This volume brings together the work of twenty scholars who have tried to examine the nature of the encounter between Europeans and the other peoples of the world from roughly 1450 to 1800, the Early Modern era. This volume is world-wide in scope but is unified by the central underlying theme that implicit understandings influence every culture"s ideas about itself and others. These understandings, however, are changed by experience in a constantly shifting process in which both sides participate, and that makes such encounters complex historical events and moments of discovery.