Europeans making sense of the Levant : French and British merchants in Aleppo in the late eighteenth century (ca. 1770-1805)

Abstract

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.