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This book argues that eighteenth-century British travel writing on the Syrian-Mesopotamian overland routes to India does more than recount encounters; it challenges Enlightenment assumptions about “improvement.” As travellers moved through Syria and Mesopotamia, describing local peoples, cultures, religions, and ruins, they cast themselves as agents of knowledge and progress, presenting travel as a serious, empirical endeavour aimed at informing Britain about a region often portrayed as decayed and primitive. Yet these narratives also reveal tensions within Enlightenment thought. Encounters in the Levant prompted travellers to reflect critically on Britain’s own materialism and its effects on morality, tradition, and religion. The region thus functioned not only as an object of study but as a mirror for metropolitan anxieties. By situating the Levant as a space of former grandeur and present decline, this book shows how travel writing stages a complex temporal negotiation, through which Britons reimagined the relationship between past, present, and future—and, in doing so, rethought the meaning of progress itself.
“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.
Mohammad Sakhnini is a senior lecturer in English Studies at Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi.
Acknowledgment; 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Donald Campbell, A Journey Overland to India Partly by A Route Never Gone Before by Any European (1795); Conclusion; Unpublished Manuscripts; Reference List; Index