Sometime in the 1760s, a Constantinople-born, French-educated Muslim arrived at the port of Balassor in north-east India. Known variously as Mustapha or Monsieur Raymond, he had, he later wrote, “with a mediocre dictionary and a bad grammar”, and by conversing with the ship's captain en route from Bombay, “learned enough of English . . . as I might delight in Bolingbroke's Philosophical works”. This student of contemporary intellectual history soon put his knowledge to work, securing a position translating for Robert Clive, the conquering hero of the English East India Company's new imperial administration in India. Subsequently falling from favour, Mustapha crossed over to seek employment with the English company's French rivals, earning himself a spell in prison as a spy. He also travelled to Mecca, where he gained the honorific “Haji” but lost his fortune, his cabinet of curiosities and his collection of books and manuscripts. He then became the keeper of a zenana (to the Europeans, a harem or seraglio), and he entered the world of publishing. In 1789, in Calcutta, Mustapha had printed for himself a pamphlet-length diatribe on the iniquitous administration of the law in British Bengal entitled Some Idea of the Civil and Criminal Courts of Justice at Moorshoodabad. In the same year he was also involved, as the pseudonymous editor “Nota Manus”, in the publication of a three-volume English translation of a Persian work of Indian history—Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai's Seir Mutaqherin, or View of Modern Times (written in 1781–2)—which dealt with the British conquest and administration of Bengal, and offered a stern critique of the new rulers who seemed to have “an aversion to the Society of Indians, and a disdain against conversing with them”. Finally, Mustapha (who called himself a “Semi-Englishman” who had the interests of his “adopted countrymen” at heart) claimed to have published in London a work of futurology entitled State of Europe in 1800. In his encounters with Europeans, his travels within and beyond India (although he never made it to England as he had planned), and his involvement in the production of historical and geographical knowledge, Mustapha was deeply interested in that which shaped his own fortunes: the relationships of knowledge and power between Europe and other parts of the world.Footnote ¹

Under the sign of post-colonialism such concerns have, of course, described a vibrant intellectual terrain for at least the last thirty years. However, while there are continuing explorations of the connections between knowledge and power in the global encounters of travel, trade and empire, the relationship between those two terms and geographical space seems to have changed. For some time the analytical focus was on the knowledge produced by “the West” about the rest of the world. Following the lead of Edward Said, himself drawing on a humanized version of Michel Foucault's genealogical concern with discourse, there were many studies of how knowledge about other places and other people was the product of textual and visual practices which worked through the binary division of “the Other” from “the Same” in the production of forms of geographical and other essentialisms. This geography of power/knowledge was one that figured it as a sort of intellectual Congress of Berlin where boundaries were drawn by European powers on both the metaphorical map of knowledge and the world it purported to describe. In this process, the powerful divided here from there, and us from them, by exploiting the vantage points and intellectual techniques of Western rationality, and by responding to the demands of imperial geopolitics. In so doing they managed to establish hierarchical relationships of rule. While producing much valuable work, and considerable debate over the relationship between postcolonial theory and imperial history, this mode of interpretation seems to have run its course. In response, the blinding light of Europe's knowledge-producing gaze has been reversed, shifted and ultimately refracted through the medium of a different geography.

The reversal of the European view of its “Others” was, perhaps, an obvious move, but no less important for that. Various people have experimented with the notion of “occidentalism” and, despite the archival problems posed, a remarkable array of non-Western accounts of “the West” have been uncovered. Kumkum Chatterjee and Clement Hawes's collection Europe Observed presents a set of essays on this theme that takes in the encounters between Europeans and those from Asia, Africa and the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Various versions of the reversal of the gaze are evident. There are the accounts of non-European visitors to Europe—the hundred or so Chinese Catholic clerics considered by Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia who went to southern Europe between 1649 and 1780; the Native Americans whom Nancy Shoemaker shows lobbying imperial powers in eighteenth-century London and Paris; the South Asians—such as Maryam, the wife of William Hawkins, or the Mughal diplomat Shaikh I'tisam al-Din—whose presence in England Michael Fisher has so carefully documented; or the Caribbean and Latin American dissidents whose revolutionary fires were stoked, as Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink shows, by their ambivalent responses to European “Enlightenment”. Yet there are also those who did not have to go to Europe, because Europeans came to them. Here, an array of ambivalent responses is recounted. Sanjay Subrahmanyam shows that Indians thought “the Hat Wearers” well dressed and able to make clever things, but also violent, pimply and averse to washing their hands and bottoms after going to the toilet. Irene Silverblatt demonstrates how native Andeans were not simply drawn by the colonial encounter to try and understand “Spanishness”, and what it meant for them, but, in the process, adopted the racialized categories—Spanish, Indian, black—produced through colonialism itself. Finally, Suzanne Preston Blier analyses how European hats, flags, clocks and umbrellas were appropriated within the performative politics of symbolic display (including their challenges to European power) in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dahomey. Moreover, due to the profound transformations of the early modern world by European expansion, it was also the case that non-Europeans could encounter Europeans in a range of settings outside Europe, as Vincent Carretta shows in his interpretation of Olaudah Equiano's narration of his life among Europeans and others right around the Atlantic world. In contrast, as with “orientalism”, there were traditions of writing about Europe which could be adequately conducted without going any further than the nearest good library, as seen in Nibil Matar's account of Arab views of Spain.

The aim of reversing the gaze is the postcolonial one of provincializing Europe. This can be pursued in other ways too. For example, Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have achieved it by demonstrating the vibrancy of non-European modes of travel writing in the same period, particularly Indo-Persian manuscript accounts of travels in Asia. Here is a form of travel writing within which Europe and Europeans are absolutely peripheral, even invisible.Footnote ² In Europe Observed the strategy is different. The purpose of the collection is, as the editors argue, to decentre Europe by making it the centre of attention. No longer the unseen site from which seeing is done, Europe becomes a shifting category with multiple identities, and monolithic shibboleths such as “Western rationality” are undone in the process. The focus on the early modern period also facilitates this process by engaging with a time when, depending on where you look, “European powers were by no means always the unquestioned masters” (2). While discussions of orientalism took their time getting around to the multiplicity, differentiation and fracturing of that “discourse”, here the vision of “the Other” is fractured and plural almost from the outset (interestingly, in the transition from research project to book the subtitle's object of study shifted from “The Reversed Gaze” to “Multiple Gazes”). Indeed, the relationships of power and knowledge are such that this cannot simply be a matter of, as Said had it, representing those who cannot represent themselves, but of “interactions [which] were manifest in practices of adaptation, appropriation, grafting—and, in the broadest sense, cultural translation” (25).

While distancing themselves from “the starkly dichotomous model of imperial analytics” (23) set out by Said, Europe Observed's problematic is still one defined by vision and representation: how was Europe seen by others? This raises some difficult epistemological questions when our attention is shifted to matters of cultural translation. There has often been an all too easy slippage between Said's adoption of Foucault's notion of discourse and its position on “truth” and a simpler account of representations of “the Other” as myths, stereotypes or social constructions. Call them what you will, the effect is the same: they are in some way said to be “untrue”. This becomes a difficult position to sustain once the gaze is reversed. It may be a comfortable critique of the social constructions of the powerful, but should the representations produced by the less powerful also be regarded as untruths? Instead, some might want to retain an idea of the oppressed speaking truth to power. However, it cannot simply be the case that the truth-value of a statement is directly related to the powerlessness of the speaker such that, to adapt a well-known axiom, powerlessness is knowledge. A more convincing relationship between power and truth needs to be held to than one that relies on the falsity of representations. Moreover, there were many different forms of knowledge produced through the global encounters between Europe and the rest of the world, and it is not clear that post-colonial literature's notions of knowledge as power-laden representation work equally well for all of them. In particular, when it comes to forms of scientific knowledge the identification of statements, discourses or truths as “orientalist” is not particularly illuminating, and other ways forward are required.

One possibility is to focus directly on “cultural translation”, to reimagine boundaries as borderlands (as a “middle ground”), and to repopulate them with the intermediaries or “go-betweens” needed to manage the ongoing process of “encounter”. The impossible space within Said's “stark dichotomy” then becomes a place of multiple interactions, negotiations, mediations and translations. Indeed, this is the realization and mobilization of Said's own critique of Samuel Huntington's “clash of civilisations” thesis, and of others who would “make ‘civilizations’ and ‘identities’ into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing”.Footnote ³

Reinterpreting scientific knowledge in this way is the task taken on by the essays in The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1779–1820, edited by Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj and James Delbourgo. In a series of long and detailed essays, the contributors examine in particular cases how such “brokers and spies, messengers and translators”—the go-betweens—“made and changed the contents and the paths of knowledge” (x). As the editors note, the crucial role of the go-between is not just to move between contexts, but to be “someone who articulates relationships between disparate worlds or cultures by being able to translate between them” (xiv). The interpretative job is, therefore, to examine the particular practices of mediation that were put in place to enable the production, transmission and use of knowledge. Such claims are familiar from actor-network theory's retooling of the sociology and social history of science as the investigation of the networks within which “facts” can be made and maintained. Bruno Latour's distinctions between “mediators”—human or non-human—which actively articulate parts of the network and “intermediaries” which simply and passively transmit are worked out here through the personal stories of the work of go-betweens who must mediate while appearing to be intermediaries.Footnote ⁴ For example, once Haji Mustapha's identity was known as the editor of the Seir Mutaqherin, all its errors were attributed to him as “a foreigner . . . thought so defective in the language”.Footnote ⁵ The intermediary had become a faulty mediator. This relationship has, our presumably more trustworthy editors argue, a global historical geography. The “Age of Revolutions” saw both an increase in the number and intensity of mediations and systems of exchange—providing a wealth of opportunities for those who would go between—and subsequent attempts to reduce the power and unpredictability of those go-betweens by routinizing and standardizing the work of mediation within new structures such as institutes of tropical medicine or colleges for training translators. It was, therefore, significant that it was in 1791 that Edmund Burke bemoaned the fact that “The world is governed by go-betweens” (ix).

The essays in The Brokered World recover a range of forms of mediation and types of mediators. For example, Robert Liss explores the translators who mediated between Europeans and eighteenth-century Japan, particularly the natural historian, painter, ceramicist and satirist Hiraga Gennai (the author of a 1777 Treatise on Farting). Simon Schaffer examines the circumstances surrounding the translation of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica into Arabic in Calcutta in 1789 by Tarafazzul Husain Khan in order to reveal the uses of ancient Asian histories of knowledge to British imperial astronomers, and the parallel uses of British mathematical astronomy for learned Shi'ites. Margaret Meredith sets out the networks of friendship and correspondence which linked European and North American natural historians, particularly Petrus Camper, who were trying to work out whether various species of elephant were extinct or not. Lissa Roberts uncovers the work of early steam entrepreneurs such as João Jacinto de Magalhães and Francisco Pinto, whose correspondence with the Rotterdam-based Huichelbos van Liender's Bataafsch Genootschap de Proefondervindelijke Wijsbegeerte (Batavian Society for Experimental Philosophy) unravels the neat historical rope which has always seemed to tie together James Watt, the steam engine and Great Britain's Industrial Revolution into a mass of tangled European strands. Neil Safier sets out Hipólito José da Costa's frustrated attempts to transport live cochineal beetles from Mexico to Lisbon via Brazil. James Delbourgo examines the novelist, natural historian and spy Edward Bancroft's work with American dyestuffs and his attempts to profit from fixable colours as he incessantly changed his own as camouflage against each new background. Juan Pimentel demonstrates the interconnected histories of the bones of the megatherium and Pedro Franco Dávila, a Creole merchant from Guayaquil whose eclectic collection formed the basis of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid. And David Turnbull examines the go-betweens of early Australia, comparing and contrasting the lives of the negotiator and translator Bennelong, the astronomer and linguist William Dawes (on whom Kate Grenville's stunning novel The Lieutenant is based), the ambassador and explorer Bungaree, and the boundary-crossing escaped convict William Buckley.

It is impossible to do justice here to the depth, richness and complexity of these explorations. Each chapter has an intriguing story to tell, often with a dazzling array of characters. Each sets out to unpick conventional histories by complicating narratives and interposing complex mediations where once there were unproblematic connections. The array of forms of mediation is such that every step in the practice of natural history (or the making and use of technology), in the production of knowledge and the transmission of ideas is opened up for scrutiny and rendered a historical accomplishment only achieved, and often not, at considerable cost in financial, cultural, personal and epistemological terms. This is exemplified in Neil Safier's own recent book Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (2008), which scrutinizes the ways in which material from Charles-Marie de La Condamine's mid-eighteenth-century expedition to South America to measure the shape of the Earth was gathered, constructed and presented to its audiences. As Safier argues, these processes of “inscription, narration, reading, correction, criticism, translation, and abridgement” (17–18) are those “through which empirical observations were transformed into tangible, memorable products in the emerging space of a noninstitutionally bound transatlantic public sphere” (12). As a result, as well as dealing with the more familiar contact zones of the relationship between science and empire—out there in the field and back home in the botanical garden—Safier adds a series of new spaces where knowledge was mediated, translated and abridged in tangible ways. He examines La Condamine's use of the writings of others, in both manuscript and print (this was a philosophical traveller who travelled with twenty-one trunks of books) to construct the first-person narration of his travels. He scrutinizes the critical reception of these and other writings from the expedition by a range of interested readers in Europe and the Americas. And, with a close eye to the role of the editor in the making of knowledge, he forensically unpicks the correcting of drafts of the Carta de la Provincia de Quito (1750) in the Parisian cartographic atelier where it was drawn and engraved; the making of a new edition, in 1744, of Garcilasco de la Vega's seventeenth-century Histoire des Incas under the aegis of the Jardin de Roi in Paris to emphasize South America's potential botanical contribution to European food crises (quinoa, anyone?); and the range of forms of decontextualization involved in the process whereby material from the expedition was written into Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie. In each instance Safier is attentive to what is changed in the process of mediation, translation and correction. While it is not surprising that Creole contributions, indigenous knowledges and entangled histories are what get edited out in favour of European Enlightened agency, or that the basis of the acceptance of differing views comes down to questions of trust and social status, there is a real value in showing the range of ways in which, and the varied spaces through which, these mediations have epistemological consequences.

In this work there is also a proliferation of what might be a mediator or a go-between. While the introduction to The Brokered World confines its discussion of the category to people, usefully using Georg Simmel's essay on “The Stranger” to examine how the situated perspective of the go-between might provide the basis for notions of objectivity, the chapters are more eclectic. As Safier's contribution and book suggest, and the Latourian lineage might lead us to expect, “inscriptions”—usually printed works or manuscripts—are mediators. Objects of various sorts can do this work too: the now-faded samples of dyes Edward Bancroft sent to London; the fossil bones of the Megatherium; the beetles on a cactus under glass in a crate that, had they got through the Philadelphia winter and the Portuguese customs regulations, might have made da Costa's fortune; and even the smallpox virus that crossed the boundaries between peoples in late eighteenth-century Australia. Indeed, in Emma Spary's essay it is objects that take centre stage as she examines the intersection of early industrial food production and imperial expansion. As captured in the subtitle, “Stock Cubes as Global Technologies”, she shows how elite French voyagers were enabled to “move about accompanied by a swarm of standardized objects and substances” (357). Carrying with them pickles, preserves, and brandied and glacé fruits, or, by the early nineteenth century, the “Appertised” foods canned by Nicholas Appert, they were able to preserve both their bodies and their civility. For example, the stock cube provided both “alimentary first-aid” and the “essential element of the polite [French] dinner, a ready-made soup course” (364). Thus armed with preserved food and good table manners, these travellers could be secure in the judgements they made of the cuisine, cutlery handling and domestic arrangements of those they encountered, ranking them on the Enlightenment's culinary scale of civilization. They could also be sure that when they ate a rat, a bat or a crow they did it for science, not simply because they were hungry, coarse or savage, unlike the sailors who transported them or the “natives” they met.

Taken together, this array of “go-betweens” defines a category with some shared characteristics. Go-betweens, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam points out in his Afterword, exist because there are transactions, and, in particular, because there is friction in those transactions. This friction—a barrier of language, knowledge, skill or material resource that takes some work to overcome—requires mediation, and the go-betweens mediate. Successful mediation sets a difficult task, however. It needs to work all parties to the transaction together, uniting potentially incompatible worlds, different cultures and contradictory desires. And it should do so in ways which do not “leak” or increase the friction. Go-betweens need trust and credit from all sides, requiring them to multiply identities and relationships. But, as James Delbourgo puts it, they must also “suppress the traces of [such] multiple incarnations, lest they create an impression of dangerous fluidity rather than the image of the trustworthy broker” (317). Boundary crossing can create both value and concern.

The focus on go-betweens which expands the boundary into a borderland also requires a double vision that sees both processes of territorialization and the formation of cross-cutting networks. The geography of mediation is, therefore, one that combines attention to the local places where the work of mediation is done, in all their variety, and the broader patterns of movement, the webs and the flows, that such mediation enables. Mediatory spaces are as multiple as the go-betweens that used them. For example, David Turnbull characterizes the astronomical observatory that William Dawes had built on the promontory above Sydney Cove as a “third space”. It fixed the location of Australia in a cartographic grid tied to the stars and to Europe, allowed the mapping of the land for settlement by convicts and provided for the governor's wife's instruction in the polite arts of planetary motion. At the same time it was also a site of interaction and exchange that was jointly produced by Dawes, Bennelong and the young aboriginal woman Patyegarang as they learned each other's languages. This small space fashioned of wood and canvas “allowed differing and incommensurable knowledge traditions and spatialities to encounter one another, and allowed the experimental explorations of the complexities of intimacy, misunderstanding and divided loyalties, without violence or suppression” (411–12). These micro-sites are then set within a historical geography of going between that produces patterns of concentration and dispersal. Thus Kapil Raj defines Calcutta between 1770 and 1820 as “the Brokered City”, “a complex space constituted by a multitude of go-betweens, sometimes single individuals but often members of vast professional or trade diasporas linked to other parts of terrestrial and maritime Asia” (116) and, of course, to Europe. He is then able to examine the ways in which the city—and its law courts, learned societies and printing houses—provided a complex meeting place for the intersecting paths of knowledge intermediaries from both Asia and Europe as they engaged in the power-laden production of “brokered knowledge” (134). The complex and mobile geography this constructs is a long way from the fixities and dichotomies of “orientalism”.

Shifting towards understanding knowledge production through mediation does, however, raise a number of related questions which may also suggest some future directions. An important issue is raised in Sanjay Subrahmanyam's Afterword, where he contrasts celebratory accounts of the go-between “as all purpose-saint, wily trickster, or simply an incarnation of homo ludens” (430) with those that tell more tragic stories of people “constrained in their actions, and thus caught as it were between a rock and a hard place” (440). Subrahmanyam's insistence on the harsh realities of imperial power is entirely appropriate, yet it is certainly the case that the “wiggle room” of the go-between is historically and geographically differentiated. If the editors of The Brokered World are right to see an enclosure of the mediatory commons at the beginning of the nineteenth century in British India and the North Atlantic world, recent studies of British imperial exploration have found plenty of go-betweens in mid-nineteenth-century Northern Australia, East Africa, the Himalayas and Guiana.Footnote ⁶

More conceptually, it also raises the question what exactly go-betweens go between. Thinking of “cultures”, “societies”, “knowledge traditions” or “empires” as “rocks” or “hard places” is to prejudge the question how solid they actually are at any particular moment, and for whom. It is to suggest that what we seek to understand is a question of movement between two (or more) immobilities. This, of course, would run against a rich vein of post-structural and post-colonial scholarship which argues for the constant construction and reproduction of entities such as “cultures”, “societies”, “knowledge traditions” or “empires”. If something that is only built of words, embodied actions and practices (albeit armoured with technologies) has become like a rock or a hard place, then that is an achievement that needs to be explained rather than existing as a state that can be assumed. For example, Haji Mustapha certainly found that “culture” was a problem in late eighteenth-century Calcutta. The cultural practices of the city's commercial printing houses meant that he could not get his texts to say what he wanted them to say. As he asked, “what if the Printer despising your quality as a Foreigner, thinks an [sic] Englishman whatever, has a right to know more of the language than you, and takes the liberty of correcting you . . .?”Footnote ⁷ Yet cultural difference on the basis of nationality or “race” was something that was in the making in late eighteenth-century India, and the solidity of such notions varied markedly between contexts as well as changing over time.Footnote ⁸ As a result, if the social formations that go-betweens go between are seen as multiple and shifting, as having complex ongoing histories, that only serves to emphasize the need to understand the history of mediation from both (all?) sides. While such even-handed histories of mediation in literate societies are beginning to be written—for example, Robert Liss on Japanese translators, Kapil Raj and Simon Schaffer on brokered knowledge in Bengal, and Neil Safier and Juan Pimentel on Spanish American Creole collectors and critics—it is far less clear how accounts of cultural complexity and the ongoing historical transformation of knowledge traditions can be written for oral cultures.

While this may be understood as a problem of sources, and of how we can use an asymmetrical archive to reconstruct processes of mediation, it can also highlight a deeper absence in this work as currently undertaken. Perhaps what go-betweens do most is to talk, and the history of that has yet to be written. The spoken words of mediators precede, surround and follow up the material exchanges, inscriptions and visualizations which leave their traces in the archive. Speech is necessary for the work of mediation in that it is continually adaptable in a way that more tangible forms of communication are not. It can be readily turned to the task of giving each side what it wants. Yet that is also its problem, and a source of continual distrust for literate cultures that wish to fix those words in some way. In that sense, whichever “side” the parties in such transactions come from is an oral culture, one that gives certain meanings—positive or negative—to particular forms of talk, and uses them to organize the matters of trust and credit that are central to mediation. Just as forms of writing from different knowledge traditions are both recognizable and recognizably different, providing both the basis for translations of all sorts and the grounds for all manner of misunderstandings, so too are forms of talk. For example, the oaths sworn by treaty negotiators might, at one and the same time, provide the necessary basis for making peace and lay the foundations for completely incommensurate views of the relationships thereby established.Footnote ⁹

While matters of speech have not been put at the heart of the interpretation of knowledge making in the imperial and colonial encounter, there are hints here of histories of talk that go beyond accounts of the translation between languages. Kapil Raj notes the significance of the “fabled oratory skills” (132) of Mir Muhammed Husain Isfahani for his attempts to construct a community of Shi'ite scholars to study the “new sciences” in Calcutta on his return from Europe. Margaret Meredith provides a brief cultural history of eighteenth-century scientific correspondence as “an extension of companionable conversation” in the salon, garden, academy, junto or club, which necessarily limited who could say what to whom (158). And David Turnbull quotes Paul Carter on what happened in William Dawes's observatory between Dawes, Bennelong and Patyegarang as they “established protocols or grounds for common understanding”, as “a shared discovery of the difficulty of communication itself and a mutual respect for the irreducible differences between peoples that this revealed” (410–11). There is a real opening for more work on what talk has meant in knowledge production, how it has been done, how it has made an epistemological difference, and how this vital work of intermediation has been both represented and obscured in the texts that were produced from and through it.

Finally, the counterproblem to the one raised by Subrahmanyam is that if knowledge production is not conceived in terms of the mobility between immobilities but as the intersection of relative mobilities (or as the entanglement of networks), then where are the lines to be drawn over what counts as a go-between and, along with that, how are we to conceptualize the geography of knowledge? Clearly, no universal or fixed rules are going to work here, but there need to be some ways of differentiating between forms of mediation, and that is unlikely to simply involve dividing the tricksters from the victims. For example, take Joseph Banks, the rakish botanical virtuoso on James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific in the Endeavour who was to become the linchpin of imperial science as president of the Royal Society and supporter of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Banks's mediatory credentials seem secure as he botanized in Tahiti; shot and ate a kangaroo; learned from (and perhaps befriended) the Polynesian warrior, priest and navigator Tupaia and Mai (or Omai), the first Pacific islander to visit London; and had himself depicted draped in a version of a Polynesian barkcloth cape whilst also arranging to have ersatz Maori clubs made in London, and stamped with his coat of arms, for exchange in New Zealand. Indeed, rumours about his sexual relationship with the Tahitian “queen” Purea served as a lightening rod for debates over (in)appropriate intercultural conduct. However, he is later seen as at the heart of the power-laden processes of imperial botany which tore plants from their context, stripped them of their local meanings and routed them via metropolitan centres of calculation such as Kew in order to reap profit and power across Britain's empire. Did Banks at some point stop being a go-between and start being someone for whom others went? Was it always the case that his mediations worked in the service of particularly interested forms of knowledge which he only later had the power fully to realize? Was it the case that he was always a go-between, but pursued that task in different ways and with different technologies in the South Seas and in London?

Both Joseph Banks and Haji Mustapha can usefully be characterized as go-betweens in ways that help us reshape understandings of the production of knowledge, its relationship to power and its organization over space. However, we also need to appreciate the differences between them. This is a matter of the fluidity or solidity of the situations they found themselves in; their power to manage those situations by making and using space; the technologies and techniques they had at their disposal (including those of talk); and, last but not least, not just what they knew but who they knew and how they knew them. Understanding such a complex array of mediations may require another shift in how we conceptualize the geography of knowledge in the colonial and imperial encounter. Just as the borderland, middle ground, or contact zone usefully reworked the bounded territorializations of “orientalism”, so we might now need to investigate a more multiple space of mediation.Footnote ¹⁰ As I have argued, ideas of the borderland depend upon a contrast between the hybrid, fluid and mobile space of the middle ground and those more immobile spaces which lie on either side. However, bringing a multitude of practices of mediation simultaneously into view questions this distinction and suggests a different spatiality. This would be one where contact zones appear at the imperial centre not just on the margins; where networks can bring distant spaces close together and force proximate places apart; and where social spaces can be folded, faulted or sponge-like, having variegated and shifting textures, sometimes soft and sometimes hard. Thinking imaginatively about the geography of power and knowledge in the ongoing process of encounter will help do justice to the complexities of power and knowledge in the lives of figures like Banks and Mustapha.