Go to draftingthepast.com and subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss an episode! Paid subscribers get access to ad-free episodes and more perks.

How does the history of English colonialism in the Renaissance change when you tell that history through objects? In this episode, Kate spoke with Dr. Lauren Working, a historian whose work focuses on England’s colonialism and interactions with Indigenous people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Lauren is a lecturer in Early Modern Studies at the University of York. Alongside her research, Lauren is committed to sharing historical knowledge with the public. In fact, as you’ll hear in the interview, she was approached by a literary agent thanks to her work with the BBC. As a result, she published her new book, A Golden World: How The Americas Transformed Tudor and Stuart England, with a trade press. In order to help her tell a story of the Atlantic world from both Indigenous American and colonial British perspectives, Lauren turned to objects. The result is a tactile and beautifully written history of a world of encounter and influence. We talked about the rewards and challenges of writing history through objects and how Lauren brought so many people’s experiences to the page, even when they were largely missing from the archive.

Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Lauren Working, A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Tudor and Stuart England
• Lauren Working, The Making of an Imperial Polity
• The internal illustrations for A Golden World were created by artist Rebecca Lee Kunz (Tree of Life Studio), a citizen of the Cherokee Nation
• Lauren’s episodes on BBC Radio 3, “Ruffs in Jamestown” and “Boy With a Pearl Earring”
• Lauren’s guest appearances on BBC Radio 4’s Free Thinking: “Trade and Traffic,” “The Mayflower and Native American History,” “Gifts and Gratitude,” and “The Botanical Past”
• Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast
• National Portrait Gallery learning resource: “Illuminating the global in Tudor and early Stuart portraits,” by Lauren Working
• Sara E. Johnson, Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World

Welcome back to the Drafting the Past podcast.

I'm Kate Carpenter, and in each episode, I'm joined by a

historian to talk about how they research and write history. For

today's episode, I spoke with Dr. Lauren Working, a historian

whose work focuses on England's colonialism and interactions

with Indigenous people in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Such a pleasure to be here. Thanks, Kate.

Lauren is a lecturer in early modern studies

at the University of York. Alongside her research, she's

committed to sharing historical knowledge with the public. In

fact, as you'll hear in the interview, she was approached by

a literary agent thanks to her work with the BBC. As a result,

she published her new book, *A Golden World: How the Americas

Transformed Renaissance England* with a trade press. In order to

help her tell a story of the Atlantic world from both

Indigenous American and colonial British perspectives, Lauren

turned to objects. The result is a tactile and beautifully

written history of a world of encounter and influence. We

talked about the rewards and challenges of writing history

through objects, and how Lauren brought so many people's

experiences to the page, even when they were largely missing

from the archive. Here's my conversation with Dr. Lauren

Working.

I've always loved to write. My favorite part

of school was the free write sessions that we used to have. I

remember falling over at recess once and skinning my knee, and

the nurse asked if I wanted to go home, and I said no because

it was writing class afterwards. So lots of fond memories of

scribbling in notebooks and writing novels when I was 12 or

13. I grew up in Southern California and Seattle, but

spent most of my summers in Switzerland, where I was born.

And I chose to travel thousands of miles to go to university in

a tiny medieval town in coastal Scotland for my undergraduate

degree. So I think I've always kind of been itching to travel

and to place myself in a position of outsidedness or in a

position of the observer in some ways, so I guess it's not that

surprising that I now read a lot of Tudor and Stuart travel

literature.

Well, let's start just with the basics of

how you work. So, when and where do you like to do your writing?

I work best in the mornings. I cannot work from

home, and I the, my most recent book, A Golden World, is kind of

the product of about 10 years of research. But writing the book,

I did over a really concerted period of time during my

research leave, and because that time is so precious and finite,

I just spent all day every day working on it as long as I

could. Once I get into the flow, very little can distract me. I

put my phone in my bag. I try not to look at it. I just need a

cup of coffee and a quiet office. Although saying that, I

think a change of scene can be extremely helpful as well. So if

I'm a bit stuck or getting tired of a nun-like existence of

rigorous seclusion. I do like changing my writing environment

sometimes. So, working in places that that have character, that

have connections to the history that I'm writing. In the last

few months of writing the book, I worked a lot in a place in

York where I live called King's Manor, which is this charming

medieval and Tudor property with wonderful Renaissance archways

and staircases, and figures from my book, including James the

Sixth and First and his son Charles the First, stayed there

on their way from Edinburgh to London in the early 17th

century. So I would see light filtering through old stained

glass windows with Tudor heraldry on them, and and think

about them doing the same, and then the distance between the

centuries seems to narrow for a moment. I also love writing in

coffee shops. I know some people hate this or find it

unproductive, and it's a bit less of the culture in the UK,

in some ways, to do that, but during research fellowships in

the US at the Folger Shakespeare Library or the Yale Center for

British Art, I love spending the afternoon writing in cozy local

cafes to get past my afternoon slump.

What kinds of tools do you like to use to

organize your research and writing?

I do not use any tools really other than Google

Docs and pen and paper. I I like to think I'm a pretty well

organized person, but in terms of how I research and write, I

this is the one place where I'm kind of all over the place. I

look at my writing sometimes, and I just think this is less

legible than a 16th century commonplace book that has been

revised and reorganized and repurposed over the decades. But

just yeah, pages of notes and ideas and questions, you know,

which which is all part of the the thinking process, but not

very methodical. And I combine lots of handwritten notes with

lots of Google Docs and lots of folders with visual material.

Where in the research process do you think of

yourself as starting the writing?

I start pretty early on. I'm not the kind of

person who can think through ideas in my head and then just

write them down fully formed. So, like a sculptor, I have to

kind of chip away at an idea until something from within

reveals itself. So, I write to figure out the kind of argument

I can make based on my sources, and then figure out what I'm

missing and where I need to do some more reading and searching.

And so, lots of writing and lots of revising as well.

So, are you then sort of figuring it out as you

go? Do you ever outline, or is it just a sort of?

Yeah, I I used to outline obsessively, and then

just found that things changed so much when I got to writing

anyway that I still find it useful to make sketch out some

outlines, and I always tell my students to do this as well. Or

sometimes early on, kind of outlining different

possibilities of you know how the the work might be shaped.

But a a lot of the the shape of it really does come when I cut

and just yeah reshape everything during the revision because I'm

I read things aloud, I reread things obsessively. It it can

take me hours every day to get back into the flow of writing

because I'm looking back at things I've been writing in the

days before. If I'm not in writing mode, that can take even

longer. It can take hours or days before I feel like I can

even write another sentence, but I really value, yeah, revision.

It's comforting to know I've got something there to work with

already. My partner is a poet and a lapsed academic, so he's

also great at telling me when my writing isn't clear or could

sound better when my metaphorical language is maybe a

bit dense or unhelpful, or my metaphors are mixed. So I really

tried to think about the structure of every sentence. And

a very kind reviewer of my most recent book kind of mentioned

the the lyricism of the prose, and that was a really big

compliment for me.

Yeah, absolutely, a well-deserved one.

How did you decide that you wanted to publish a trade book

this time?

Yeah, I, in some ways, it was a little bit

accidental. I kind of stumbled into it, and then got more and

more excited by the prospect once it had started. But I did a

few radio programs for the BBC, and kind of off the back of

that, I was approached by multiple literary agents asking

if I'd considered writing a book about Elizabethan England and

colonialism for a broader audience. One program had been

about the evidence of ruffs found on the Jamestown

archeological site, for example. So, kind of using a

quintessential signifier of of the Elizabethan era and thinking

about what it might tell us about status and power in early

colonial Virginia. So, from those initial conversations, I

ended up going with the agent who I felt really understood my

interests and and my my idea of where I wanted to take the book

project, how I wanted to organize it. I remember really

vividly. We were sitting on the terrace at Somerset House in

London, so we were a stone's throw from where Anne of

Denmark, James the First's wife, displayed her own cabinets of

curiosities in the early 17th century, really near to where

Walter Raleigh had hosted two Carolina Algonquin men in his

mansion, and so we kind of talked about what the book might

look like. And I started working on a proposal from there, and I

was attracted to the idea of disseminating my ideas to a

wider public because I felt that there was a growing interest in

the UK around colonial histories, but that these often

focused on the slave trade and also on the East India Company

and its relationships to with Asia, and all of these are of

course immensely important. And it's been amazing to see the

projects and new interpretations and heritage sites and museum

collections that have come out of these initiatives, but I did

feel that there was a lack of knowledge about how Indigenous

peoples' labor and knowledge contributed to the culture and

esthetics of the Renaissance. And so, yeah, I mean, from

there, lots of publishers were interested in the book, which

was a really lucky position to be in, and it just involved some

hard decisions about which press I wanted to go for in the end,

but kind of tied to to my love of writing, I was drawn to

publishing with Faber because my editor seemed really behind the

project. She was happy to have the book be a bit unusual. It's

not a strictly chronological story. A lot of trade editors.

Kind of want that chronology because it is more helpful for

for readers in a lot of ways. The travels of objects aren't

perfectly linear, but part of the book is about disrupting

easy narratives about the English going out and

establishing a dominant presence in different parts of the

Americas. So, having an editor on board who kind of understood

that was really important.

Did you find that writing a book intended for

a trade audience versus an academic one, did that change

your process?

Yeah, it it's tricky because trade books, I

mean, the editors want a lot of description. You know, they want

a lot of scene setting, and we might not necessarily be used to

doing that as historians working in academia, where I kind of

needed to lean into descriptive detail. But at the same time, I

think you know we're kind of trained to think that's a bit

cringe or not very, you know, serious. And so I did find that

I needed to kind of think about what my prose was going to look

like, what kind of concessions to this different form of

writing I would need to make, and which hills I kind of would

die on and would not go, what routes I just wouldn't go down.

But I did find myself trying to figure out what the weather was

like in a particularly hot Elizabethan summer, so I could

put myself in the shoes of the alchemist and translator Richard

Eden as he set to work translating passages about

Atlantic travel for his patrons, or watching videos about

contemporary Inuit sealskin preparation to write more

knowledgeably about the parkas that English privateers brought

to Elizabethan London from Nunavit, and what is today

Canada, and I think it did help me slow down a little bit and

just spend a bit more time with sources. I think sometimes I get

a bit greedy and I start to find evidence of something, and I

just want to find more evidence of this and kind of look

elsewhere and kind of collate all these materials together and

build a bigger picture right away, and actually just sitting

a bit more with various sources and seeing what I could learn

from them and and get out of them was actually really beneficial.

I want to talk more about the book and the

research you did for it, so I actually will ask you if you're

up for it to read this excerpt. This passage is called a

"Guiiana Idoll of Gold and Copper."

“In the summer of 1618, a fallen favourite

facing death clambered into a rowboat and tried to flee to

France. On his finger, he wore a diamond ring, a cherished gift

from a long-dead queen, harking back to the days when he had

been adored by Elizabeth herself. He also carried a less

expensive object, one that had been crafted far from the

artisans’ workshops of London: a copper-and-gold figure made by

Indigenous metallurgists, acquired somewhere in the

tropical forests of the Amazon. This was Walter Ralegh’s

second attempt at evading his captors, but it was a

half-hearted one, and he was soon wrested back into custody.

Several months later, he was dead, executed on the orders of

Elizabeth’s successor, James I, who had always harboured

contempt for him. When authorities drew up an inventory

of everything Ralegh had been carrying with him at his arrest,

the Indigenous artefact appeared first on the list. All we know

of this figure is contained in these few words: ‘A Guiana Idoll

of gold & copper.’ Likely a sacred entity, perhaps intended

to be buried next to the body of a deceased ruler, it had

travelled into a land whose beholders viewed it as an alien

thing, used as evidence of the marvellous possibilities for

precious metals in Arawak and Warao lands along the Orinoco

Delta of what is now Venezuela.”

So, part of the reason I chose this passage is

because objects are at the heart of this book and of this

history. And you mentioned specifically to me ahead of time

how some of the objects you encountered, like this one,

changed the way you saw some of these histories. So let's start

with this one. Tell me how sort of the story of this object

changed the way you approach this history.

Yes. So I love this artifact, even though it no

longer survives, and it is a bit of a a ghostly artifact. And we

might discuss this a bit more later. But writing histories

told through objects, you know, this is often something that's

seen as quite grounding and quite accessible. But objects

are also just so mysterious and kind of frustratingly so, and

the kinds of evidence that they provide really varies. So, in

some cases, in the book, in the case of the emeralds and the

Cheapside hoard, for example, or in pieces of eight, we have

tangible surviving objects that provide the starting point for

historical inquiry. But in this case, the object is just this

mention within a text. So we have this line from an

inventory, and yet coming across it became the basis for my

chapter. It was, coming across this amazing detail that Walter

Raleigh had this indigenous artifact with him at his arrest

in 1618, in those final months before he was beheaded, that

really gave me a new approach through which to navigate his

seminal book known as *The Discovery of Guyana* So the

first thing I grappled with when I came across this inventory,

which hasn't really, to my knowledge, been discussed by

scholars before, is what this Guyana idol of gold and copper

is. The description is given to us with a typical Protestant

gloss. Idol is often, you know, dismissively or negatively used

to describe what reformers viewed as a kind of pagan or

non-Christian object, but the clue is in the mix of metals. So

copper, gold alloy figures from the Americas are now known as

tombagas, and so these these seven words scrawled in official

state documentation led me to think more about Taíno and

Arawakan metalworking techniques, and also just to

look for more evidence of them in Elizabethan and Jacobean

writing. So I found a couple other examples as well, and

invited me to think a bit more about contrasting notions of

value as they're understood by the different communities that

Walter Raleigh kind of encounters during his travels as

well. A lot of times, I think when we think about precious

metals in the Renaissance imagination, the tendency is to

think about mass resource extraction or mythical

adventures like Raleigh's search for Manoa or El Dorado, and we

think maybe a bit less about artisanal handiwork. So for me,

the Tumbaga reference was an important corrective and

reminding us that access to South American gold often

involved indigenous agents, miners, refiners, go betweens,

and that gold ore or copper gold alloys-they're often shaped like

birds or like moons, they're not magically appearing from thin

air like treasure in a fairy story. And so, following these

copper gold figures in the writings of various travelers, I

think encourages us to think of these spaces not just as these

landscapes there to be exploited, as the English saw

them, but through the indigenous hands who made visible that gold

that Elizabethans are are coveting, so it really opens up.

I think the English exposure to indigenous trade routes and

longstanding metalworking practices, how they have their

own currencies of trade and exchange along the Orinoco River

and further afield, but also how indigenous artifacts are then

present in Tudor London, carried by perhaps one of the best known

names of the English Renaissance, and so I think it

sheds light on the humans as well as the artifacts. I think I

say in the introduction to my book, you know, that talking

about objects is a way of talking about people, and

Raleigh's account is full of rumors of gold, but it's also

about establishing alliances with regional rulers. He writes

about his discussions with Topiawari, the ruler of Aramaia.

Topiawari's son is part of the exchange and comes to London

with Raleigh. There's mentions of Martin the Arawakan, a boy

who is christened Charles, who ends up in Chelsea in 1597. So,

to me, that even just then revisiting better known

references to Raleigh and his voyages in England kind of

shifts, I think, the focus a bit. So, Falstaff in

Shakespeare's *Merry Wives of Windsor* calls Mistress Page "a

region in Guyana, all gold and bounty." And you know, perhaps

audience members also thought of those Arawaks who accompanied

You know, one of the things I really found

Raleigh to London.

remarkable in this book and that I loved is how how effective it

is when you use these objects to bring parts of the world

together, so that you're sort of telling the story from Europe

and from the Americas, sort of at at once. They're very much

side by side. It's not often, I find that sort of Atlantic world

histories are still from one perspective or the other, kind

of either standing in Europe, looking looking west, or vice

versa. And I really like how using the objects allows you

kind of to stand, so to speak, on both shores. What did it take

to do that? What did it? I it seems easy when I read it, and I

am certain that it was not in the writing and researching. So,

what did it take to kind of bring both perspectives

together?

Yeah, this was this was difficult to do, but

also one of my favorite parts of writing the book. And I guess

the really short answer is a lot of research, and I'd never come

across any mentions of the conditions of emerald mining in

art history books, for example, describing emeralds in Tudor

art. And yet, because emeralds come from a really specific

region in Muzo and Wisca homelands in what is today

Colombia, bringing those two spaces together through

traveling emeralds seemed like such a good way of connecting

labor and consumption. And so, it it did take having to study

many, many different indigenous cultures and all their distinct

ways of seeing the world, all the varying ways that they were

impacted by and challenged and affected European attempts at

colonizing their lands. I think my research took some

inspiration from contemporary discourse about supply chains

and commodity chains. During the pandemic, I listened to a lot of

podcasts like Wardrobe Crises or Business of Fashion, which kind

of outline debates within the fashion industry around networks

of labor and production, and how the lives of workers and

factories across the globe are connected to the things we

consume and wear. And I'm really intrigued by where things are

made and where they come from. I like clothing brands that are

transparent about where their factories are, and it kind of

baffles me, you know, that on one hand there's these amazing

initiatives on the part of brands to make visible details

of kind of environmental impacts and and you know the wages of

garment workers, and then on the other hand, we live in a time of

mind-boggling scales of production and waste

colonialism. And in some ways, I kind of wanted to see if I could

trace objects from their places of origin to where they end up,

and to think about where and when consumers in Tudor and

Stuart England might link American objects to their places

of origins. When when was it beneficial or interesting to

them to have those associations with the Americas? And when do

certain resources kind of lose those associations along the

way? So Elizabethans love indigenous-made featherwork, for

example, and its associations with American cultures are a big

part of their appeal, but then they're very keen to

disassociate themselves from silver production because of the

horrible known labor conditions in Potosí, in present-day

Bolivia. So I kind of wanted to come to it a bit from that

angle, thinking about how the Tudors, even when they don't

have colonies themselves, are kind of dependent on colonial

economies in the Atlantic. But also, it was really valuable for

me to think about material belongings or artifacts in order

to raise attention to indigenous knowledge, often women's

knowledge, and making that visible in 17th century England,

so this multi-layered storytelling became a way of

trying to center or make room for indigenous ideas about land

and memory and kinship, even in a history, a kind of domestic

history of the of the Tudors and Stuarts. So, a basket sent to an

English woman named Virginia, who's actually named after the

Virginia Company because her father is so obsessed with it,

but a basket sent to Virginia from the Algonquin Chesapeake

can kind of encourage us to think about Virginia Company

merchants and collecting practices, but it also becomes

evidence of Algonquian women's expertise in England, and we

might not know much about the the basket, but it tangibly

brings the knowledge and labor of native women into a house in

Cambridgeshire, carried through its husks and sweet grasses. So

materials that are really intimately tied to native land,

as well as its people, it's kind of carrying the stories and

histories of a people in the way that the basket is patterned and

woven. So, yeah, that kind of multi-storied,

multi-perspectival approach. I kind of wanted to show how one

person's commodity, whether it's a basket or a tobacco plant, or

a beaver hat, is also another person's history, or kin, or

ancestral knowledge.

I have another question I want to ask, but

first, I want to know: Do you do you ever think of yourself as an

environmental historian? This felt like a very environmental

history to me, but I don't think you describe yourself.

No, the answer is no. I never have, and I and I

love the work of environmental historians. I mean, I think it's

yeah, it's such a fruitful approach and and way of thinking

about things. And I guess you know, works like Christine

DeLucia's Memory Lands is a book that kind of thinks about

conflict, war, indigenous studies, but kind of through the

environment, and so I suppose things like that are kind of in

the back of my mind. But I've yeah haven't thought of myself

as such.

I am curious. I was curious reading, and even

more so listening to you talk because, as we know, evidence of

indigenous perspectives and practices is fragmentary at best

in archives and in. Traditional archives and complicated, but

the way you write about those perspectives and histories and

contexts does not feel fragmentary in the book. It

feels fully developed. How did you go about researching those

perspectives?

Yeah, this this was something I thought a lot

about. We've been talking a lot about objects, artifacts. I

think I used the word material belonging at one point, which I

kind of use in the book as a as a way that's that moves around

away from objects as perhaps kind of inactive or inert

forces. But when writing about those belongings that have

connections to indigenous communities, this was tricky

because I don't want to misrepresent an artifact that

I'm writing about or claim knowledge about it that I don't

have. So it was important to me to really make clear in the book

what my positionality is that I am qualified to write a history

of Tudor and Stuart England. But equally, a key argument of the

book is that this history can't be understood without

understanding colonialism and the Anglo-Indigenous encounters

that emerged as a result, the golden world of early modern

London is deeply connected to English piracy projects and

those transatlantic encounters that make Indigenous peoples and

lands a part of English culture. And so, the best way for me to

really go about doing this was to cite, but make clear that I'm

not speaking for Indigenous communities, and instead that

I'm kind of engaging with their work and the knowledge they have

made known to us, those of us on who are outside their

communities, it's kind of crazy to think, but I mean, most trade

books about Tudor colonialism, they don't cite indigenous

sources and and indigenous thinkers, and and the number of

times I've been told, you know, how how can you cite indigenous

peoples because there are no, you know, indigenous scholars

who were writing about this material, you know, and so how

can you bring them into the conversation? So, in terms of

bringing artifacts to life for readers, in the cases where they

are indigenous made, I try to defer to indigenous voices where

possible. Every chapter cites knowledge holders from the

relevant communities. So, in a chapter about seal skin

garments, yes, I talk about English sailors and merchants

describing Inuit parkas and kayaks. But a more comprehensive

picture emerges if I also talk about the ulu, the tools used by

women to prepare skins. If I quote contemporary Inuit makers

speaking about the importance of seals in their culture, to write

the chapter on on rakiok, a type of wood in the Carolinas, I

watched films by Algonquin canoe makers about the significance of

of wood and how canoes are carved. So it was really

important to me, though though a big challenge in a trade book

marketed to people who are interested in the world of Henry

VIII and Elizabeth the First to show how it makes sense to bring

in a Tupi artist working today in a chapter about habits of

collecting Brazilian featherwork among courtiers in Tudor London.

So, from a sort of purely practical craft

perspective, one challenge to writing about objects or places

or other things best experience through touch or sight or smell,

translating those into words for readers and bringing them to

life presents its own challenges. What were your

approaches to bringing these objects to life?

Well, as we've talked about, trade writing

often deploys a lot of description. This was part of

the fun, but it does take some getting used to. I think as

we've been talking about going from a more academic description

to one for a non-specialist reader, so I was always kind of

worried about veering into the the kind of tacky or the the the

obsessive kind of thick descriptions of things as well,

so it was a balancing act. It kind of involved thinking like

an archeologist and perhaps also some sometimes like a poet. So

on one hand, I spent months on the Jamestown archeological

site, not only handling objects but also reading detailed

studies of various object findings, from clay tobacco

pipes to animal bones and corn cobs, all kinds of practical

information about length and weight and provenance of

materials, etc. And so, the challenge was getting that

balance right between providing necessary details about what an

object looks like, or or ways, or how it sparkles in light, and

addressing that. So what? In that sense of how this

description fits into a bigger understanding of its context.

Use or how it affected the person who wore the object, or

who smoked it, or cultivated it, whatever the case may be. I

teach a lot of Elizabethan literature, so I enjoyed kind of

zooming into an object and thinking about its materiality,

and then zooming out to its place in culture. So, how we

might start with a description of a Massachusetts beaver before

moving on to its afterlife as a hat, and then onto how beaver

hats are satirized in plays at the Globe or Blackfriars

Theater. When I was in the midst of revising the book, I spent a

few days in London and Oxford, just sitting in front of the

display glass in my favorite museums, just coming face to

face with objects again, rereading museum labels,

thinking about how early modern owners might have lived with

these objects-silver bowls or emerald encased book covers,

maps and globes, feather work-and as you say, I think

there's something really affecting in that sense of of

touch and of trying to recover for readers, especially those

who haven't gone into a profession that involves holding

lots of really old things, about what it feels like to touch the

woven fibers of a feather work made 400 years ago, and also I

think we're lucky to live in an age where so many materials are

available digitally, but sometimes you need to commune

with an object. Although I'm aware this makes me possibly

sound like a very devout 17th century Catholic kneeling at a

cabinet or something, but that that's something I was very

aware of as well. That historic objects are wonderful, but

there's a risk of kind of making them fetishistic too, and

artifacts are important archival fragments. But I also undergird

and kind of contextualize that with with many many kind of

written sources as well. So lots of travel books and inventories

and merchants' ledgers and state reports. So I do think we need

all those different sources together to really understand

those connected histories.

Was it easier or harder to describe something

like that Guyana idol, where you didn't actually have the object

to look at, and you just had words to go on, or was did that?

I'm just-that's a random.

Yeah, no, I-I like that. I think it probably,

in some ways, is easier. I don't know what that says about my

brain. I'm sure art historians would be shocked and horrified,

but I mean, I'm writing an exhibition catalog at the

moment, or a piece of a catalog, and sometimes when the the

object is right in front of you, there is something I don't know

a bit trickier about getting that balance of conveying what's

what's interesting and and kind of eye catching about it, but

being kind of methodical in the way you talk about it at the

same time.

How did you find and decide on the objects that

you would use to anchor these chapters.

So I wanted objects that spanned the first

half century or so of English colonial endeavors. So I knew I

kind of wanted to span from the Middle Elizabethan era,

particularly kind of the 1580s when England is at war with

Spain and interests in the Atlantic are growing, and then

to the 1630s and the kind of lead up to the English Civil

Wars, so I tried to choose objects that would let me tell

stories of encounter with lots of different indigenous groups.

So not just the better known English encounters with

Powhatans in Seneca Maca, for example, or the the Wampanoag in

in Donland or New England, but also Tupi peoples in Brazil, or

the the Mexica, the the Aztecs in Mesoamerica, and even the

Miskitu in what is today Nicaragua and Honduras. I think

not many people who who aren't scholars of this area, I think,

know that Puritans were sending ships to settle islands off the

coast of Nicaragua at the same time as they were sending

settlers to Massachusetts Bay. So I tried to choose objects

that opened up insights into many different kinds of

encounters across many different locations in the Americas, while

thinking about how these fit into the story of empire

building and colonial consumption that I was also

telling about early modern London. So I wanted chapters to

seem in some way kind of recognizably or quintessentially

Elizabethan or Jacobean, and then containing little twists or

unexpected details. So the first chapter just seemed like I knew

that that was the place I wanted to start with Martin Frobisher.

So a story of an Elizabethan sea dog trying to find a Northwest

Passage to Asia, who ends up plundering Canada for what he

thinks is gold and is actually fool's gold. So that was just

the perfect way to start a book called *A Golden World* But it

also illustrated one of my key points so perfectly that we can

follow the adventurer, and if we only follow in his footsteps,

then we're kind of blinded to the two-way nature of exchange,

where Inuit people and garments are also coming into London as a

result. I then had to balance an attention to objects with

storytelling and narrative development, so choosing what

objects I needed to then spotlight those diverse

encounters while also being broadly chronological was

difficult. The book isn't meant to be comprehensive, so some

objects just didn't make it into the book. If I if I found that I

could already tell that story of cross cultural encounter with a

different object, so I don't talk about certain dyes from the

Americas because I already have a chapter about cochineal, or I

would have loved to talk about whalebone, but then my chapter

on pearls already drew links between Atlantic fishing and the

elite body, that kind of thing. In terms of where I actually

found the objects, you know, some are just old favorites that

I've studied for years, ones that I've encountered through

research and collaboration with with museums in the UK,

especially so the the Ashmolean in Oxford, the Pitt Rivers, the

British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, somewhere in US,

based collections, including materials from anthropology

departments, because I think there's still a bit of a divide

between Indigenous and European art and kind of where they're

displayed and where they find themselves in different

institutions. Though luckily this is changing, and inspired

by exhibitions and things as well. So I I kind of stumbled on

an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa

Barbara last December on the blood of the Nopal, so about

cochineal, and it featured Zapotec artists' work with the

substance and things, so yeah, a lot of working out kind of where

the objects survive, where I can find representations of what

objects may have looked like because they we don't have

surviving examples. And the last thing I would say is just the

the images included in the book as well. I think I, you know, I

really try to get a sense of that representation and range.

So I wanted someone flipping through the insets in the book

to get a sense of its breadth and diversity.

So there's beautiful court miniatures and still life

paintings, but then there's also a 16th century watercolor of an

enslaved African pearl diver, but also a painting by a

Peruvian artist of the the Cimarrons or the Maroons, the

community of previously enslaved African men and women who

resisted Spanish oppression and lived in settlements with

indigenous communities. There are plants and precious metals,

but also indigenous-made artifacts from North, Central,

and South America, so I really wanted that balance.

It may seem like a small thing in the scheme of

things, but I realized that there were no chapter numbers in

this book, which is kind of unusual. Although I don't, I

don't know why it's so unusual, and it has the effect of making

it feel more like essays rather than, as you talked about, sort

of like a chronological narrative, how did you think

about structuring the book?

Yeah, so this was an absolute aim. I I wanted

readers to be able to come back to this book to revisit the

chapters when and where they might come in handy. So I could

imagine someone visiting a museum or a historic site and

flipping to the chapter on gardens and plantations, or the

chapter on women's patronage of travel books. Someone on social

media recently cited a chapter in my book because she was going

through a 17th century inventory and wanted to know more about

where emeralds came from, and and I was very pleased to see

that because that's exactly the kind of connections I want to

help people make. I'm also part of a network in the UK for

teachers who want to teach Indigenous histories and

perspectives in schools, so I thought it would be useful to be

able to recommend, say, the chapter on Roanoke or on animals

as a way to bring in some of these histories within a unit

like the Tudors on the government mandated curriculum.

So yeah, I kind of wanted the the book to be broadly

chronological, but to have each essay be able to stand on its

its own as well. So each has its own kind of internal logic, its

own conceits. The chapter on animals brings cabinets of

curiosities and conversation with a strange plot by the Duke

of Buckingham to get involved with the Caribbean. The chapter

on Roanoke watercolors and the so-called Drake manuscript

becomes a reflection on art history and Elizabethan

portraiture and the uses of bad art and that kind of thing.

Yeah, you mentioned that that teacher

program, and it sort of leads to my next question, which is that

I I wanted to know a little bit more about some of your public

facing work and how you think about its relationship with book

writing. So you mentioned earlier that some of the. In

this book, first appeared on BBC Radio as as programs. We also

know in your acknowledgements that you freelance for the

National Portrait Gallery, which I thought was really

interesting. How do you think about how those things shape

your approach to writing history?

Yeah, so I was selected as a New Generation

Thinker for BBC Radio Three in 2021, and it's a scheme where 10

academics, although sadly due to funding cuts, I think it started

out to five, are selected to work with producers and

contribute to programming, and you gain experience in bringing

academic research to non-specialist audiences. So

that involved appearing on a few episodes of Free Thinking, which

is more kind of a roundtable or panel discussion between various

writers and artists. And then I was also commissioned to produce

two episodes about fashion and colonialism for a series they

were doing. I mentioned earlier the ruffs in Jamestown. Another

one was called "Boy with a Pearl Earring, so I actually kept that

chapter title in the book as well. And then I also wrote what

the BBC calls little postcards or five minute insets into

programs. So I did one on still life paintings, which again you

can kind of see reflected in the book, and one on Thanksgiving.

So I think in the publishing industry there is a sense that

radio work can be kind of abridged trade writing, which is

why I think I got interest in potentially writing a book after

I did the radio programs. But one of the reasons I applied to

the scheme, even though it involved an extremely mortifying

round of kind of eliminations and elevator pitches and stage

debates and like all these things that I would never want

to kind of do of my own volition usually, but was because I felt

that it would be good for me to step back from my work and see

if I could talk about it in a way that might contribute to

cultural conversations, and I kind of saw this as an area I

needed to work on, and that maybe this was a good way of

forcing myself to put myself out there a bit more, be able to

talk about my work, trade book. I mean, trade book writing isn't

for everyone, and I mean, for example, in the UK, our kind of

mandatory research excellence framework assessment process,

which I will not go into, that we're kind of beholden to for

for kind of government support and funding and things, don't

actually count trade books as a as like an output, as like a

publication. So actually, the trade book is a way for me to

kind of do more in that area of public engagement and impact,

which is an area within it in some ways. But I I really

enjoyed writing and presenting a program where I could talk about

a 1630s cavalier poem about Madagascar in the same breath as

I was reviewing artwork by a Senegalese artist in the V&A's

Fashioning Masculinities exhibition, so I think doing

that work for the BBC was and and kind of still is a valuable

exercise in trying to put a finger on the pulse of the

contemporary moment, but in a way that can also throw up other

questions and concerns about my academic work. I think sometimes

it's quite easy to become fixed or entrenched in certain

preoccupations and ways of of looking at things. I won't say

too much about the National Portrait Gallery, but I yeah I

started freelancing for the London National Portrait Gallery

back as a PhD student, and I delivered sessions on Tudor

portraiture for the gallery's educational programming. So I

was lecturing to school groups about the tutors, and it was

really there where I got to kind of think a bit more about you

know the amazing work that art historians are doing around

scientific analysis and kind of just the tools that they have

for zooming into portraits on microscopic levels and reading

these reports on dyes and where the wood in a portrait is is

coming from, and that kind of thing. So those that exposure to

those resources and ways of thinking about portraits as

material culture, at the same time as I was thinking about

archeology and history, I think was was really formative.

I also had to take the school groups then up into the

galleries to talk to them about portraits, and that was again a

really good exercise in like captivating an audience that may

not even necessarily want to be there, and to to see how you

could kind of bring them into the conversation in ways that

engaged or or stimulated them. And then over the years, my work

with the the NPG has kind of really developed into some other

nice opportunities to do things like sit on one of their

advisory boards for kind of thinking about empire in

relation to the Tudors and Stuarts and and that kind of

thing. So yeah, work that I hope will will continue because

they've got just such a brilliant collection of

portraits.

In the last bit of our time, I'd like to ask you

to share a little inspiration with listeners, so I'm wondering

what the most influential writing advice is you've ever

gotten.

I love people's responses to this on your on

your show, and I feel like nothing I say will will be

anything that they haven't heard, and probably better put.

But I think something that that actually I've been thinking

about recently because. A mentor of mine mentioned it again to

me, but made me think of of my PhD supervisor, who always just

really encouraged me to write what I wanted to write, and not

just what I felt that I should write. And this may sound

evident, but when you know when you are starting out in your

career, I think there can be a lot of pressure from, be it

funding bodies or you know senior academics, not

necessarily on purpose, but as to the direction that you should

be taking your work. My supervisor doesn't have a mobile

phone. I once had to call him at his hairdresser's to get through

to him in advance of a meeting that we had scheduled. He was

never very that impressed with kind of other activities and

things I was doing other than researching, and I mean I I love

public engagement projects. I'm working on one now with the

National Trust, but I think what he was really getting at was the

importance of guarding one's time and of giving oneself time

to think about the sources and not to get distracted by what is

trendy or popular or what others think you should be doing. So he

he always encouraged me to read widely, to be receptive to

ideas, to read histories outside your specialism or interest, to

read novels, not not to get imprisoned by your niche. I

think it it gets a bit dark and dusty in those architectural

recesses otherwise.

Who do you read for inspiration? Have you read

any books recently that you would recommend?

I have recently read finally Sarah E. Johnson's

The Making of Moreau de Saint-Mery's

Intellectual World. It's a book about the 18th century Atlantic,

so it's outside the scope of my expertise. But I really loved

how Johnson turned a biography about an Enlightenment thinker

into, as she as she puts it, a communal biography of all those

free and enslaved people who made his life and works what

they are. And there's a lot of kind of creative innovation in

the book, you know, kind of playing with fonts, with images,

with juxtaposition, that I think really encourages us to confront

the choices that we make when we write the histories of others.

As we wrap up here, I am curious to know: Will

you write another trade book? Do you think there's more in your

future?

Well, my agent desperately wants to know the

answer to this question. I've got few ideas up my sleeve, but

I do. I would also like to write another academic book. So, I

think my challenge-the challenge to me going forward-is how how

to make that work? Whether or not concurrent projects that are

quite different are are possible, but I think I will

take a little bit of you know everything I've learned when

writing the trade book, even when I turn to my academic

writing from now on.

Well, Dr. Lauren Working, thank you so much for

joining me on Drafting the Past and talking about your writing

process. Thank you, Kate. Thanks again to Dr. Lauren Working for

joining me on this episode of the podcast. To get a copy of

her book, A Golden World, which I highly recommend, look for the

link in the show notes. You'll also find links to everything

else we mentioned in this episode. Don't forget to sign up

for the newsletter at draftingthepast.com so you don't

miss all of the great new things we have coming this fall. Until

next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring

history.