In the early modern age more people traveled farther than at any earlier
time in human history. Many returned home with stories of distant lands
and at least some of the objects they collected during their journeys.
And those who did not travel eagerly acquired wondrous materials that
arrived from faraway places. Objects traveled various routes--personal,
imperial, missionary, or trade--and moved not only across space but also
across cultures.
Histories of the early modern global culture of collecting have focused
for the most part on European Wunderkammern, or cabinets of
curiosities. But the passion for acquiring unfamiliar items rippled
across many lands. The court in Java marveled at, collected, and
displayed myriad goods brought through its halls. African princes traded
captured members of other African groups so they could get the newest
kinds of cloth produced in Europe. Native Americans sought colored glass
beads made in Europe, often trading them to other indigenous groups.
Items changed hands and crossed cultural boundaries frequently, often
gaining new and valuable meanings in the process. An object that might
have seemed mundane in some cultures could become a target of veneration
in another.
The fourteen essays in Collecting Across Cultures represent work by an
international group of historians, art historians, and historians of
science. Each author explores a specific aspect of the cross-cultural
history of collecting and display from the dawn of the sixteenth century
to the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the essays attest, an
examination of early modern collecting in cross-cultural contexts sheds
light on the creative and complicated ways in which objects in
collections served to create knowledge--some factual, some
fictional--about distant peoples in an increasingly transnational world.
