"I Like This Place" Race, Conduct, and Ownership in As You Like It

Abstract

The early modern era was a time of significant transformation in England. The population was booming, enclosure was altering people’s relationship with land, and an increase in colonial projects marked a new level of globalization. These transformations expanded trade and shifted early modern understandings of the world, ultimately leading to more complex interactions with people from other places. As Jean Howard notes, the shift in population meant that “between foreigners and aliens, London must at times have felt like a city where… the mixing of different kinds of people was inevitable.”¹ While there had always been some instability, this shift in wealth and population challenged previously restrictive sociocultural boundaries in the early modern era. Patricia Akhimie explains that this shift was not just about land and money, but identity as well, since “the potential for mobility—a shift in social status, or national or cultural identity—[was] revolutionary in the early modern period… an awesome opportunity as well as an anxiety-provoking prospect.”² As space between different lands became more easily traversed, so did the space between class and the identity associated with it. Thus, the early modern population grappled not only with new ideas and cultures, but with how contact with these previously unknown entities would alter their own sense of identity.