Making difference: Aliens, strangers and others in early modern London, 1580--1680.

摘要

In the century from 1580 to 1680 the government of the City of London consistently responded to difference as a threat. Responses to the presence of French and Dutch Protestants, Jewish immigrants and supplicants for relief from captivity in Muslim lands announced who was a Londoner, who was English and who did not fit in. These actions created stereotypes that cut across national or religious lines. Londoners and their government expressed concerns about the nature of alienness itself, rather than about the specific national characteristics of the city's immigrant population. And in enacting measures against the children of aliens, civic authorities defined belonging on the basis of English descent. The Crown, meanwhile, generally favoured immigration and, in defending the rights of immigrants' children, embraced a notion of Englishness grounded in birth under the allegiance of the monarch. Yet both created their respective markers of difference through the course of daily practice, in response to a broad range of issues, not just matters of immigration.;Historians and literary critics have often attempted to identity specific groups as the central ‘other’ of early modern England. Approaches to issues of difference have also tended to create a distinction between irrational popular xenophobia and more rational fears of economic competition. I argue that such distinctions cannot be maintained, and that concerns and policies relating to the economy, trade, employment and taxation all defined the boundaries of belonging and exclusion. By examining the records of the Courts of Aldermen and Common Council, as well as of the Lord Mayor and the Company of Weavers, I reconstruct the most prevalent markers of difference in the City of London from the 1580s to the 1680s. I gauge the responses of central government by studying the registers of the Privy Council, the Council of State and state papers. In doing so, I argue that daily practice in a broad range of areas created difference and that a disparity existed between City and Crown in matters of belonging.