Global Gifts

Global Gifts considers the role that the circulation of material culture played in the establishment of early modern global diplomacy.

As the "center" of Christianity has moved south to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, what gifts can churches in different parts of the world share with each other? Are churches in Europe and North America willing and able to receive as well as give? Who's rich? In what? Who's needy? In what way? How do we overcome the real obstacles that obstruct this essential part of being the church?

In this age of globalization challenges--from economic uncertainty to emerging markets--there are no mapped out answers for the international manager. Global Explorers guides the global manager from the periphery to the center stage of international business leadership. In a 1997 survey of Fortune 500 firms conducted by authors J. Stewart Black, Allen J. Morrison and Hal B. Gregersen, virtually all companies indicated there was a severe shortage of global leaders. The demand for competent global leaders far outstrips the supply. Global Explorers provides the skills and outlines the competencies future global managers need to fill the leadership gap. Using extensive research, real-life examples, and 130 in-depth interviews with senior executives representing 50 global companies, including IBM, Disney, Exxon and Sony, Global Explorers suggests the reasons for the global leadership shortage, and identifies the necessary skills to compete in the international marketplace. For managers who want to safeguard their corporate future in these changing times, Global Explorers will help them develop a personal program for developing and balancing the skills they need to become successful global leaders.

A vivid account of Dutch seventeenth-century art and material culture against the backdrop of the geopolitics of the early modern world The seventeenth century witnessed a great flourishing of Dutch trade and culture. Over the course of the first half of the century, the northern Netherlands secured independence from the Spanish crown, and the nascent republic sought to establish its might in global trade, often by way of diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim powers. Central to the political and cultural identity of the Dutch Republic were curious foreign goods the Dutch called "rarities." Rarities of These Lands explores how these rarities were obtained, exchanged, stolen, valued, and collected, tracing their global trajectories and considering their role within the politics of the new state. Claudia Swan’s insightful, engaging analysis offers a novel and compelling account of how the Dutch Republic turned foreign objects into expressions of its national self-conception. Rarities of These Lands traces key elements of the formation of the Dutch Republic—artistic and colonialist ventures alike—offering new perspectives on this momentous period in the history of the Netherlands and its material culture.

Volume I surveys the long history of fashion from the ancient world to c. 1800. The volume seeks to answer fundamental questions on the origins of fashion, challenging Eurocentric explanations that the emergence of fashion was a European phenomenon and shows instead that fashion found early expressions across the globe well before the age of European colonialism and imperialism. It sheds light on how fashion was experienced in a multitude of ways depending on class, gender, and race, and despite geographical distance, fashion connected populations across the globe. Fashions flowered and were reseeded, through entanglements of empire, forced and voluntary migration, evolving racial systems, burgeoning sea travel and transcontinental systems.

Global goods were central to the material culture of eighteenth-century country houses. Across Europe, mahogany furniture, Chinese wallpapers and Indian textiles formed the backdrop to genteel practices of drinking sweetened coffee, tea and chocolate from Chinese porcelain. They tied these houses and their wealthy owners into global systems of supply and the processes of colonialism and empire. Global Goods and the Country House builds on these narratives, and then challenges them by decentring our perspective. It offers a comparative framework that explores the definition, ownership and meaning of global goods outside the usual context of European imperial powers. What were global goods and what did they mean for wealthy landowners in places at the ‘periphery’ of Europe (Sweden and Wallachia), in the British colonies of North America and the Caribbean, or in the extra-colonial context (Japan or Rajasthan)? By addressing these questions, this volume offers fresh insights into the multi-directional flow of goods and cultures that enmeshed the eighteenth-century world. And by placing these goods in their specific material context - from the English country house to the princely palaces of Rajasthan - we gain a better understanding of their use and meaning, and of their role in linking the global and the local.