Europe and the Islamic World: A History, by John Tolan, Gilles Veinstein and Henry Laurens

Abstract

The idea of bringing together historians of medieval, early modern and modern European relations with the Islamic world is a good one, and it is sad that the distinguished author of the early modern section, Gilles Veinstein of the Collège de France, died around the time that this useful book appeared. A brief introduction by John Esposito rejects the facile concept of a ‘clash of civilisations’, famously set out by Samuel Huntington. If anything, the book tries to pull its readers towards the concept of a single ‘Islamo-Christian’ civilisation, itself an unsatisfactory term—one would have thought that the concept of a ‘civilisation’ with defined boundaries had departed the world with Arnold Toynbee. While they agree that Huntington’s view is a gross over-simplification, three historians with different perspectives are bound to produce a volume that shifts significantly in emphasis. John Tolan’s chapters are the broadest, since his main scholarly interest lies in the intellectual engagement between Christians and Muslims; but he has not shied away from treatment of trade relations, the political history of the reconquista, and even (though in a short section littered with errors) the significance of the first Portuguese advances into the Atlantic. Veinstein was primarily a scholar of the Ottoman world, and it is no surprise that his chapters on the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should lay a strong emphasis on the Ottoman relationship with western Europe, and include authoritative coverage of what was happening in the Balkan areas that lay under Turkish rule. Henry Laurens, on the other hand, is particularly concerned with political developments in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and he offers more detail on the First and Second World Wars than the scale of the book perhaps allows; as a result his analysis of some important developments, such as the planning of the Suez Canal, seems quite compressed. Yet he manages to bring in a great amount of valuable material, such as the final defeat of the Barbary corsairs and the role of Anglo-Moroccan trade in the nineteenth century (without, however, citing the important work of Daniel Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira [1988]).