The history of Asian and African collections in western institutions is not a new field of study, and has increasingly become the focus of international research in recent years. This volume contributes to such scholarship by investigating the collection history of manuscript collections in Germany. It engages with the often-complex circumstances under which such collections emerged and grew along three thematic axes: 1) Seven contributions focus on the development and composition of personal and institutional collections in Germany. 2) Another six contribu-tions instead focus their attention on European collectors, especially those who traveled outside of Europe in search of manuscripts. 3) The final seven contributions shift the focus to larger-scale processes, economic and political conditions, particularly at the local level of the regions of origin of the materials.