Diplomatic activity of various kinds forged close cultural links between England and Scotland and European polities. English and Scottish monarchs considered themselves part of a European ‘society of princes’, which was reflected in events held at court and the ways in which diplomats were incorporated into dynastic occasions. They regularly gave presents to, and received gifts from, foreign royals. Increasingly, diplomats at court were incorporated into the gifting framework; this, and the increasing volume of court entertainment driven by an increase in resident diplomats at court and the need to avoid disruptions to court events caused by precedence disputes among ambassadors, saw diplomacy spur cultural production in England in particular. At the same time, the rise in diplomatic activity inspired authors to explore themes related to diplomatic practices and cultures. Meanwhile, English and Scottish diplomats were important agents of cultural exchange, acting as cultural brokers for important political figures back home, and many of them were also avid consumers of paintings, furniture, and other cultural goods which they imported back to England or Scotland.

The most lasting testament to W. G. Sebald’s profound interest in literary translation is the British Centre for Literary Translation, which he founded at the University of East Anglia in 1989 on the model of translator houses in Germany and France. His aims with BCLT were to provide material support for literary translators and to raise the profile of literary translation as a profession in the UK. Sebald established a small team around him and quickly secured stable, recurrent funding for BCLT from the Arts Council of Great Britain and other sources. He established the pattern of BCLT activity that largely still persists: the Centre became a base for dozens of visiting translators, hosted events (conferences, workshops and seminars, the St Jerome Lecture) and pursued other projects, in particular compiling a Directory of Literary Translators. Sebald served as Director for the first five years of BCLT’s existence: he stepped down in 1994 as his literary career began to blossom, but retained an attachment till his death. Now into its fourth decade, BCLT continues its vigorous promotion of literary translation at the interface between academia and the profession.

This chapter examines the relations between thousands of Yemeni Jews and the Jews of the Indian subcontinent in modern times. Starting in the eighteenth century, Yemenite rabbis and emissaries filled in religious functions in Jewish communities first in Cochin and among other groups. In the opposite direction, members of Bene Israel community served as officials and officers in the British army during the time it occupied Aden in 1839. These mutual relations formed intimate ties among various communities across the Indian Ocean.

This chapter investigates a little considered aspect of Rushdie’s work in the context of soundscapes and the auditory imagination. While ekphrasis and the way in which Rushdie works with images has been widely explored, his novels are fully realized through sound, whether it is trains, filmic soundtracks, songs, or the sounds of street life in cities such as Bombay, London, and New York. The chapter focuses particularly on music across Rushdie’s fictional oeuvre, paying closest attention to The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Hear Feet. It argues that a change is perceptible in the way that music is figured across these two novels, which in turn reflects a wider shift in the author’s politics, especially with relation to Islam.

This chapter considers the tensions in Sino-American exchange diplomacy felt in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation and replacement by Gerald Ford. Ford lacked domestic political authority and thus was unable to find the negotiating flexibility necessary to achieve a deal to establish official diplomatic relations with Beijing. The resulting deadlock in high-diplomatic negotiations was one cause of stasis and conflict over cultural exchanges in 1974 and 1975 that culminated in the last-minute cancellation of a tour by a famous Chinese performing arts troupe, news that made the front pages of US newspapers. This chapter also examines the more gradual accumulation of tension in exchanges arising from American resentment at tight controls on visitors to China and Chinese resentment at impolitic behavior by American guests, ranging from photographing evidence of Chinese “backwardness” to drunken brawls.

The high watermark in the Sino-American relationship during the Henry Kissinger era came in 1973 with the creation of “liaison offices,” or de facto embassies, in each capital: These liaison offices further deepened and formalized the diplomatic relationship after the Richard Nixon–Mao Zedong summit of 1972 and would remain the closest that the two governments would come to establishing official diplomatic relations before Kissinger left government in January 1977. This chapter reveals that – in cause, conception, and execution – liaison offices were a direct outgrowth of the exchange relationship. Other new milestones in that relationship were also set in 1973, not least during the visit of the largest cultural delegation yet to travel to the People’s Republic of China: the Philadelphia Orchestra. However, 1973 also saw the first signs of new tensions in exchange diplomacy as lingering Sino-American disagreements about Cambodia and Taiwan, as well as turbulent Chinese domestic politics, led to confrontations in cultural contacts and during a Congressional delegation to China led by Senator Warren Magnuson.

Chapter 5 examines exchanges of material cultures. Through the paradigm of ‘domestication’, it shows how lakeshore populations incorporated several commodities circulating the wider Indian Ocean World into their everyday lives, while also showing how coastal traders sought to affect the supply of these objects to enrich their commercial networks. The principal items discussed are glass beads, cotton cloths, and guns. The chapter uses the Lake Tanganyika case study to show how demand for specific products in East Africa affected broader commercial patterns that traversed the wider Indian Ocean World, which themselves were concurrently being affected by the spread of capitalism from Europe. Additionally, it shows how patterns of consumption on the lakeshore served to enhance the status of several bonds(wo)men, suggesting a contravention of often assumed links between being in bondage and of having low social status.

Chapter 3 uses archival and anthropological sources to examine human encounters with Lake Tanganyika itself. The lake was a source of food, a barrier to cross, and the subject of religious and political innovation. How these features of human–lake encounters were understood shifted over time in ways that were related to the exchange of cultures and fluctuations in the lake’s level. In general terms, these shifts can be summed up as the ‘commercialisation’ of encounters with the lake, which affected how people crossed it, their motivations for doing so, and their means of appeasing spirits they believed to inhabit it. Technology, environmental factors, and religious paradigms with links to the wider Indian Ocean World affected how people crossed, used, and interpreted conditions on the lake.

Chapter 7 examines the history Islam on Lake Tanganyika’s shores. It explores the ways in which coastal traders adapted their religious practices to the lakeshore environment, and how new converts adapted their new religion to their pre-existing knowledge of the spiritual world. In line with recent Indian Ocean World historiography, it uses a ‘bottom-up’ approach to conversion, contesting trends in older Africanist works that focused on the conversion of elites. In this case study, this means an examination of bonds(wo)men’s importance to the spread of Islam, who, through claiming ‘freeborn’ social status, also claimed the right to convert. This allows for a greater appreciation of Islam’s influence on the lakeshore, to the extent that the lake becomes understood as an ‘Islamic Sea’ – similar in conception to the Indian Ocean over the longue durée.

This chapter explicates the diverse models scholars have developed to analyze cultural exchange in early modern material culture. With a focus on objects originating in Asia and Europe in the early modern period, the author considers environmental, cultural, technological, social, political, economic, and ideological approaches and factors

This introduction discusses the benefits of a mobile approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia. Starting at Hindu–Buddhist, Chinese, Islamic, colonial, and prehistoric sites of heritage in Indonesia, the monograph will focus on people’s encounters and knowledge exchange taking place there, across colonial and post-colonial regimes. It follows site-related objects travelling, like the famous Buddhist statues from Borobudur temple, gifted to King Chulalongkorn of Siam, to gauge how and why these objects have transformed in meaning and play a role in parallel processes of heritage formation inside and outside Indonesia. With this site-centred and mobile approach, we can explain the relationships between heritage formation and religion, violence, and regime change over time, and show the concerns of local subjects and elites, of scholars, pilgrims, and tourists, entering colonial and post-colonial Indonesia and moving out of state-centred archaeology and transnational cultural associations, and of global (UNESCO) politics.