The English Civil War (1642-1651) was a series of armed conflicts between Royalists loyal to King Charles I and Parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell. Charles I had ruled without Parliament for 11 years before being forced to recall it in 1640 to fund a campaign against Scottish rebels. When Parliament demanded sweeping reforms, Charles attempted to arrest five of its members in January 1642, precipitating open warfare. The Parliamentarian New Model Army, reorganized under Cromwell, decisively defeated the Royalists at the Battle of Naseby in June 1645, and Charles surrendered the following year. After a failed second rising in 1648, Charles was tried by a Parliamentary High Court, found guilty as a "tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy," and beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall on January 30, 1649 (BCW Project, "The Trial of King Charles I"). Up to 200,000 people died as a result of the wars, and the monarchy was then abolished, after which England became a republic under Cromwell's Protectorate until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 (English Heritage, "The English Civil Wars: History and Stories").

The Great Plague of 1665 was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in England and one of the deadliest. Caused by the bacterium yersinia pestis and transmitted through flea bites, the epidemic killed an estimated 100,000 Londoners, roughly a quarter of the city's population (The National Archives, "Great Plague of 1665-1666"). The disease likely arrived from Amsterdam via trading ships, first striking the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields before spreading through overcrowded neighborhoods. At its peak in September 1665, weekly mortality bills recorded over 7,000 deaths from plague alone (Royal Museums Greenwich, "The Great Plague"). Charles II and his court fled to Oxford, and trade with London was suspended. The epidemic subsided by early 1666. The Great Fire that September, while devastating, did not end the plague, as the hardest-hit parishes lay outside the fire's path.

John Tradescant the Elder (c. 1570-1638) and his son John Tradescant the Younger (1608-1662) were pioneering naturalists whose careers exemplify England's growing engagement with the wider world. The Elder served as gardener to the Earl of Salisbury, the Duke of Buckingham, and eventually King Charles I, traveling to Russia, the Mediterranean, and North Africa to collect exotic plants and curiosities. He housed his collection at "The Ark" in Lambeth, widely regarded as the first public museum in England. The Younger made multiple voyages to Virginia, introducing species such as the magnolia and tulip tree, and succeeded his father as royal gardener. Their celebrated collection eventually formed the foundation of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum.

The Tradescants' botanical expeditions were inseparable from the broader project of British imperialism. The 17th century saw England establish its first permanent colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, followed by settlements in Bermuda, Barbados, and the Caribbean. By 1670, British colonies spanned New England, Maryland, and Nova Scotia, while the East India Company, chartered in 1600, built trading posts across India. Notably, the herbalist Thomas Johnson displayed the first banana seen in England at his London shop on April 10, 1633; the fruit had arrived from the recently colonized island of Bermuda. Winterson transforms this real event into the novel's inciting image, as the young Jordan gazes at Johnson's banana and envisions "deep blue waters against a pale shore" (6), an encounter that sparks his lifelong impulse toward exploration. The banana thus functions as a symbol of the colonial encounter: a small, strange object that opens a portal to distant lands, collapsing the boundaries between the known and the imagined.