In Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails & Encounters in the Early Modern World (Waltham, Brandeis University Press, 2011),Sanjay Subrahmanyam studies the lives of three individuals who lived as foreigners in a transimperial context on the frontiers of the Hispano-Portuguese Empire (Africa, India) and beyond (Mongol Empire) during the Early Modern Period. In her latest book Étrangers. É?tude d’une condition d’incertitude dans une société d’Ancien Régime (Paris, Bayard, 2012), Simona Cerutti explores the local ties in Torino in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Does the “stranger”, a core theme in both works, constitute a common interest and starting point for a dialogue between local and global historians? Subrahmanyam and Cerutti each investigate the capacity of social actors to act (agency) but from differing perspectives. The present review compares and considers their different approaches.