The mingling of aristocrats and commoners in a southern French city, the jostling of foreigners in stock markets across northern and western Europe, the club gatherings in Paris and London of genteel naturalists busily distilling plants or making air pumps, the ritual fraternizing of "brothers" in privacy and even secrecy--Margaret Jacob invokes all these examples in Strangers Nowhere in the World to provide glimpses of the cosmopolitan ethos that gradually emerged over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Jacob investigates what it was to be cosmopolitan...