Fellows of The Royal Society in North Africa and the Levant, 1662-1800

Abstract

A previous article has emphasized the importance of the considerable number of Fellows of the Royal Society of London who, between the founding of the Society and the war with Napoleon I, were inhabitants of— or were closely identified with—the British Colonies in the West Indies and the mainland of North America (1)*. What follows below is, in a sense, a continuation of the previous discussion in an effort to identify the principal media of scientific intercourse between the Society and the British trading areas in the Mediterranean regions, exclusive of the Christian world in southern and western Europe. The objects of this intercourse were, in the main, no different from those which impelled the Society from its founding to engage in scientific correspondence with every corner of the world. However, the role of the trading companies appears to have been less significant in the Levant and in North Africa than that of companies trading in the New World (such as the Hudson’s Bay Company and the South Sea Company) or of the great East India Company in the Far East. There is, for instance, no evidence of active co-operation between the Levant Company and the Royal Society. It is less surprising, perhaps, to find that not a single Arab, Turk, or Greek was elected to the Royal Society before 1800—although one Italian-born resident of Turkey was elected to the Fellowship. With this exception, as we shall see, all of the North African and Levantine Fellows of the Royal Society before 1800 were native Englishmen, Scots, or Irishmen who, for one reason or another, devoted a portion of their lives to labour in the ancient Mediterranean lands and, because of this fact (together with their scientific interests) became firsthand observers, collectors, and informants of the Society from those regions.