In 1705, the first treatise on Asian shells and molluscs was published posthumously. Its author was a man known as Rumphius (1627–1702), who was of German origin and had worked for the Dutch East India Company and spent many years in Indonesia studying maritime material culture and marine organisms. Rumphius's work marked the beginning of the transcultural and systematic study of Asian molluscs before which the collecting and study of conches had been the preserve of emperors and merchants, artists and artisans, and naturalists and amateurs in China as well as Europe. This book focuses mainly on Asian shells in early modern artefacts and paintings before 1705, considering them “things that talk,” and takes shells as a point of departure for transcultural “object lessons” in the study of art and material culture that teach us about aesthetics, craftsmanship and ecology in early modern Eurasia.

Research on the material culture of the early modern world has taken approaches that do justice to the period's globalized networks of mercantile and artistic exchange. Historians have written about the “global lives of things,” adding culture as one of the defining agents in the conceptualization of an object's “social life.” Early modern Europe has been conceptualized as a space whose object worlds were as “European” as they were “creole,” while the transcultural dimensions of Ming and Qing dynasty material culture have been widely acknowledged.