This cultural history by two of the foremost scholars of the early modern Anglo-Islamic encounter synthesizes over two decades of scholarship in the field. Matar brings his expertise on the Turks and Moors of the early modern Mediterranean, and Maclean expands into the Islamic empires of the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids. Together, they craft a synoptic view of the primarily English engagement with a vast and diverse Muslim world at a time when the marginal British archipelago was becoming the center of a global empire.
Roughly establishing the parameters for their investigation as the beginning of Elizabeth I's reign, when formal relations with Islamic polities were renewed for the first time since the Crusades, to the Peace of Utrecht, which saw the decline of the Spanish empire and the advance of the British, Maclean and Matar assert two main theses: (a) that the unprecedented dispersion of mostly Englishmen to Muslim lands as traders, diplomats, and captives decisively shaped British identity in the early modern period; and (b) that the British articulated a range of responses to Islam depending on whether they traveled to the Ottoman empire and the Maghreb or farther afield to the Persianate world of the Safavids and Mughals. The Ottomans appeared as a militant and expansionist threat to Europe throughout the seventeenth century, including the more removed British Isles. The Mediterranean, particularly after the mass expulsion of Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula, became even more dangerous to the British and other traders as a result of rear-guard guerrilla actions by the Barbary corsairs. With the bulk of English writing on Islam in the period about these regions, the overall image of Muslims remained negative, even if numerous British men and some women had positive experiences among Ottomans and Maghrebis.
Yet as Maclean and Matar meticulously document, Britons in the eastern Islamic empires, and particularly the Mughal empire under Akbar (1556–1605) and Jahangir (1605–27), did not experience hostility, or even much notice, regarding their strange attire, manners, and beliefs. They were there to trade, not to convert, and they sought to assimilate into this multiconfessional, multiethnic environment. Until the end of the seventeenth century, when the East India Company initiated its own militant and expansionist policy, they wisely did not provoke aggression. Ironically, it was the militant Moroccans who were able to eliminate the first British colony in a Muslim land, at Tangier (1661–84), whereas the accommodating Muslims of southeast and south Asia were taken aback by the East India Company's expropriation of strategic sites as early as 1616. This is the trajectory with which Maclean and Matar conclude their study, showing how tastes changed, and thus consumption patterns, in both British and Muslim locales as a result of this encounter. However, Britons prohibited Muslims from residing in the lands they controlled, whereas Islamic polities tolerated “people of the Book,” including the Protestant English. This meant that the balance of trade was toward the city of London and its merchant elite, who laid the foundation for the British empire.
But the situation at the start of Elizabeth's reign was very different. Particularly after her excommunication in 1570, which removed English traders from their traditional markets in continental Europe, she supported the joint-stock companies that promoted trade in the Levant and other Ottoman regions. The chapter on “First Diplomatic Exchanges” includes a case study of her correspondence with Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur, who ruled Morocco from 1578 to 1603; her Stuart successors generally avoided personal correspondence with Muslim sovereigns. Belated in the Ottoman empire, as they were in the Americas, the English competed with the Venetians and French at first, and then the Dutch. However, they were able to gain trading concessions by the 1580s, which increased travel by traders and diplomats to a region much safer for Protestants than Catholic Spain and its territories. The pivotal role of “British Factors, Governors, and Diplomats” is detailed in a lengthy chapter, which concludes with a case study of “the embassy to Istanbul of Sir John Finch, 1674–81.”
While this encounter produced a spate of travel narratives from the turn of the seventeenth century, and some trade documents were included in Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598–1600), most of the records of the trading companies did not reach a broad readership. The average Briton, therefore, continued to view the lands governed by Muslims in the early modern era through classical and biblical lenses. Even more influential was the mass of captivity narratives published in this period, which the chapter on “Captives” covers. Its archival breadth shows how these texts shifted from documents of redemption to intelligence assets enabling “the dream of empire” (127). Women number among the captives, as they do among the petitioners for the captives' release. Whereas they are anonymous for the most part, other women emerge as historical subjects, such as Lady Teresa Sampsonia Sherley (initially effaced as an anonymous “wife” [15; cf. 61]), Mariam Khan (“William Hawkins' Armenian wife” [61]), and Lady Anne Glover (94).
One of the most significant chapters focuses on “The Peoples of the Islamic Empires” that Britons encountered, particularly Eastern Christians and Jews. Their attitude to both groups was strangely patronizing, as they assumed they could convert these communities to Anglicanism to create a “fifth column” within the much more accommodating Ottoman empire. The chapter ends by addressing the grim fate of the Armenian ambassador from Morocco who died under house arrest in London. Unlike the relatively more tolerant environment of Morocco in the era, the impulse toward religious uniformity in England meant that he was seen as an alien “other” rather than a Christian brother.
The final chapter, on “Material Culture,” expands the field of early modern Anglo-Islamic relations beyond clashes of civilizations, cultures, or religions by tracing the impact of commodities transmitted via the circuits of the emerging colonial world system, especially tobacco, coffee, calico, turbans, and horses. In closing, the book underscores that “all [were] being turned into consumers of British [today, American] goods. And Muslims, like others, desired those goods, though the price is still being paid” (238). This book should be read by everyone who seeks to understand—and to rectify—this history.
