On his visit to London in the autumn of 1599, Thomas Platter took in a performance at the newly built Globe theatre and trips to Hampton Court, Windsor Castle and Eton College. But it was a London house crammed with global curiosities curated by Walter Cope that captured his imagination. This outlandish exhibition included a unicorn’s tail, an embalmed child and the bauble and bells belonging to Will Somer, Henry VIII’s fool. Pride of place was given to items from the Americas: Cope would later become a key investor in the Virginia Company, and he had already collected fabulous feathered Native American headdresses and hung a long, narrow canoe and oars from the ceiling. A few years later there were delighted reports of ‘Virginians’ demonstrating the handling of a canoe on the Thames. In her fascinating book A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England, Lauren Working observes that these indigenous men may well have been recently captured and brought to London. English colonists were patrolling Chesapeake Bay for some years before the establishment of the first permanent settlement at Jamestown. 

This is a book about the cabinet and the canoe on the Thames, not about Jamestown. That is to say, it inverts the historical tendency to understand colonialism in general, and the English relationship with the so-called ‘New World’ in particular, as ‘an elsewhere’, in Working’s phrase. Instead, Working has written a deftly revisionist account of early modern England: a place made newly strange through her close and creative attention to objects from the Americas. An Aztec manuscript codex donated to the Bodleian Library; Mary, Queen of Scots, embroidering an armadillo based on an illustration from the pages of a French naturalist; the fashion for cedarwood bedsteads: these are evocative examples that make the wider claims of the book specific and detailed. From the large yellow flower that mirrors the artist’s profile in Anthony van Dyck’s Self-Portrait with a Sunflower and the rich red dyes produced from the cochineal insect found in the central Americas to the pearls that were persistently linked with transatlantic ambition in mercantile iconography, A Golden World discovers the ways in which Elizabethan and Jacobean Englishmen and women who never travelled to Virginia nevertheless had their dress, palate, vocabulary and habits transformed by the encounter.

Before chocolate, tea, coffee or opium, the English foreign intoxicant of choice was tobacco, brought ‘out of the provinces of America, which we call the West Indies’, as John Gerard put it in his Herball. The polymath ethnographer Thomas Hariot, who travelled to Roanoke in the 1580s, described its role in Algonquin ceremony: the gods were believed to be ‘marvellously delighted’ by sacrificial tobacco fires, or tobacco powder cast into the air ‘after an escape of danger’. Unlike Spanish colonialists who adopted the practice, common in the Caribbean and South America, of smoking tobacco in a cigar-like tube, the English preferred clay tobacco pipes of the type widespread among the Algonquin peoples of the east coast. Working describes a fragment of such a pipe made in Jamestown and marked with the name of the Earl of Southampton: it is illustrated in one of the book’s two insets of colour prints.

This ‘filthy novelty’, as James I put it, quickly took hold. Working traces debates about whether tobacco was a healthful or injurious substance. Gerard claimed it was effective in countering migraine and kidney problems, and domestic recipe books often cited tobacco as a medicinal ingredient. But Gerard also acknowledged that tobacco was a comfort not a cure: smoking a pipe might ‘empty the body of humours, yet the cause of the grief cannot be so taken away’. The King’s view that it was ‘dangerous to the lungs’, among other disadvantages, prompted action. Like many legislators since, he attempted to restrict the damaging circulation of tobacco through heavy taxation on imports. 

This disapproval, of course, won tobacco a countercultural allure that anticipates the unrepentant glamour of smokers from Molière to Humphrey Bogart. John Beaumont’s praise of smoking as the agent of transformation in his 1602 poem The Metamorphosis of Tobacco is, as Working observes, ‘almost avant-garde’, evoking a world of artistic nicotine chic captured in the transgression attributed to Christopher Marlowe that ‘all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools’. But, as Working draws out, the forms of sociability increasingly associated with smoking were also associated with a politics of colonial expansionism, and European appetites for the products of the Americas drove increased production that ultimately created plantation economics and the horrors of trans­atlantic slavery. 

Much of the book is concerned with elite or middling-sort male culture, but an incisive chapter on women’s access to this globalised imaginary caught my eye. In a nice example of how sometimes familiar material can be re-examined for new details, Working discusses William Strachey’s letter describing the deliverance of the Sea Venture, a ship bound for Virginia and shipwrecked in Bermuda. Strachey’s account of the storm-tossed ship has long been recognised as a source for Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, and the playwright must therefore have had access to this document before it was printed. Working points out that the letter is addressed ‘Excellent Lady’ and that its detail concerning the climate, flora and fauna and governance of the shaky Virginian colony is all directed towards its unknown female addressee. Connecting this to the Algonquin woman Matoaka, baptised as Rebecca on her marriage to the English planter John Rolfe but known in English circles then and now as Pocahontas, is, rightly, unsettling. Mataoka was displayed in the English court, attended a masque (The Vision of Delight) by Ben Jonson and died at Gravesend as their ship began the journey home. The human cost of the English delight in the Americas is never far from view in Working’s clever and compassionate reconstruction of its significance. 

Sir Philip Sidney considered art a ‘golden’ world that could embody moral virtue. The associations in the title of this book, therefore, are ironic. Lauren Working avoids preaching, but does not flinch from moral complexity. She draws our attention to the hidden producers of these objects as well as their consumers, and cites contemporary indigenous voices in conversation with John Donne, with Mataoka and with English culture. Hers is a rich book, as full and compelling as Cope’s cabinet, but with a postcolonial catalogue. Anyone interested in Tudor and Stuart England should read it.