Global Gifts The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia

This anthology explores the role that art and material goods played in diplomatic relations and political exchanges between Asia, Africa, and Europe in the early modern world. The authors challenge the idea that there was a European primacy in the practice of gift giving through a wide panoramic review of imperial encounters between Europeans (including the Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English) and Asian empires (including Ottoman, Persian, Mughal, Sri Lankan, Chinese, and Japanese cases). They examine how those exchanges influenced the global production and circulation of art and material culture, and explore the types of gifts exchanged, the chosen materials, and the manner of their presentation. Global Gifts establishes new parameters for the study of the material and aesthetic culture of Eurasian relations before 1800, exploring the meaning of artistic objects in global diplomacy and the existence of economic and aesthetic values mutually intelligible across cultural boundaries.

Introduction: global gifts and the material culture of diplomacy in early modern Eurasia Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello; 1. Portraits, turbans and cuirasses: material exchange between Mantua and the Ottomans at the end of the fifteenth century Antonia Gatward Cevizli; 2. A silken diplomacy: Venetian luxury gifts for the Ottoman Empire in the late Renaissance Luca Molà; 3. Diplomatic viories: Sri Lankan caskets and the Portuguese-Asian exchange in the sixteenth century Zoltán Biedermann; 4. Objects of prestige and spoils of war: Ottoman objects in the Habsburg networks of gift giving in the sixteenth century Barbara Karl; 5. The diplomatic agency of art between Goa and Persia: Archbishop Friar Aleixo de Meneses and Shah 'Abbas I in the early seventeenth century Carla Alferes Pinto; 6. Dutch diplomacy and trade in Rariteyten: episodes in the history of material culture of the Dutch Republic Claudia Swan; 7. Gifts for the shogun: the Dutch East India Company, global networks and Tokugawa Japan Adam Clulow; 8. 'From his Holiness to the King of China': gifts, diplomacy and Jesuit evangelization Mary Laven; 9. 'With great pomp and magnificence': royal gifts and the embassies between Siam and France in the late seventeenth century Giorgio Riello; 10. Coercion and the gift: art, jewels and the body in British diplomacy in Colonial India Natasha Eaton.

Zoltán Biedermann is Associate Professor and Head of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies at University College London.
Anne Gerritsen is Professor of History and directs the Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick.
Giorgio Riello is Professor of Global History and Culture at the University of Warwick.