This Orient Isle

Jerry Brotton’s monograph builds on his significant publication repertoire and academic research as Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London. Perhaps best known for his best-selling and award-winning, AHistory of the World in Twelve Maps, which also featured as a documentary series on BBC4 a couple of years ago, this work extends the previous works of Samuel Chew, The Rose and the Crescent (1936), Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain 1558–1685 (1998), Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (1999), Gerald M. MacLean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World 1558–1713 (2011), and Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850 (2002), to name but a few from this evergrowing genre of ‘British Islamic history’. This Orient Isle attempts to thread some significant themes of English Elizabethan and Renaissance; diplomacy, empire, political and theological intrigue, international trade, cultural and literary impacts and contemporaneous personal narratives and experiences. All of the aforementioned individual themes have previously been covered in the works (along with many others) cited above. This publication is written over eleven chapters covering a multitude of themes, largely tied together by Elizabethan travel narratives, diplomatic records and popular plays along with the literary representations of the Muslim ‘oriental other’....