With its focus on early modern emissaries and their role in England's expansionary ventures and cross-cultural encounters across the globe, this collection takes up the literary and cultural productions and representations of ambassadors, factors, traders, translators, spies, middlemen, merchants, missionaries, and other agents, who served as complex conduits for the global transport of goods, religious ideologies, and socio-cultural practices throughout the early modern period.

Brinda Charry is Assistant Professor of English at Keene State College, USA. Gitanjali Shahani is Assistant Professor of English at San Francisco State University, USA.

Introduction, Brinda Charry, Gitanjali Shahani; Part 1 Discourses of Diplomacy; Chapter 1 The Shah's Two Ambassadors: The Travels of the Three English Brothers and the Global Early Modern, Jonathan Burton; Chapter 2, Ania Loomba; Chapter 3 Representing the King of Morocco, Virginia Mason Vaughan; Part 2 Agents of Exchange; Chapter 4 Just Passing: Abbé Carré, Spy, Harem-lord, and 'made in France', Pompa Banerjee; Chapter 5 'After My Humble Dutie Remembered': Factors and / versus Merchants, Barbara Sebek; Chapter 6 Passengers, Spies, Emissaries, and Merchants: Travel and Early Modern English Identity, M.G. Aune; Part 3 Language and Technologies of Mediation; Chapter 7 The Translator as Emissary: Continental Works about the Ottomans in England, Linda McJannet; Chapter 8 The Queen of Onor and her Emissaries: Fernão Mendes Pinto's Dialogue with India, Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski; Chapter 9 Listening to the Emissary in Middleton's No Wit, No Help Like a Woman s, Marianne Montgomery; Part 4 Transmission and Transformation; Chapter 10 'Backward and Abysm of Time': Negotiating with the Dead in The Tempest, Brinda Charry; Chapter 11 'Thrown from the Rock': Emissaries as Midwives and Impediments of a New World, Sheila T. Cavanagh;