A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, c.1600–1760, by Simon Mills

Abstract

Simon Mills’s book represents the culmination of nearly a decade of publications by the author, centring on the experiences of English Levant Company chaplains during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here, Mills argues that the expansion of early English diplomacy and commerce with the Ottoman Empire, which was spearheaded by the Levant Company between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, created and expanded opportunities for English archaeological and philological enquiry in the Middle East, and enabled the Church of England to establish important links with Eastern Christians. Using three generations of Levant Company chaplains, all of whom were stationed in Aleppo at various points between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Mills explores how Levant Company employees and associates, and clerics in particular, exploited the Company’s diplomatic and commercial infrastructures to facilitate the early modern study of the ‘Orient’, as well as early Anglican–Orthodox rapprochement. Mills explores how chaplains and others studied local languages, including Arabic, Greek and Hebrew; catalogued and collected biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities; and helped to print and propagate some of the earliest Protestant literature in Arabic. In so doing, he makes a persuasive case for the notion that ‘Orientalism, Near-Eastern antiquarianism, and early English missions in the East were inextricable from the English commercial presence in the Ottoman Empire’ (p. 5).