Author: Christine Laidlaw Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0857711105 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
For more than two centuries following its formation in 1581, the Levant Company enjoyed a monopoly of British trade with the Ottoman Empire and provided Britain's diplomatic representation at the Sultan's court and throughout the Ottoman territories. Rather than focusing on 'the Turkey trade' itself, or on the merchants who engaged in it, Christine Laidlaw examines the supporting cast of Britons - officials, clergymen, physicians and accompanying family members - who lived and worked alongside the merchants at the Company's three principal trading posts at Istanbul, Izmir and Aleppo during the eighteenth century. This unique perspective will be invaluable for historians of the eighteenth century and the Ottoman Empire.
Author: Anastasia Yiangou Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317029739 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
This book explores the concept of ‘the Levant’ as a component of the regional and international system during the age of imperialism. At its heart is a focus on the experience of Greek-speaking societies and, above all, the independent state of Greece that came into existence in 1830. A key sub-theme running through the account is the Anglo-Hellenic connection stemming from an enhanced British presence in the Eastern Mediterranean from the 1830s and 1840s, and in particular its relationship to the Greek polity. Within this framework the emergence of the idea of ‘Greater Greece’ is integrated into the narrative, including its regional reverberations and ethnic tensions. Other contributions examine trade and finance, gender issues, colonialism and the distinctive experience of Cyprus. The core of the volume deals centrally with three interlocking themes: modernity, nationalism and trans-nationalism. Ultimately these forces were to prove at odds with the ambiguity and elite structures that characterized the Levant in its nineteenth-century heyday. The book analyses the evolution, and increasing definition from the late 1950s, of Greece’s modern European identity, while taking into account the magnetic force of other relationships and regional links. This treatment connects with the choices and dilemmas facing Greece and its surrounding region, which contemporary crises invariably throw into relief. It will be of interest both to specialised historians and students of current affairs seeking to understand the broader historical context.
Author: Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192895761 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
Britain's Levantine Empire, 1914-1923 explains the rise and decline and nature and extent of British military rule in the urban eastern Mediterranean during the course of the First World War and its aftermath. Combining novel case studies and theoretical approaches, the volume reveals the extent of military control that Britain established and anticipated maintaining in the post-Ottoman world, before a series of confrontations with nationalist and socialist anti-imperialists forced a new division of the eastern Mediterranean, still visible in the political borders of the present day. Britain's Levantine Empire, 1914-1923 tells this story through the eyes and ears of the British servicemen who built this empire, analysing the testimony of over 100 such military personnel sent to Alexandria, Thessaloniki, Istanbul, and the towns and islands between them, as they voyaged, made camp, and explored and patrolled the city streets. Whereas histories examining soldiers' experiences in the First World War have almost exclusively focused on their lives at the frontlines, this study provides a much needed in-depth history of soldiers' experience and impact on the urban hubs of the Eastern Mediterranean, where urban planning, nightlife and entertainment, policing, and security were transformed by the presence of so many men at arms and the imperialist interventions that accompanied them.
Author: Simon Mills Publisher: ISBN: 0198840330 Category : Aleppo (Syria) Languages : en Pages : 353
Book Description
A Commerce of Knowledge tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Syria during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reconstructing the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, Simon Millsinvestigates the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and English scholarly and missionary interests: the study of Middle-Eastern languages; the exploration of biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities; and the early dissemination of Protestant literature in Arabic. Early modernOrientalism is usually conceived as an episode in the history of scholarship. By shifting the focus to Aleppo, A Commerce of Knowledge brings to light the connections between the seemingly separate worlds, tracing the emergence of new kinds of philological and archaeological enquiry in England backto a series of real-world encounters between the chaplains and the scribes, booksellers, priests, rabbis, and sheikhs they encountered in the Ottoman Empire.Setting the careers of its protagonists against a background of broader developments across Protestant and Catholic Europe, Mills shows how the institutionalization of English scholarship, and the later English attempt to influence the Eastern Christian churches, were bound up with the internationalstruggle to establish a commercial foothold in the Levant. He argues that these connections would endure until the shift of British commercial and imperial interests to the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the eighteenth century fostered new currents of intellectual life at home.
Author: Alfred C. Wood Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136237267 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
First Published in 1964. The main purpose of this study is to look at the many sides of the Levant Company from its foundation, the early years of 1583 to 1605 and to its decline in the 1830s. The Levant Company was an English chartered company with Elizabeth I of England approving its initial charter on 11 September 1592, in order to maintain trade and political alliances with the Ottoman Empire. It includes manuscripts from the Public Record Office, printed materials and documented voyages and travels.
Author: Burhan Çağlar Publisher: Libra Book ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 170
Book Description
The first newspapers in the Ottoman lands generally focused on commercial and financial news, but as the time passed, they developed a richer content portfolio with a wider range of topics. The Levant Herald (1856-1914) was one of the long-lasting newspapers issued by British subjects under Ottoman rule. From this perspective, it witnessed the Empire’s last decades. Although The Levant Herald was published in Ottoman territory, it also circulated in Europe and Britain. Due to this, the newspaper had a somewhat international character. The main purpose of the newspaper was to give news concerning the financial, commercial and economic developments in the Near East, the Levant in particular, and to highlight the investment opportunities in the region. It was aimed at not only the British Levantine groups in the Ottoman territory and their local and commercial partners, but also the entire European community that had settled in the east. The proprietors of the newspaper changed several times during its lifecycle and due to the regular threat of closure, it had to be issued under different names. The names that the newspaper used were as follows: The Levant Herald, The Constantinople Messenger, The Eastern Express, The Levant Herald & Eastern Express.
Author: Henning Schuler Publisher: ISBN: Category : Aleppo (Syria) Languages : en Pages : 243
Book Description
When German traveller Ulrich Jasper Seetzen in Aleppo sat down to write his diary in early 1805, he was upset with his landlady. "Madame Sceriman" a Maronite woman married to an Italian merchant, claimed a higher rent than Seetzen thought he had agreed to, insisting on an old contract. "This angered me so much" Seetzen wrote "that I decided at once to leave her house and look for new lodgings". Seetzen, who had been renting the apartment from Sceriman for over a year at this point, continued: "This confirms the judgement of consul Barker, that the local Levantines are without good faith and that, following the example of their despotic governments, they make avanias wherever possible." 1 Seetzen was by all accounts what one could call an "enlightened traveller", who did not want to expose an inherent depravity of the local population, but rather tried to rehabilitate them in the eyes of his European contemporaries. Yet on this day, he felt that his judgement not only clashed with reality, but also with what he had been told by the British consul. It is this kind of exchanges that I want to explore in this thesis. How did the French and British in Aleppo, in the European society of Aleppo, but also with travellers and the local population, make sense of the Levant and its inhabitants at the end of the Eighteenth Century? I want to reconstruct the intellectual environment that the French and British inhabited as Europeans in Aleppo and their thoughts and ideas about the government, the country, and the people among whom they lived. Considering the sheer extent of the sources (mostly correspondence) left by them, this is 'a narrow path through a broad field' as one supervisor once called it. In the overwhelming majority of their letters the French and British at Aleppo did not spell out their views and thoughts about the city they inhabited, but rather wrote about commercial or administrative matters. However, it is the advantage of this approach that precisely by looking at documents that are not "ethnographic" in nature, one can see how the French and British expressed their thoughts in their everyday interactions and how the language and expressions they used betrayed the view they had of themselves, as Europeans in the Levant, and of the people and country surrounding them. Of course, personal accounts or descriptions of the city and region of Aleppo written by its European inhabitants are very valuable sources that I will use as well. The protagonists of this study were a rather small but tight community of British and French merchants. Most documents were produced by a handful of individuals, which allowed me to follow their debates closely. Focusing on one place and a relatively short period of time, the last three decades of the Eighteenth Century, this study is not comparative. While the British and the French differed in some of their views and ideas, I found that they largely constituted one European community in Aleppo which coincided in the majority of opinions explored in this thesis. I thus analyse them together but point out differences when they are significant. In the following sections of this introduction, I will first give an overview of the literature that I found informative and that motivated me to write my dissertation and how it shaped my approach, and then provide some historical context on the situation of Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the Europeans in Aleppo at the end of the Eighteenth Century. In the last section I will give a more detailed overview of my sources and periodization.
Author: Philip Mansel Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300176228 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 497
Book Description
Not so long ago, in certain cities on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived and flourished side by side. What can the histories of these cities tell us? Levant is a book of cities. It describes three former centers of great wealth, pleasure, and freedom—Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut—cities of the Levant region along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. In these key ports at the crossroads of East and West, against all expectations, cosmopolitanism and nationalism flourished simultaneously. People freely switched identities and languages, released from the prisons of religion and nationality. Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived and worshipped as neighbors.Distinguished historian Philip Mansel is the first to recount the colorful, contradictory histories of Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut in the modern age. He begins in the early days of the French alliance with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century and continues through the cities' mid-twentieth-century fates: Smyrna burned; Alexandria Egyptianized; Beirut lacerated by civil war.Mansel looks back to discern what these remarkable Levantine cities were like, how they differed from other cities, why they shone forth as cultural beacons. He also embarks on a quest: to discover whether, as often claimed, these cities were truly cosmopolitan, possessing the elixir of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews for which the world yearns. Or, below the glittering surface, were they volcanoes waiting to erupt, as the catastrophes of the twentieth century suggest? In the pages of the past, Mansel finds important messages for the fractured world of today.
Author: Christine Laidlaw
Author: Anastasia Yiangou
Author: Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal
Author: Simon Mills
Author: Alfred C. Wood
Author: Mortimer Epstein
Author: Burhan Çağlar
Author: Henning Schuler
Author: Philip Mansel
Author: Alfred C. Wood