had a long history of taxing, regulating, or otherwise restricting resident for-
eigners whenever it was politically or economically expedient. This was not
xenophobia as we have come to know it: within these policies economics were
likely to trump ethnicity as a generating case. One need only look at the
Dutch Church libel to see concerns about the national identity of “strangers”
give way to worries about trades, rents, and coins, as Gil Harris has argued.^6
Nonetheless, during Elizabeth’s reign, immigration increased markedly and so
did the constraints: every year from 1571 to 1574 , for example, the state ex-
pelled all immigrants, excepting only those who had come to England for re-
ligious reasons.^7
Elizabeth’s orders to deport “divers blackmoores” stand out within this
context as unique. For they articulate and attempt to put into place a race-
based cultural barrier of a sort England had not enforced since the expulsion
of the Jews at the end of the thirteenth century. In mandating the geograph-
ical alienation of certain “Negars and Blackamoors,” the queen sets them cat-
egorically apart from her “own liege people.”^8 While she figures the English
in terms of their national allegiance, she designates the “Negars and Black-
amoors” as a “kind” of people, “those kinde,” defined by skin color (the black-
ness suggestively stressed by “Negars” and “Blackamoors”) and associated, less
inclusively, with a religion or lack of religion (“most...are infidels”). That is,
against the contrasting nationalidentity of her “own liege people,” she depicts
and condemns “Negars and Blackamoors” as arace—ablackrace.^9
These documents have become pivotal to critical assessments of the ma-
terial and ideological place of “blacks” within early modern England as well
as of early constructions of racism and race. Scholars have tended to read these
letters as “the visible signature of the imperial metropolis’s nervous writing out
of its marginalized other” and have taken this writing out of “blacks” as the
writing in of a color-based race and racism.^10 There continues to be debate
over when “the association of race and color” became “commonplace,” when
blackness supplanted religion as “the most important criterion for defining
otherness,” as I have suggested already, with early modern scholars locating
this development at the end of the sixteenth century and eighteenth-century
scholars, at the end of the eighteenth.^11 Even so, it is clear that a discourse of
blackness was taking shape and getting use as a vehicle of discrimination at
the time that English playwrights were featuring the Moor and that the En-
glish queen was declaring the “blacks” in her realm “to manie.” Yet what com-
plicates the inscription of racial identity and bias is the fact that constructions
such as these emerged within a complex of social, economic, political, reli-
Too Many Blackamoors 101