Description
Book SynopsisThis book argues that eighteenth-century British travel writings about the Arabian Overland Routes to India offered fascinating anecdotes of encounters that allow us to rethink Enlightenment understanding of the meaning of improvement. Travelling among and writing about the inhabitants, government, culture, religion and ruins of Syria and Mesopotamia offered Britons opportunities to pose themselves in their narratives as men of improvement abroad. To that end, travelling appeared in their books as serious attempt to improve their readers’ knowledge about a region that many in Britain saw as decayed, barbaric and primitive. But the various encounters British travellers experienced in the region allowed them to negotiate the impact of excessive materialism on the traditions, morality, religion and landscape of eighteenth-century Britain. At the heart of this book’s understanding of Enlightenment writings about the Levant is the idea that a journey in a region which many considered as a theatre for the arts, sciences and military conquests in the past and decay in the present represents a fraught relationship modern Europeans had with the past, present and future.
Trade Review“Sakhnini’s impressive and original study of late eighteenth-century British travelogues illuminates both imperial history and Enlightenment ecology. Anxious to establish the fastest routes between England and India, intrepid agents of the East India Company charted itineraries between Aleppo and Basra, but, becoming fascinated by the Syrian desert and its inhabitants, projected agricultural improvements at every turn”— Gerald MacLean, Emeritus Professor, University of Exeter.
“This is a study of unexpected enlightenment. Exploring land routes to India in the eighteenth century, Briton could find in the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia spaces of civility and sociability. Rather than importing improvement to the desert, they were themselves improved. Original, compelling, this book opens a window on alternative cosmopolitanisms” — Professor Donna Landry, School of English, University of Kent.
“A meticulously researched study with unpublished archival material, Sakhnini’s is both a source book and an intriguing analysis of how British travelling merchants, civil servants, military and medical men not only recorded Syrian-Mesopotamian sites and experiences but, en route, also engaged in Enlightenment debates about history, aesthetics, the individual’s perfectibility, the improvement of the human condition and national versus global tactics” — Julia Kuehn, University of Hong Kong.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgment; Introduction; Chapter One Improvement of Knowledge: John Carmichael’s A Journey From Aleppo to Busserah, Over the Desert (1772); Chapter Two Polite Englishman in the East: Edward Ives’s Journey from Persia to England (1773); Chapter Three Commerce, Virtue and Improvement: Abraham Parsons’s Travel in Asia and Africa (1808); Chapter Four Henry Abbott: A Cosmopolitan in Cities and Deserts; Chapter Five Eyles Irwin’s Travels: The Politics of Adventure in the Levant; Chapter Six Political and Moral Improvement: Donald Campbell, A Journey Overland to India Partly by A Route Never Gone Before by Any European (1795); Conclusion; Unpublished Manuscripts; Reference List; Index
