Afterword: On Diplomatic Gifts and their Meanings

Abstract

This afterword addresses some of the key insights emerging from the articles in this issue as ways of reshaping our understanding of diplomatic gifts in a global context. These include the multiplicity of registers of diplomatic communication, the versatility of gifts as floating signifiers whose meanings were shaped by a diverse array of actors, and how the wider contexts and afterlives of gifts affect and illuminate questions of value and agency. Together, they stress the importance of examining political and material exchanges between Britain and the Islamicate world from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century within a comparative and connected framework. The afterword concludes with a call to look for transformations and continuities that do not align with the conventional narrative of the modern international system as shaped exclusively in and by the West, and above all to better account for the roles that non-Western communities and concepts played in the development of the global diplomatic system.

Keywords

• Britain
• diplomatic gifts
• materiality
• global diplomacy
• Islamicate world