British Encounters with Syrian-Mesopotamian Overland Routes to India, 1751-1795 (Paperback)

Mohammad Sakhnini

ISBN 10: 1801360510 / ISBN 13: 9781801360517

Published by Anthem Press, London, 2026

About this Item

Paperback. The book examines the relationship between the Enlightenment idea of improvement and eighteenth-century travel writings about Middle Eastern overland routes to India.This 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 a 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 books 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.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 practises 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. The book examines the relationship between the Enlightenment idea of improvement and eighteenth-century travel writings about Middle Eastern overland routes to India. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781801360517

Bibliographic Details

• Title: British Encounters with Syrian-Mesopotamian Overland Routes to India, 1751-1795 (Paperback)
• Publisher: Anthem Press, London
• Publication Date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1801360510
• ISBN 13: 9781801360517
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Mohammad Sakhnini is a senior lecturer in English Studies at Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi.