British travel attitudes to the Near East in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Abstract

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century travel was considered to be a necessary adjunct to education, and, eventually, voyagers included Near Eastern countries within the Grand Tour. They visited the area at a time when Ottoman rule went unchallenged, and European countries, thanks to the help of their different societies and institutions, were amassing a large amount of data on a wide variety of subjects. Four outstanding contributors of the period were Lady Mary Wortley montagu, Richard Pococke, Robert Wood and Alexander Russell.

Lady Mary, who was a friend of some of the most prominent poets and writers of the age, immortalized the women of Turkey in her belles lettres and attempted to present many of the customs and manners of that area in a more favourable light than that in the Arabian Nights or in the popular travel literature of the time. Pococke, who later in life was made Bishop of Ossory and Meath, was a dedicated and selfless traveller, touring for five years the various regions under Ottoman rule. His A Descrirtion of the East was considered to be the most authoritative and comprehensive travel account of the period, and made any further attempts along the same lines useless.

The third traveller, Robert Wood, mainly concentrated on the works of Homer and the study of archaeology. He was particularly interested in the ruins of Baalbec and Palmyra, since they provided a notable example of smaller states successfully competing against larger and more powerful nations. The last contributor, Alexander Iussell, was a physician attached to the Levant Trading Company in Aleppo, and he, like Lady Mary before him, had the opportunity to observe and correct many of the popular misconceptions regarding Eastern women and the Islamic religion.

In later years, however, as Britain rapidly became a world power while the Ottomans lost many of the provinces under their jurisdiction, British travellers' attitude towards the area changed. Romantic revolutionaries at heart, they were no longer interested in acquiring information in the manner of their predecessors, but rather strove to challenge the past with the achievements of their own generation. Some works which demonstrated the new trend were William Kinglake's Eothen, Eliot Warburton's The Crescent and the Cross, and William Thackeray's From Cornhill to Grand Cairo.