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James Mather. Pashas: Travellers and Traders in the Islamic World

I have read this fascinating book twice, and still find it easy to miss the wood for the trees. James Mather gives us a detailed picture of the world of the traders of the Levant Company from its original charter in 1581 to its disbandment when George Canning (why is his name not in the Index?) took over for the British government the control of the company’s network of consuls in the Levant. Mather draws deeply on both the State Papers of the National Archives and on contemporary journals and reports from the travellers and traders of his title — people like Henry Blount, Robert Bargrave, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Charlemont, Aaron Hill, Richard Knolles, Henry Maundrell, Simon Ockley, Edward Pococke, Paul Rycaut, George Sandys, and other contemporary writers and scholars — and this first-hand material gives his book its liveliness and interest. Mather makes it clear that the Levant Company was founded and managed by men whose aim was profit, not empire, and whose style was conservative rather than forward-looking, and who in the end were overtaken by and lost out to the imperialists in a world where the East India Company was not afraid to develop its trading outreach into an empire defended by the military. He shows us the Company’s life and activity in three main centres — its ‘factories’ in Constantinople, Aleppo, and Smyrna — and gives us a picture of its workings. However, though Mather is much concerned with the economic and political background to the trade, and is good on the political background to the decline of the Company, he says little or nothing about the actual mechanisms of the financial dealing involved. How exactly were payments made and profits returned between London and the three factories? Who were the bankers and the accountants, who carried the money or the letters of credit? Who organised the shipping? How, in fact, was it all done? There is more to be said about the whole organisation behind the traders. Though, to be fair, Mathers’ chapter on ‘Trading Places’ has good sections on ‘Apprentices’ and ‘Embarking’, in which we learn about the Company’s personnel and the perils of the Mediterranean journey. A theme running through the book is the relationship between foreign trade and foreign diplomacy. While the Company wanted British ambassadors to act for it at the Sultan’s court, ambassadors inevitably saw themselves as more than representatives of trade interests; as acting for Crown rather than Company. Mathers well brings out, however, that the Company’s fortunes were closely tied to those of the Ottoman state, and declined as the Ottoman state lost its power abroad, and other powers — notably the French — rose to play their own imperial game. The French invasion of Egypt under Bonaparte, though unsuccessful, changed the course of events and the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean, and the British interest in India overtook its interest in the Levant except as a means to India. The Company failed to grasp a place in this brave new world, and so died. Mathers, however, notes the empathy of the Company’s travellers and traders with the oriental world of the Ottomans, contrasting it with the later imperialistic and patronising orientalism described by Edward Said, and closes his account hoping for the return of ‘a peaceful and mutually enriching encounter