Introduction

Modern European culture and politics have been largely shaped by centuries of material and cognitive contact with domestic and exotic forms of ethno-anthropological, sociological and cultural diversity in both a spatial and temporal dimension. The need to confront and deal with ‘diversity’ stemmed in part from the process of European expansion in the world. But it also reflects the core problem of politics: how to harmonize different interests, groups, religious faiths, customs, languages and ethnic identities, blending them into some form of viable and durable co-existence. We can identify two extremes in the approach to cultural diversity: suppression through assimilation or its perpetuation through radical ‘othering’. In between there has been a wide variety of policies and intellectual or ideological constructs of a ‘transcultural’ kind, with the transfer, adaptation and dialogue of political, religious and economic patterns of relationships. This international collection of essays reviews many such cultural experiences, taking a global, transcultural outlook, ranging from European encounters with exotic peoples of newly discovered lands of conquest and colonization to the process by which the European states themselves took shape. It is the outcome of the European research project “EUO-European Culture and the Understanding of Otherness: Historiography, Politics and the Sciences of Man in the Birth of the Modern World (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries)” conceived and directed by Guido Abbattista with researchers from eleven European universities, sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Education University and Research (Interlink program 2006-2008)