The World Beyond England

You know the Tudors. Henry VIII, the six wives, the break with Rome, Elizabeth and her Armada. But here's the thing nobody tells you: while all of that was happening, England was a small, cold, financially exhausted island that most of the world had never heard of.

In 1485, the year Henry VII scraped together his shaky new throne at Bosworth Field, the Ottoman Empire was the dominant superpower on earth. Ming China controlled a quarter of the global economy. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was three to four times the size of London. England was not the center of anything. It was watching from the edges, trying to figure out its next move.

So what happens when you put the Tudors back where they actually belong, inside a massive, complicated, wildly connected world that had no idea England was going to be important someday?

In four chapters we cover Elizabeth I's real alliance with the Ottoman Sultan (and the mechanical organ she sent him), the South American silver secretly driving Tudor inflation, Thomas More writing Utopia as a New World story, and England's own late, underfunded, morally complicated entrance onto the world stage.

Once you see how small England really was, you will never look at your favorite Tudors the same way again.