In an age of globalization, revolutionary information technology, and radical change in the volume and modes of communication, the exchange of both material goods and ideas has gained increasing attention from scholarship. Historians have sought to characterize what is involved in exchanges, and a lively debate has ensued. This began in the 1980s, when Michel Espagne and Michael Werner coined the term ‘transfers culturels’ to refer to the transfer of elements of a ‘French National Culture’ to Germany and its reception there during the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies. Espagne, Werner and their followers focused on national cultures in order to avoid some of the shortcomings of comparative history by contextualizing questions of transfer, reception and acculturation.1