ABSTRACT
During the seventeenth century Indians became one of the popular strangers to appear in London’s Lord Mayor’s Shows. This proliferation of Indians in civic pageantry coincided with a moment when increasingly the Lord Mayor and his aldermanic bench had stakes in any one or all of the new trading companies. The East India Company’s activities flooded English markets not only with traditional commodities like spices but also catered to the growing marketplace for curiosities. Read alongside this growing demand for strange objects, the animals and natives portrayed in Thomas Heywood’s Porta Pietatis (1638) become readily collectable objects. This chapter seeks to explore the economic and civic implications of staging strangers, particularly Indians, and the strange, exotic animals in seventeenth-century Shows. Together they reveal the often paradoxical ways in which the city reacted to a new era of global trade. Simultaneously, they help us to re-examine the emergent racial hierarchies that sought to classify and taxonomise natives even as the Company attempted to catalogue the flora and fauna of the East Indies.
