gious, and natural discourses—none existing in isolation and only some orig-
inally engineered to produce the national or racial boundaries that had to be
made if they were to be.
In the case of Elizabeth’s letters, in particular, if the clarification and cod-
ification of a racist ideology was the result, it was not alone “the cause.” For
although the queen presents the presence of “blackamoors” in England as an
internal problem, prompted by the fact that “of late divers blackmoores” have
been “brought into this realme” and added to a population that “allready”
numbers “to manie,” her efforts are framed by an external conflict: England’s
ongoing war with Spain, which been heightened more than it was mollified
by the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588. That war was playing itself out
partly in privateering ventures, some which brought “blackamoors” into En-
gland.^12 Whatever its ideological bearings, Elizabeth’s plan to reverse that im-
migration served as a practical means for reclaiming English prisoners from
Spain: for from what we can tell in each case, the queen intended to exchange
“blackamoors” for the captive English. From the start, then, not simply were
the “Negars and Blackamoors” selected for deportation positioned in an op-
positional relation to England’s “own liege people”; that relation was itself de-
fined by the dynamic between England and Spain—a dynamic that hinged on
the practicalities of war and was, in many ways, inattentive to boundaries of
race or color. As Elizabeth’s letters publicly outline these transactions, they do
expose a color-based racist discourse in the making. But significantly, that dis-
course takes shape largely in response to political and economic circumstances
that themselves complicate and compromise its terms.
***We need, then, to start with these political and economic circumstances and
with the “blackamoors” who are caught in the middle. In an influential study
on the “staying power” of “black people in Britain,” Peter Fryer has argued
that the queen’s discriminatory project “failed completely” “in so faras [it] was
a serious attempt to deport all black people from England.”^13 Elizabeth’s ef-
forts extended only across the short period between 1596 and 1601 and did lit-
tle to diminish the size of that population. Whatever their numbers (and there
is little evidence on this), black subjects remained in England throughout the
early modern period and by the middle of the eighteenth century composed
somewhere between 1 and 3 percent of the London populace.^14 Yet to evalu-
ate Elizabeth’s policies in the ambitious terms of a full-scale deportation is
102 chapter four