panies.^64 And not only was English activity across the Mediterranean, in gen-
eral, at a peak, with factors stationed prominently in Italy, Egypt, Syria, and
Turkey as well as in North Africa; English interest in Barbary, in particular,
was especially vibrant and visible. The English had been involved in the Bar-
bary trades since the 1550 s; but Queen Elizabeth’s negotiations with Morocco
escalated notably in the 1580 s, after a civil war (which climaxed with the “bat-
tle of Alcazar” in 1578 ) put a new regime in place there and required new
diplomatic arrangements.^65 As Nabil Matar and others have pointed out,
Moorish ambassadors came to London for publicized state visits in 1589 , 1595 ,
and 1601.^66
For Matar, the introduction of Moors on the English stage was “a direct
result” of “the negotiations and collusions” between England and Morocco.^67
I think instead, though, that the impulse behind that staging was much
broader, catalyzed not only by England’s specific dealings with its Moroccan
trading partners but also by the desire to come to terms with a more reaching
and emergent globalization. England’s overseas interventions had no estab-
lished terminologies, ideologies, or geographies, though discourses of the na-
tional and transnational as well as of imperialism and colonialism would
evolve through them. If this period prefaced or predicted the high colonial-
ism that would take shape—and give shape to “black” subjects—in the New
World, England had not yet found its colonial footing.^68 Indeed, how telling
that when Shakespeare staged colonialist domination in the “brave new
world” of The Tempestin 1611 , he could only imagine bringing his European
colonizers home. Nor, as historians have emphasized, was the English state
decidedly imperialist, despite Hakluyt’s best efforts to have it otherwise.^69
Even the idea of “culture”—a term which has enabled critics (and which I use
here) to think beyond the politically freighted constructs of “nation” and
“state” and socially freighted construct of “society”—invoked a fairly provin-
cial conception of land-based cultivation, not coming to indicate a distinctive
population group or community until the nineteenth century.^70 Hence, at the
turn of the sixteenth century, the English needed to figure out the politics and
parameters of a new globally oriented environment—to explore the perme-
ability of geographic boundaries, to decode and encode an expansive network
of cultural identities and differences, to develop vocabularies for the accom-
modation and alienation of mixed populations, mixed marriages, and mixed
blood, and to otherwise negotiate the extraordinary volatility of cultural
change and exchange.
In this, the early modern moment was like our own—but with signifi-
introduction 17