Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I appreciated the subject matter more than the book itself.
Endless books are available on the East India Company and the resulting Raj with its economic, political and military impact on Britain starting in the eighteenth century. It is much harder to find comparable studies of the Levant Company and its influence on Britain of the seventeenth century. I was thus very excited to discover this book.
The title is somewhat misleading. This is not a study of "traders and travelers in the Islamic world" as the subtitle explains. It is a study of British citizens in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And it is really a history of the Levant Company, a rough equivalent of the East India Company, established as a monopoly trade company between England and the Ottoman Empire.
The strength of the book is the extensive use of quotes from primary sources, often letters and dispatches from Levant Company officials and British diplomats.
My main criticism is that the book attempts too much for its short length (240 pages plus notes, bibliography & index). The author also presents us with two young men in the seventeenth century apprenticed to the Levant Company. But after providing back stories and several pages on the first journey to Turkey by one of them ,the author loses interest in the two, and we rarely hear from them again. Puzzling.
There is an extensive bibliography for those wishing to further investigate this fascinating subject. Two arguments raised by the author but not sufficiently discussed to sate my curiosity were: 1) the Levant Company was never interested in militarily conquering Turkey or other parts of the Ottoman Empire, unlike the East India Company in India; and 2) while many books touch on the impact of trade from India in the eighteenth century in developing Britain's consumer and fashion society, the author makes an intriguing argument that trade with the Ottoman Empire had a similar, though less far reaching, impact during the seventeenth century.
The book ends with an unfortunate epilogue of scenes from Raj-era India and a summary of Britain's increasingly narrow and bigoted view of Islam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since these are at best a tangent to the book's themes, it was a puzzling way to end the book.


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Long before they came as occupiers, the British were drawn to the Middle East by the fabled riches of its trade and the enlightened tolerance of its people. The Pashas, merchants and travelers from Europe, discovered an Islamic world that was alluring, dynamic, and diverse. Ranging across two and a half centuries and through the great cities of Istanbul, Aleppo, and Alexandria, James Mather tells the forgotten story of the men of the Levant Company who sought their fortunes in the Ottoman Empire. Their trade brought to the region not only merchants but also ambassadors and envoys, pilgrims and chaplains, families and servants, aristocratic tourists and roving antiquarians. Unlike the nabobs who gathered their fortunes in Bengal, they both respected and learned from the culture they encountered, and their lives provide a fascinating insight into the meeting of East and West before the age of European imperialism.Intriguing, intimate, and original, Pashas brings to life an extraordinary tale of faraway visitors beguiled by a mysterious world of Islam.

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