My dissertation project seeks to understand early modern intercultural diplomatic encounters in the Mediterranean from an actor-focused comparative perspective. Focusing on eighteenth-century contacts between Europe and the Islamic world, I follow envoys of the three North African Ottoman regencies on their missions to Vienna, Paris, and London. I aim to broaden the perspective on these encounters by transgressing long-established boundaries of national academic cultures and conceptualizing these envoys from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli as protagonists of intercultural contacts. The ways they were received in France, Great Britain, and the Habsburg lands will shed new light on these European powers’ attitudes and expectations towards North Africans and the Islamic world on a cultural and political level. The practice of diplomacy with these North African representatives, I argue, reveals much about how eighteenth-century Europeans thought of themselves and their place in a world that was changing rapidly. At the same time, my research also showcases North African ambitions and motivations in direct diplomatic contacts with European powers and their perceptions of their Christian neighbors. Subscribing to a cultural approach to the history of diplomacy, my research tries to move as far as possible beyond the purely diplomatic sphere, paying special attention to the envoys' reactions to things they see and hear, interactions with people they meet, and the ways they are received in different locations and social occasions. I aim to situate these encounters in the history of intricate intercultural realities and changing discourses and ideas that shaped the globalizing eighteenth-century world and the place of Europe and Islamic lands in it.