Objects in Conflict

Volker Depkat is Professor of American Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany. His recent publications include American Exceptionalism (2021), A New American Confederation: How German Federalism Inspired the US-Constitution (2024; co-authored), and Representations and Uses of the American Revolution in Past and Present (2025; co-edited).Harriet Rudolph is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Regensburg, Germany. Her publications include Material Culture in Modern Diplomacy from the 15th to the 20th Century (2016; co-edited) and “Istanbul as a Collection Site: Cross-Cultural Networks of Knowledge in the Alba Amicorum of Ernst Brinck and Wolfgang Leuthkauff” in WissensWelten – Worlds of Knowledge (2026).

• 1. Introduction I. Where are the Objects?: Tracing the Material Culture of Intercultural Diplomacy in European Collections 2. Exotic Gifts – On the Lobbying of Indigenous Elites to Influence European Colonial Policy: Selected Examples from Around the World in European Museums 3. Crafting Diplomacy: Extraordinary Embassies and the Programmatic Display of French Luxury Goods, 1662–1789 4. Immaterial Diplomacy: Dissimulating Muslim Embassies in Habsburg Spain II. Beyond Official Procedures: Individual Material Practices of Diplomatic Actors in a Transcultural Setting 5. Materialities, Spaces, Emotions: The Leuthkauff album amicorum as an Entangled Object and the Challenges of Researching the Material Culture of Diplomacy 6. Diplomatic Homes Abroad: Exploring Ottoman and Habsburg Relations through Furniture and Decoration in the Early Modern Period 7. Material Culture and Practices of Friendship in Intercultural Diplomacy: A Case Study from Late Seventeenth-Century Istanbul III. Material Procedures of Cross-cultural Diplomacy in Imperial and Local Centers of Power 8. Gift Exchange, Marketing, and Memory: The Material Culture of the Moroccan Embassy to Vienna in 1783 9. The Stool, the Curtain, and the Robes of Honour: A Ludic and Material Reading of the Diplomatic Space at Baron Kuefstein’s Reception in Ottoman Hungary (1628) 10. Mere Container or Object of Intrinsic Value?: A Leather Wallet on Diplomatic Mission in the Ottoman-Habsburg Wars IV. Frontier Objects: The Material Culture of Diplomacy on Imperial Peripheries 11. Textile Diplomacy: Tahitian Bark Cloth in the Age of Early Pacific Encounter 12. English Liquor, Indian Corn: Food Diplomacy and Conflict in Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Haudenosaunee Relations 13. Objects, Power, and Anishinaabeg-British Diplomacy at Fort St. Joseph, 1796–1810