Perhaps the most interesting chapter of the book concerns what we today think of as that most quintessentially English of pastimes: gardening

APPLES AND oranges, pearls, roses and seashells meet a globe, a blue-and white porcelain dish and a black boy in the Paston Treasure. The eclectic assortment of objects shown in the Dutch still life painting, which dates from the early 1660s, creator unknown, reflects the movement of people and things across the world that was well under way by the seventeenth century. Many such people and things, as Lauren Working observes in A Golden World, came from the Americas in the first era of colonisation. But how much do we really know about them, their backstories and afterlives?

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