For at least the last two hundred years, 'race' has functioned as one of the most powerful and yet most fragile markers of social difference. It is one of the great ironies of imperial history that ideologies of racial differences have hardened as a direct response to racial and cultural crossovers; conversely, colonial enterprises have facilitated contact and exchange between people of different ethnicities, religions and cultures. Notions of alterity or exchange thus derive their meaning from one another. Here I want to explore some aspects of this mirrordance on the stages of Shakespeare's time - a time which can be characterized as either the last period in history where ethnic identities could be understood as fluid, or as the first moment of the emergence of modern notions of 'race'.

We are beginning to interrogate the crucial differences between twentieth-century and early modern ideologies of racial and cultural difference. Between the two stand four centuries of colonial relations which profoundly reshaped global relations.