This article explores the effects of music education carried out by Protestant missionaries on local forms of sociability in sub-Saharan Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on a methodological framework of ideal types of musical communities, the examination focuses on examples of musical encounters between missionaries and the Yoruba in West Africa, the Lobedu in South Africa, and the Nyakyusa in East Africa. A closer look at the kinds of sociability facilitated by missionary music will reveal a colonial dialectic emerging from the contrasting forces of cultural hierarchy and belonging.

In the late nineteenth century, Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) physically modified guitars and created a new technique for playing them. In the years that followed, hundreds of Hawaiian troupes, engaging new entertainment circuits that crisscrossed the globe, introduced the world to their “Hawaiian steel guitar,” from Shanghai to London, Kolkata to New Orleans. While performing Hawaiian mele, or songs, with their instrument, they demonstrated new virtues for the guitar’s potential in vernacular and commercial music making in these international markets. Based upon archival research, this essay considers the careers of several Hawaiian guitarists who travelled the world in the early twentieth century, connecting local soundscapes through the proliferation of an indigenous technology.

During the first global economy, roughly from Western industrialization to World War I, the gramophone, much like other consumer goods, circulated relatively freely around the world. This paper compares the market in India and China asking how gramophone companies established themselves there and focuses on the interaction between Western businesspeople and local partners. The article first shows how agents started exploring strategies for “localizing” music and, second, how in both countries their interaction with local partners was first shaped by curiosity and commercial interest, and later by traditionalism and nationalism, the latter of which paradoxically both inhibited and enabled Western business. Based on diaries, corporate files, trade journals, and consular reports, the paper shows that the highly localized and politicized demand for music made access to local knowledge a crucial competitive advantage.

Western visitors to Japan are often surprised at how widely European art music can be heard. The roots of what is arguably one of Japan’s greatest success stories lie in the systematic introduction and dissemination of Western music by the government after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Much research has focused on the government’s role; but how was Western music disseminated and received in different parts of Japan? This article discusses the roles of two brothers, Shikama Totsuji (1853–1928) and Shikama Jinji (1863–1941), who in different ways contributed significantly to the dissemination of Western music beyond Tokyo and in particular to the northern provincial town of Sendai.

The article assesses the role of the military in the global dissemination and exchange of music in the long nineteenth century. It shows that, first, Western military music and its instrumentation were influenced by cross-cultural encounters, primarily with the Ottoman Empire. Second, I argue that educational professionalization and instrumental standardization were important vehicles for the global rise of the military band beyond its original purpose. Third, tracing the transnational careers of some German military musicians will make evident that competition with respect to national prestige, rising imperialism, and the increasing commercialization of musical life were crucial features of the spread of military musicians all over the world, making them cultural brokers not only of military music.

The Union of the Iberian Crowns (1580–1640) promoted a wider cultural exchange between Portuguese and Spanish Asian settlements in Asia. This paper identifies the remarkable circulation of artisans and patrons and the development of new building techniques during this period, which allowed for a shared cultural dialogue that may be best described as forms of mestizage. So, it tries to address the mobility of patrons and architects, which helps explain the diffusion of techniques and models. The first case shows how cultural dialogue promoted new techniques from local traditions and materials, which were later used in neighbouring settlements. The second demonstrates the role these mixed solutions played in the creation of the image of a pure state, in the form of public palaces, a mestizo society, mainly in urban houses, and a local cultural resistance, keeping traditional housing forms in the native quarters. Thanks to this approach, the currently preserved built heritage can be seen not only as a European cultural transfer but also as the result of a fruitful global dialogue.

Among the more emphasised aspects of the Atlantic history are the mobility of ideas and goods but also the endless movement of peoples that linked the margins of the ocean and gave the Atlantic basin an indisputable cohesion. Within the theoretical framework of the subfield of Atlantic history, this study addresses the way the imperial perceptions shaped the migratory patterns of the Portuguese Atlantic, notably the transoceanic behaviour of the men who volunteered to defend its scattered territories. During a particularly difficult period in the mid-seventeenth century, the hierarchical ambiguities of Portuguese empire and its religiously charged military thought, in conjunction with the prevalent political culture of service, promoted a constant back and forth across the ocean that revealed the conceptual unity of the Portuguese Atlantic world. For these men, for a while, there were no alluring centres and unappealing peripheries; the Atlantic was conceived of as a wide circulation space essentially free from mental or emotional prejudices.