The term ‘Cultural Broker’ has nowadays become rather fashionable in the Humanities, yet remains a relatively ill-defined concept. Originally used by anthropologists to describe the role of mediators between indigenous and Western societies, the term is now used more broadly to refer to intermediaries between, as well as within, cultures. However, little has been done to clearly define the term, and more importantly the social position and wider impact of cultural brokers. Our project aims to provide an innovative and challenging historical interpretation of what we mean by ‘cultural brokers’ by exploring and comparing their specific networks as engines of (or obstacles to) cross-cultural (ex)change; consider processes of professionalization and social mobility as well as questions of their changing self-fashioning and ‘Fremdwahrnehmung’. In short, we plan to take the analysis of cultural brokers out of the field of cultural encounters and into global social history in order to assess the long-term impacts of brokers on identity, society and economy more broadly.

This workshop will be the second one of a series of three, organized in cooperation between the University of Cambridge and the University of Konstanz, to be held between 2016 and 2018. The first workshop, entitled ‘Historicizing Cultural Brokers: Agency and the Limits of Power’, has been held in Cambridge in December 2016. While this workshop has focussed on conceptual issues and on the figure of the cultural broker proper, the second workshop will seek to ‘embed’ brokers more systematically in their social and political environments. Looking at the arts, the sciences, and the economy, we will concentrate on selected spheres of activity, which in the modern age were particularly prone to cross-cultural exchange. In doing so, we will assess brokers’ impact in these spheres and juxtapose their agency with other factors shaping the historical trajectory of the brokered issues. Alongside the factor of institutionalization as one such trajectory, we will also pay attention to other, sometimes less obvious forms of impact. They include anything from social practices and cultural artefacts to knowledge and ideologies, as well as products and taste issues. Ultimately, the exploration of brokers’ impact will produce useful empirical as well as intellectual groundwork for the third workshop to be held in Cambridge again in 2018. The whole project is designed to maximize the academic exchange between Cambridge and Konstanz by engaging several of their scholars in a fruitful debate on the impact of ‘cultural brokers’ as ‘social actors’ from 1700 to the present.