The World is Lately Growne: Representing a Global World in Early Modern English Broadside Ballads

The early modern period witnessed large scale global expansion and interconnectivity. This thesis demonstrates that broadside ballads provide an insight into how their consumers imagined the outside world during a highly dynamic period. Through their liminal form (amalgams of tunes, texts, woodcut images and public performances), ballads created emotional communal moments which embedded their representations of the outside world in the minds of the audience. This study focuses on ballads describing non-European people and places. These constitute a minority of the total ballad corpus and have often been overlooked, or not placed into a wider, global context. By analysing representations of sailors, the dangers of the sea, the Americas, and the Islamic World, I demonstrate how the early modern global world was imagined. Ballads comment upon the outside world, emphasise the human cost of enriching the nation and were significant in the colonial enterprises of early modern joint-stock companies. They frame foreign cultures in varying and contradicting ways depending on prevailing political interests. The significance of this study is that it emphasises the ways in which the global world informed ballads and is reflected in them. By analysing ballad narratives within their cultural andproduction contexts, highlighting the web of connections that joins them to other literary forms, and incorporating the contemporary knowledge held by the audience, we can analyse how different works and events would have been received