ABSTRACT
John Pory's edition of Leo Africanus's A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600) circulated widely in England at a time when the English were beginning to conceive of themselves as a “nation” and at a time of increased English awareness of the complicating presence of foreigners within their “realm.” It helped to establish the terms of identification that formed the bedrock of an incipient racism centuries before the taxonomies and methodologies of the nineteenth century established a language of racialization purportedly based in science. This is not to say that an implacable prejudice was not already prevalent, however, in particular against those who could not easily lay claim to an emerging sense of “Englishness.” Queen Elizabeth demonstrated something of this intolerance in her notorious proclamations of 1596 and 1601, in which she articulated “the great annoyance” of her people at the “great numbers of negars and Blackamoores” within “this realm” and ordered their expulsion. Her proclamation of 1601 – delivered just two years before Othello was first performed before the new monarch, James I, in 1603, and a year after Pory's edition of Leo Africanus's Geographical Historie was published 1 – suggests that English society was far from being homogeneous in 1600. 2
