Between 1584 and 1588, the Florentine merchant Filippo Sassetti sent a whole sequence of letters from India to his friends and the grand ducal court in Florence. He informed his correspondents about local Indian plants, animals, the mechanisms of commercial exchange and Indian social structures and politics. Apart from publishing and editing letters, the scholarship so far has focused on linguistic, geographic, medical and ethnographical issues related to his letters. This article focuses on a set of rarely explored resources: the valuable objects sent with Sassetti's letters to the grand duke Francesco de Medici (1541–87) and his brother cardinal Ferdinando (1549–1609). The letters are exceptional, since they allow one to reconstruct the origins and itineraries of the items that Sassetti describes in detail. None of the objects survived in Florence but some of them are traceable to the Medici inventories of the sixteenth century.

Reflecting broader trends in the study of colonial British America, historians have increasingly recognised the transatlantic nature of Protestant mission work. Both homeland and colonial participants shared a common worldview and goal when it came to the conversion of Native Americans. However, historians frequently present a bifurcated process: British-based mission boards and agencies provided funding and broad parameters, while colonial agents, ministers, and officials dictated the ways in which the missionaries themselves operated. In general, this is an accurate reflection of the reality of the Atlantic world, given the communication times and the normal inability of British sponsors to visit any work in progress. These limitations often led to a disconnect between goals laid out in Britain and practices on the ground in the colonies. An exception to this practice can be found in the early attempts of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) to establish a mission presence in New England.

If there is one thing that everyone interested in international development issues knows, or thinks they know, it is that the countries of Asia, and especially East and Southeast Asia, have performed much better in the international development stakes since 1960 than the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. The principal metric used to measure achievement is growth in per capita GDP, although other indicators have also become widely used, including those such as the Human Development Index, which combines per capita GDP with other measures of social achievement such as literacy rates, school enrolments and infant mortality rates. But whatever measure we use to construct league tables of development progress, at the end of the twentieth century almost all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa were clustered at the bottom while those of Asia were more spread out across the spectrum. Some nations, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Brunei had, by 2000, achieved the status of “high human development”. Most other countries in Asia were in the “medium human development” category, while most countries in sub-Saharan Africa were either in the bottom twenty of the “medium” category or in the “low human development” group. Of the 35 countries in the low development group in 2001, almost all were in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).