Lauren Working for A Golden World

Lauren Working is Lecturer in Early Modern Studies at the University of York. She was shortlisted for the prestigious Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Global Writer's Award for her work on this book, and her academic book The Making of an Imperial Polity won the Royal Historical Society's prestigious Whitfield Prize in 2021.

As a BBC New Generation Thinker, she has spoken about her work across broadcast media, and worked with institutions including the National Portrait Gallery, National Trust, British Library and V&A.

She joins us for A Golden World, her glittering new history of how the Americas transformed early modern England.

From rumours of lost Amazonian cities of gold to the silver running through the mountains of Bolivia, hopes for dazzling wealth fuelled the imperial fantasies of the Tudors and Stuarts.

But while stories of treasure ships and privateers like Walter Raleigh have become entrenched in national myths - what did Elizabethans actually know about Mexico, the Amazon rainforest, or the Chesapeake? How did Indigenous people and knowledge enter the art, fashion, and literature of Shakespeare's time - and at what cost?

A Golden World illuminates how the Americas became a visible and material presence in English culture, through a range of unexpected objects: from tobacco leaves strewn in playhouses to a boy wearing a pearl earring.

Award-winning historian Lauren Working presents an altogether new history of the 'golden age' of 16th century England, that considers the desire for power, land and resources in the first era of colonization, alongside the craft and labour of those in the Americas who contributed to the English Renaissance as we know it.