Even in the days of the Pastons, the Old World was expanding.

The European colonial adventure that began in the fifteenth century brought traders and explorers, soldiers and administrators into contact with new and unfamiliar cultures, peoples generally unhappy to be the objects of conquest and the projection of maritime power. A history of woeful oppression, slavery, exploitation and very gradual liberation fills the pages of a thousand history books. But the cannier or luckier women of indigenous elites were sometimes able to finesse foreigners’ policies to their own advantage, in the process becoming enshrined in European written narratives of conquest, conversion and imperial rule.