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In 1596, Queen Elizabeth issued an "open letter" to the Lord Mayor of London, announcing that "there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are allready here to manie," and ordering that they be deported from the country.1 One week later, she reiterated her "good pleasure to have those kinde of people sent out of the lande" and commissioned the merchant Casper van Senden to "take up" certain "blackamoores here in this realme and to transport them into Spaine and Portugall."2 Finally, in 1601, she complained again about the "great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors which (as she is informed) are crept into this realm," defamed them as "infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel," and, one last time, authorized their deportation.3
England was, of course, no stranger to strangers, nor to discrimination against them. As Laura Hunt Yungblut has shown. European immigrants constituted a noticeable part of the English population starting in the twelfth century.4 Although they could gain some rights of citizenship, the Crown taxed or restricted their residency whenever political or economic expediency warranted. Elizabeth herself repeatedly authorized the expulsion of immigrants.5 Yet Elizabeth's orders to deport certain "blackamoors" are, in fact, unique, for they articulate and attempt to put into place a race-based cultural barrier of a sort England had not seen since the expulsion of the Jews at the end of the thirteenth century.6 In justifying the geographical alienation of certain "Negars and Blackamoors," the queen sets them categorically apart from her "own liege people."7 While she figures the English in terms of their national allegiance, she designates the "Negars and Blackamoors" as a "kind" of people, "those kinde," defined by skin color (the blackness stressed by "Negars" and "Biacfcamoors") and associated, less inclusively, with religion or lack of religion ("most" are "infidels"). That is, against the contrasting national identity of her subjects, she depicts and condemns "Negars and Blackamoors" generically as a race-a "black" race.8
These documents have become pivotal to critical assessments of the material and ideological place of "blacks" within England as well as of early constructions of racism and race within English literature of the period.9 Critics have read Elizabeth's letters as "the visible signature of...