Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England contributes to the growing field of keyword studies initiated in part by Raymond Williams's Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), upon which it is modeled. It was produced with support from the European Research Council's Travel, Transculturality, and Identity in England, ca. 1500–1700 (ERC-TIDE) project. Focused on terms related to identity, race, and migration, this volume by authors and TIDE members Nandini Das, João Vicente Melo, Haig Smith, and Lauren Working includes an introduction, bibliography, and index that bookmark an encyclopedic compilation of thirty-six interdisciplinary essays investigating the selected keywords: “Alien/Stranger,” “Ambassador,” “Blackamoor/Moor,” “Broker,” “Cannibal,” “Citizen,” “Convert,” “Courtier,” “Denizen,” “Envoy,” “Exile,” “Foreigner,” “Friend/Ally,” “Gypsy,” “Heathen,” “Host,” “Indian,” “Interpreter,” “Jew,” “Mahometan,” “Mercenary,” “Merchant,” “Native,” “Pagan,” “Pirate,” “Rogue,” “Savage/Barbarian,” “Secretary,” “Settler,” “Spy,” “Subject,” “Traitor,” “Translator,” “Traveller,” “Turk,” and “Vagrant/Vagabond.”
These terms “featured centrally in English debates about migration and empire” (9). For instance, “Indian” was applied to diverse peoples from South Asia to the far-flung Americas, “collapsing widely disparate geographies under aspirations of empire” (147). Similarly, in reference to plantation, “‘settler’ . . . merged domestic ideas of establishing peace and stability with colonial attempts to ‘civilize’ other territories and its peoples” (234). Each keyword essay unpacks such semiotic “slipperiness” (18) of language, which the early modern lexicographer Antonio de Nebrija famously dubbed a partner to empire, in consideration of the term's etymology, historical usage, and philological development. A list of related keywords at the end of each essay unpacks fuller meanings, which are “nuanced . . . in juxtaposition with other terms of similar or conflicting implications” (18).
In “Gypsy,” for instance, the authors observe that the difficulty of establishing a distinct genealogy for the Romani people “challenged the categories of ‘subject,’ ‘stranger,’ and ‘traveller’ that authorities sought to impose” (125) as quasi-legal entities. Stranger is supplied as a related keyword for this chapter. As further explored throughout the volume, early modern nation-formation and empire-building involved the application of such semantically vague and illusory identity categories to distinct groups within England and beyond, establishing who did and did not belong by a combination of law and custom, and in support of a tacit social/racial hierarchy.
Part history of words, part philosophy of language, the essays in this volume are self-referential but not redundant, comprehensive but not cramped. Occasionally, however, this organizational principle becomes counterintuitive. For instance, the essay on “Rogue” omits discussion of The Rogue (1623), James Mabbe's translation of Mateo Alemán's picaresque novel, Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), which catapulted rogues into the popular English imaginary. The book is instead mentioned in the entry on “Jew” because of its usage of the term marrano. One wonders why Guzmán could not appear in both places. Given its focus on identity categories related to empire, Keywords also could have potentially called for an entry on the term emperor, whose ambiguous meaning and contested application to certain historical figures (e.g., Spain's Philip II, Universal Monarch, or Indigenous Mesoamerica's Moctezuma II, Huey Tlatoani, or Great Speaker) has provoked ample academic discussion from the early modern period to the present day.
This book does not aspire to be “exhaustive” (16), however. Rich in primary and secondary texts references, Keywords rather initiates “a process of interrogating the historical development of concepts, as well as an examination of our own assumptions about and usage of those concepts within the academy” (15). The essays in this volume of carefully curated, overlapping keywords uncover “the complexity, and often the multiplicity, that was inherent in the usage of these terms in early modern English” (18). As such, they inspire personal reflection over whether, when, and how these terms should continue to be used in writing about the past.
Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England is an accessible and indispensable reference book that suits a variety of purposes. More a point of departure into the vast dialectical void of language and identity than a finite destination, Keywords supplies a much-needed, well-researched compendium of not only the multipronged origins of words but also their varied histories and confused meanings. This open-access volume belongs in the library of every scholar of the early modern period in England.
