As this book shows, different British responses to the material conditions of the Arab region and its inhabitants were mapped onto some British debates about the viability of modern commercial societies and the apparently intractable problem of securing a more benign relationship between material advance and virtue, modernity and traditions, improvement and backwardness. These debates reflected some significant transformations of the period: fears of French invasion during the Seven Years Wars, Enclosure Acts and the Jacobite Rebellion, the corruption of East India Company, the crisis of the American colonies and French Revolution, and the debate over slavery of the 1790s. En route, Britons raised concerns about a host of religious, political and ethical questions that troubled eighteenth-century Britain: Is moral corruption a necessary price a society has to pay in return for living in a materially advanced state? Do people need to honour traditions and religion in modern commercial society in which people have never been freer? Can one find virtue and morality in commercial society? Can an advanced and enlightened society tolerate religion? How can it be that a wealthy society also has poor and dispossessed people who live in workhouses? How is it possible that a society which respects Enlightenment values of freedom and liberty also practices slavery and colonises other societies? European travellers in the Levant often found themselves confronting these questions, especially in a region known for being grand and great in the past but barren and full of ruins in the present. 

Mohammad Sakhnini completed his graduate studies at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. He taught at the universities of Exeter, Sussex and Brighton and held a research fellowship at the University of Linnaeus, Sweden. Currently, he is a senior lecturer in English Studies at Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Anthem Studies in Travel

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