an infidelity that no one could see literally and so would see figuratively.
Hence, while nation (in lieu of Christianity) becomes the primary term to
distinguish the English here, religion (in its absence) becomes an additional
term to distinguish the black race. And in this document, as not in the prior
letters, blacks acquire their own negative attributes as a “kinde of people.” It
is no longer expediency and circumstance that make their deportation from
England “reasonable” at a particular historical moment. They, by virtue of
their innate and collective characteristics, their blackness and their probable
faithlessness, are a race, a people, that “should be with all speed avoided and
discharged out of...Her Majesty’s dominions.” If the current “hard times
of dearth” within the nation make such an action particularly urgent in 1601 ,
Elizabeth’s rationale extends across time, producing a population—the idea
of a population—that could and should be repeatedly constructed and con-
demned as the infidel “black.”
The official letters Queen Elizabeth issued between 1596 and 1601 move
then from the contingent to the absolute, the practical to the ideological, the
economic to the racial, ultimately coming as close as contemporary texts will
come to categorically defining a “black” race. The proposal to deport “black-
amoors” begins, in its first manifestation, as an expedient solution to crises re-
sulting from the Anglo-Spanish war; in its last incarnation, it produces the
infiltration of “blacks” as a threat to England’s economy and to its national
unity and “natural” identity. Yet the story these documents tell is not simply
of a growing English racism or the stabilizing of an association between color,
“blacks,” and race. Rather, the letters evidence how pressured that ideological
trajectory was by practical circumstances that were divisive to any single way
of seeing. Together, the letters expose the tensions not just between the En-
glish and the Spanish, but between the queen and her “own liege people,”
whose interests were themselves not one. These documents do not provide a
representative measure of the racist sentiment within England at the turn of
the century. They show us, rather, how seriously Queen Elizabeth’s attempts
to activate that sentiment were molded and challenged by competing politi-
cal and economic circumstances that themselves pointed in conflicting direc-
tions, both for and against the deportation of blacks. If her more explicitly
“racist” language suggests that England’s subjects had themselves grown more
inclinedideologicallytoward discrimination against blacks as a racial group,
the new vehemence and new threats coupled to that language suggest as well
that England’s citizens were nonetheless lessinclinedpracticallytoward the de-
portation of particular “blacks” in their possession. And if we can trace in
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