Abstract
This is not a book about the contours of French and British trade in the Mediterranean during the period surveyed. Rather, it is a study of the effect in France and Britain that the development of commerce with the Muslim Mediterranean had on shaping a number of contemporary fields of knowledge, including several with no obvious or immediate connection to international trade. The first chapter explores the new interest in defining the nation, measuring the economy and promoting economic growth that resulted from French and British legislation to police Mediterranean trade. The second explores the novel access that the Mediterranean trade delegations gave to the Greek Orthodox Church and other Christian denominations in the Ottoman Empire and allowed Protestants and Catholics arguing over the rights and wrongs of transubstantiation in the second half of the seventeenth century to find support for their positions in the histories of the Eastern churches. The third chapter examines the emerging western interest in the history and geography of North Africa as part of a wider interest in filling in the blanks of world history and a new enthusiasm among government archivists and historians in organising information chronologically. And the final chapter looks at the European debate over fossils, especially fossilised human bones, across the period, and the way the debate was shaped by the stories that emerged from North Africa about a buried city called Ras Sem that had been turned to stone by an angry God.
None of the interest in the fields of knowledge explored was sparked off by dialogue with the peoples of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, the author suggests that there was limited contact between the merchant colonies and the indigenous population beyond commercial encounters. The interest was engendered solely by debates occurring in Western Europe in the seventeenth century. Moreover, in the case of each knowledge-category, however apparently distinct, the interest displayed in the Ottoman world followed a similar pattern. They all though went through the same history of development. Initially, pre-1650 there was no interest at all in defining nationality or finding out more about the belief systems, history and culture of the Ottoman world. At this point, according to the author, the western world was in a state of nescience. Interest was then enlivened for different practical and intellectual reasons, and French and English (the author always says British) theologians, antiquarians, natural philosophers and so on used contacts in the delegations to find out more. Then by 1750 enough was known for interest to droop or become an interest for an entirely different field of enquiry. Thus by the 1740s both French and British natural philosophers had accepted that the city of stone was a myth: the French (as was their wont) had sent out an expedition to the likely site and found nothing, while Thomas Shaw, an Oxford antiquarian and geographer, had used his philological skills to debunk the accounts of the city in various Arab and Ottoman sources. The interest in the site now shifted to intellectuals in England, like William Stukeley, interested in the Druids and purported Druidic temples, such as Stonehenge. Stukeley thought the ruins of Ras Sem were just one of many ancient Druidic temples scattered around the Mediterranean which were inspired by Stonehenge. All pre-Christian Mediterranean civilisation was inspired by the Ancient Britons.
This book is an interesting contribution to a new genre: the history of ignorance. It sets out to explore why and how at a specific moment in time the realisation dawns that there are things we know nothing about that we must get to know: in this case principally the Ottoman, Muslim and Orthodox Christian worlds and their histories. It also demonstrates convincingly that it is dangerous to use modern disciplinary categories when exploring the intellectual life of the early-modern world. Disciplinary boundaries at this point were porous and many fields undefined or interconnected. The author is particularly acerbic at the expense of those, à la Kuhn, who continue to treat the history of science as a separate field. The book is based on a deep knowledge of the relevant archives as well as printed contemporary sources. There are occasional factual lapses – Shaw was the Regius Professor of Greek; he was never an Oxford professor of theology. But for the most part the author’s knowledge is impressive. If the book has a weakness, it lies in its style. It not an easy read. Individual words are sometimes used wrongly, others do not exist in the online version of the OED, and many sentences are grammatically poorly constructed or over-complex. Above all, the sections of analysis are frequently impenetrable because they are written in over-sophisticated Germanic English. This is unfortunate because there is much here that historians of the Early Enlightenment will find very stimulating: this reviewer learnt a great deal. It is a pity that the manuscript was not very carefully edited by a native English speaker before it was published. As a result, the book will have fewer readers than it deserves.