A Hamburg doctor sets out in search of Turkish combat drugs; three East Indians mix an "unheard-of" elixir in a pharmacy on Java; the philosopher Leibniz searches for the earliest Chinese characters; Spaniards in the Peruvian town of Potosí have to see how the devil is worshipped in the mines; a Jesuit missionary discovers an Eastern Hermeticism in Isfahan; a heterodox adventurer discovers an "unheard-of" elixir in a pharmacy on Java.s Potosí, Peru; a Jesuit missionary discovers an Eastern hermeticism in Isfahan; a heterodox adventurer hands over a secret manuscript to the Moroccan ambassador; and a collector of the Lord's Prayer despairs of the vocabulary of the African Khoikhoi.

What distinguishes these pre-modern pioneers of 17th and 18th century globalisation? How do they succeed or fail in referencing the foreign and distant objects they deal with? How did the ideas that landed with them travel through space and time? In his new book, Martin Mulsow interprets the early modern period as a time of over-reach, an epoch in which sources and news from near and far overlapped without anyone coming to terms with this duplication or sometimes even noticing it. It was an age of risky reference, which Mulsow brings to life before our eyes in a stirring and erudite way.