Preface Préface

What happens when cultures meet in the eighteenth century? What continuities and discontinuities are visible between cultural exchanges across geographies? Two hundred and twenty years after Alexander MacKenzie set out from the Peace River to cross the continental divide, a journey that included many first time encounters between British subjects and the Cree and Assiniboine peoples, scholars of the eighteenth century gathered on Treaty 6 land to pursue the implications of cross-cultural encounters in the period. Many historians now trace the origins of modern globalization to the eighteenth century, pointing to the global circulation of goods, labour, and information as its defining feature. By attending to the sheer variety of cross-cultural exchanges in the period, the thirty-eighth annual conference of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies sought to evaluate the historical purchase of thinking about the century within the terms of a nascent globalized world. Can we discern global patterns or does the frame of globalization blind scholars to the specificity of the local? Globalization studies often presume a uniqueness to our present moment but a historical perspective interrogates this uniqueness and, by so doing, helps to clarify what precisely is new in our present moment. Over one hundred and fifty scholars from Canada and across the globe (including the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, U.S., Mexico and Brazil) came to Edmonton and the dialogue that ensued between the local and the global generated many comparative models. Three patterns of cross-cultural exchange could be discerned from the incredible range of scholarly insights shared. First, that the trading of goods and cultures are constitutively interwoven and thus the global circulation of commodities is central to cross-cultural exchange. Papers in this stream explored: what we learn about China through reading about tea in England; how linen became a global commodity; how French Atlantic products such as beaver hats and sugar found their way to Austria; how Chinese porcelains and lacquers circulated in Europe; and what new modes of transport emerged to carry these new commodities around the globe. Second, that as texts circulated around the globe, so too did knowledge. From intellectual history to book history, scholars charted what knowledge travels, how and where it travels and to what effect, including topics such as: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkey; John Bunyan’s texts in Pennsylvania; Italian music in Britain; French philosophy in Germany; trans-Atlantic novels; Pacific artifacts in England; Spanish Orientalism; and a twelfth-century Arabic text in Britain. Third, that governance ascribed to nation-states is often intertwined with transnational models of power. Topics addressed included: the influence of Ottoman Turks in the Habsburg monarchy; transnational monarchies; the political and military significance of Russian-Qing relations; the interconnections between the Russian and the Habsburg empires; cross-cultural monarchical aesthetics; the global slave trade; and the geo-politics of the North Atlantic. The crossings may be diverse, but the sheer range of exchanges attests to a global hybridity that renders transculturalism the norm for the period. The papers selected for this volume come from all three streams and they underscore a major motif uniting commodities, knowledge and power: the centrality of mobility and circulation to eighteenth-century forms of life and culture. Hybrid genres and miscegenated texts abound, from Johanna Danciu’s exploration of vaudeville as a hybrid genre in Parisian theatre to Julie Murray’s analysis of The Woman of Colour, an anonymous novel with a bi-racial heroine who travels from Jamaica to England. The material circulation of goods and peoples is central both to Ruth Scobie’s fascinating study of Elizabeth Montagu’s feather hangings which included materials from Hawaii, and to Paul Rice’s …