Introduction: cross-disciplinary approaches to Kongo history Koen Bostoen and Inge Brinkman; Part I. The Origins and Dynamics of the Kongo Kingdom: 1. The origins of Kongo: a revised vision John K. Thornton; 2. A central African kingdom: Kongo in 1480 Wyatt MacGaffey; 3. Seventeenth-century Kikongo is not the ancestor of present-day Kikongo Koen Bostoen and Gilles-Maurice de Schryver; 4. Soyo and Kongo: the undoing of the Kingdom's centralisation John K. Thornton; 5. The Eastern Border of the Kongo kingdom: on relocating the Hydronym Barbela Igor Matonda; Part II. Kongo's Cosmopolitan Culture and the Wider World: 6. From image to grave and back: multidisciplinary inquiries into Kongo Christian visual culture Cécile Fromont; 7. Ceramics decorated with woven motifs: an archaeological Kongo kingdom identifier? Els Cranshof, Nicolas Nikis and Pierre de Maret; 8. From America to Africa: how Kongo nobility made smoking pipes their own Bernard Clist; 9. 'To make book': a conceptual historical approach to Kongo book cultures (sixteenth-nineteenth c.) Inge Brinkman and Koen Bostoen; 10. Kongo cosmopolitans in the nineteenth century Jelmer Vos; 11. The making of Kongo identity in the American diaspora: a case study from Brazil Linda Heywood.