Through case studies spanning Europe, America, Africa, and Asia, this book illuminates our understanding of what happens when different cultures meet. Twelve cultural historians explore the mechanism and inner dynamic of such encounters, and demonstrate that while they often occur on the wave of global forces and influences, they only acquire meaning locally, where culture inherently resides. The authors shine a light into the nature of this process by showing that traditional, macro-scale frameworks of interpretation are too abstract and general to capture change caused by cross-cultural contacts, and that such change can come about only at the grassroots level because that is where the domestication of otherness takes place.