Europeans making sense of the Levant

• Department of History

PhD thesis defence by Henning Schuler discussing how French and British merchants living in Aleppo in the late Eighteenth Century (ca. 1770-1805) made sense of the city and the people living in it.

This thesis analyses how French and British merchants living in Aleppo in the late Eighteenth Century (ca. 1770-1805) made sense of the city and the people living in it. It attempts to bridge the gap between two different findings in recent literature: on the one hand, the increasing evidence for multifaceted connections made across traditional cultural boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, and on the other hand the finding that, prompted by the weakening of the Ottoman Empire and a desire to unfable the world, European thinkers began to depict the Ottoman Empire as fundamentally different. The thesis draws mainly on archived correspondences by the British and French in Aleppo, and a number of contemporary travel accounts. The intellectual environment of the Europeans in the Levant is reconstructed by analysing the availability and use of books, which provides the background to evaluate the opinions of the Europeans in Aleppo on such issues as the local government, the influence of the climate on the people of the Levant, and the character of the urban and rural populations of the province. Looking at newspapers and their distribution and discussion, and at the different aspects of European sociability in Aleppo, it is argued that being European in Aleppo carried a social and moral meaning which went beyond the legal category established by the capitulations between the European powers and the Ottoman Empire. Combining these findings, it is concluded that while they were doubtlessly deeply integrated into the commercial and social life of the city, the Europeans of Aleppo also inhabited their own, European sphere, which in many ways helped them make sense of their experience in Aleppo.

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