling his promise'. Whether in marginalia, libel or legal action, Londoners approached Jewish identity less in terms of monolithic difference than as a nexus, a meeting point for stereotypes of a range of groups. Jewishness in early modern London was, in short, shaped by the many people's present in the city. The reception of Jewish immigrants in London alerts to the degree to which early modern civic difference was at all times relational, a product of day-to-day negotiations in a diverse city. Although Jews were officially absent from England between expulsion of 1290 and readmission in 1656, Jewish stereotypes occupied a powerful position within English culture.
Turkey and North Africa, although geographically distant, attained very real rhetorical proximity in England. Literate English men and women encountered representations of the Islamic world in a ...variety of printed genres, from travel narratives and printed plays to accounts of sailors captured by Barbary pirates. Travel narratives, printed dramatic works and accounts of captivity presented a range of stereotypes, juxtaposing Turks and Moors with European Catholics, English Protestants, Jews and others. The Islamic world structured difference in some surprising ways, shaping English perceptions of a wide variety of groups. The representation of Muslims in plays and travel narratives inflected stereotypes of Jews, Catholics and others. Most English people encountered the Islamic world only indirectly, in travel narratives, plays and solicitations for aid to Christian's captives in Muslim lands. Printed captivity narratives texts specifically recounting the persecution of Christians by Muslims, echo travel literature and plays in their fluctuating depictions of the Islamic world.
In the century from 1580 to 1680 the government of the City of London consistently responded to difference as a threat. Responses to the presence of French and Dutch Protestants, Jewish immigrants ...and supplicants for relief from captivity in Muslim lands announced who was a Londoner, who was English and who did not fit in. These actions created stereotypes that cut across national or religious lines. Londoners and their government expressed concerns about the nature of alienness itself, rather than about the specific national characteristics of the city's immigrant population. And in enacting measures against the children of aliens, civic authorities defined belonging on the basis of English descent. The Crown, meanwhile, generally favoured immigration and, in defending the rights of immigrants' children, embraced a notion of Englishness grounded in birth under the allegiance of the monarch. Yet both created their respective markers of difference through the course of daily practice, in response to a broad range of issues, not just matters of immigration. Historians and literary critics have often attempted to identity specific groups as the central ‘other’ of early modern England. Approaches to issues of difference have also tended to create a distinction between irrational popular xenophobia and more rational fears of economic competition. I argue that such distinctions cannot be maintained, and that concerns and policies relating to the economy, trade, employment and taxation all defined the boundaries of belonging and exclusion. By examining the records of the Courts of Aldermen and Common Council, as well as of the Lord Mayor and the Company of Weavers, I reconstruct the most prevalent markers of difference in the City of London from the 1580s to the 1680s. I gauge the responses of central government by studying the registers of the Privy Council, the Council of State and state papers. In doing so, I argue that daily practice in a broad range of areas created difference and that a disparity existed between City and Crown in matters of belonging.
This chapter discusses the mercantilist economic thought less as a theory with particular implications for state-building than as a discourse used by some Londoners to legitimate markers of ...exclusion. In 1580 the lord mayor of the City of London wrote to the lord treasurer in response to the queen's request that he take action against the threat of plague. The City was plagued by non-English immigrants who 'do take houses and keep journeymen and servants, use weaving and live without order, check or controlment'. Londoners constituted Continental immigrants more by their occupational roles than by national stereotypes, as artisans and merchants rather than as French or Dutch, roles that implied unity, conspiracy and a wilful intent to harm the English. The anti-alien riot of 1517 known as 'Evil May Day' is perhaps the most notorious example of the violent hostility periodically exhibited towards strangers in late medieval and early modern London.
