How Did the Americas Transform Renaissance England? With Lauren Working

**Mia Sarenti** (0:00)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Where Great Minds Meet. I'm producer Mia Sarenti. When we think of Renaissance England, we often picture Shakespeare and the splendour of royal courts. But how much of this so-called Golden Age was shaped by the people, ideas and resources from the Americas? On today's episode, Lauren Working, historian and lecturer in early modern literature at the University of York, joins Caroline Dodds Pennock, historian and professor in international history at the University of Sheffield, to discuss Working's new book, A Golden World, How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England, and the profound influence of the New World on the English society, culture and imagination.
Let's join our host Caroline Dodds Pennock now with more.

**Caroline Dodds Pennock** (0:44)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Lauren. It's really nice to talk to you. I was privileged to get an advanced copy of Lauren's book. And it is just a really fascinating, rich work, which asks us to think differently about a period that I think people often think they know very well, which is the Golden Age of Renaissance. Some people might call it Early Modern England. So maybe we could start by asking, what is the story people usually tell about this period? And what is it that you think is missing from that story?

**Lauren Working** (1:14)
Yeah, thanks, Caroline. I'd love to ask listeners kind of what their associations with the Tudors and the Stuarts are. But I think, you know, when we think of this period, it's often dominated by court portraiture, you know, the kind of objects and art that comes down to us. So we might think about the paintings of Hans Holbein. We might think about the Reformation and perhaps things like timber frame houses and this kind of insular idea maybe of a kind of merry old England before it got really global and colonial in a later period.
So I kind of wanted to play on that idea of the Golden Age that Elizabethans themselves tried to propound. This age of kind of wit and refinement, a time of high style and linguistic innovation in a lot of ways.
But also kind of really ask this question of who was it golden for if it was a kind of golden age?
And at what cost? Where is this gold kind of literally, sometimes as well as metaphorically kind of coming from? Why are we getting all these metaphors about refinement and medals and coming into this period? This is not a time that England has an empire to speak of in that kind of later sense of the later 17th and 18th centuries. But I think England is thinking imperially at this time, and they're still dependent on a lot of exploitative economies in the Atlantic. So the question I really wanted to ask is kind of where is the plantation and where are these economies in this history of England? The poet Edmund Waller in the mid 17th century has these lines which encapsulates this really well, I think. He says, ours is the harvest where the Indians mow, we plow the deep and reap what others sow. And so this idea that the English are aware, even at the time, that as they're trying to build an empire and build these global connections, they rely on the labor and the lives of people in other parts of the world. And yet we've kept that labor kind of disconnected from domestic history.

**Caroline Dodds Pennock** (3:34)
Yes, absolutely. You sort of talk about how colonialism is often seen as happening elsewhere.
And that's something I really want to get into because, of course, I'm super interested in the Indigenous histories that are entangled with what you're talking about. And that attempt to de-center kind of imperialism and de-center empire and have us see it as present in England, I think, is really super interesting. I wanted to, sticking with the title just for a minute, this Golden World is obviously a really deliberate choice, carries this sense of wonder and fantasy, also extraction, as you've just been suggesting. And these are ways that people have often viewed the Americas. But they do also, as you're suggesting, offer us an opportunity to flip the script in the way that you're trying to do. Why is it that gold then is this starting point? What is it that gold, I guess, literal and imagined gold, means to English people in the 16th and 17th centuries?

**Lauren Working** (4:30)
Yeah, I mean, when you start to look for it, gold is really everywhere. It's one of the epigraphs of the book is a line from George Chapman's poem, Dig Iona, where he says, gold is our fate, which all our acts do fashion and create. So as you say, I wanted to kind of come back to that kind of Elizabethan obsession with with gold and silver, just kind of how widespread that really is in this period. In some ways, because I think a lot of national narratives in the US and the UK are still still tend to focus on kind of mass migration to places that we now call kind of Massachusetts, you know, various areas of New England where there are, you know, that people emigrated for these godly, very pious reasons. And that's really what sparked colonialism.