Felipe Fernández-Armesto
In Aleppo Once
Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World
By James Mather
Yale University Press 302pp £25 order from our bookshop
In 1782, Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, showed a lovelorn European youth comically incapable of rescuing his girlfriend from the harem of an Ottoman official, who, however, generously allowed the lovers to go free. Turks could outfox Europeans in cunning and exceed them in generosity. Turkey was often cited as a model for Enlightenment Europe to follow in hygiene, education and charitable institutions, and generally in what a late seventeenth-century traveller praised as their ‘order … economy and the regulation of provisions’. Well-informed observers of Turkey commended the Ottomans for religious toleration, respect for laws, customs and property rights, and for benevolence toward minorities – the very virtues that some political philosophers of the Enlightenment thought that Europe lacked.
In England, respect for the Ottomans already had a long tradition. James Mather’s intricate and entertaining study of English merchants in the Empire – especially in Aleppo, Alexandria, and Constantinople from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth – is hugely helpful in making that tradition intelligible and explaining
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
*Offer ends in TWO days*
Take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/
'Nourished on a diet of exceptionalism and meritocracy, millennials internalised the harmful falsehood that hard work necessarily yields success. The very least they should settle for is a "cool job", one that ... is the focus of their "passion".'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/workers-twerkers
'There is a difference between a doctor who writes medical treatises and a doctor who writes absurdist fiction. Do we want our heart surgeon to be an anti-realist?'
Joanna Kavenna peruses Iain Bamforth's 'Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trust-me-philosopher