Premiered in London twelve years after the unsuccessful return of the first British embassy to China, led by Lord George Macartney, Domenico Corri's five-act ‘dramatic opera’, The Travellers, or Music's Fascination (1806), is a unique work exhibiting concrete connections to the embassy in its dramatic concept, musical and visual sources. This article explores how the subject of the opera – tracing the ‘progress of music’ from China to Britain – reflected the contemporary discussion about Chinese music, articulated most clearly by Charles Burney, who held a significant interest in the embassy's musical exchange. By incorporating a Chinese melody and ‘realistic’ visual representation connected to the embassy, the opera reconstructs certain ceremonies and musical experience witnessed by the members of the embassy. Interestingly, the opera balances first-hand knowledge of Chinese music and culture with an emerging imperialist view, and dramatises the aim of the embassy to show British advancement in the arts and sciences.

A widely reported story in the historiography on medieval Ethiopia relates how, in the year 1306, an “Ethiopian” embassy visited the court of Pope Clement V in Avignon and offered military aid in the fight against Islam to Latin Christianity. This article re-examines the source – Jacopo Filippo Foresti's Supplementum Chronicarum – thought to document an episode of one of the earliest European–African Christian contacts. It investigates Foresti's own sources, their historiographical transmission history, and the feasibility of relating it to the socio-political entity of Solomonic Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa in the early fourteenth century, concluding that Foresti's information was based on Latin Christian texts, such as the Legenda Aurea and the myth of Prester John, only. The ‘Ethiopian’ embassy of 1306 is thus not borne out by sources and should be dismissed in scholarship, resetting the timeline of official Ethiopian–Latin Christian contacts in the late medieval period.

This paper analyzes the impact of the presence of foreign missions on trade using Turkey's unique expansion in its foreign embassy network (39 new embassies in 8 years) as the source of variation in a panel data setting. A majority of the existing empirical studies use cross-sectional bilateral trade data due to lack of variation over time (Rose, 2007; Moons and Bergeijk, 2013). Employing a panel data analysis, this paper is able to address the endogeneity issues that are associated with a standard cross-sectional analysis. The dependent variable in the paper is the trade between Turkey and 190 countries for 2006 to 2016. The results indicate that presence of an embassy increases export value by 30% and this increase comes mainly from the volume effect. Categorizing goods by the Rauch (1999) classification shows that the increase in differentiated goods exports is the main driver of the export surge. The number of exporting firms increases by about 8%. There is no statistically significant impact on the exports of homogeneous goods. Replication of the analysis for imports suggests no impact on imports.