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Daniel Carey, Simon Mills. A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1600–1760., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 826–827, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae134
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Extract
In 1762, the German orientalist and Biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis published a compendious set of Fragen (questions) he had devised to inform the research and observations of a group of learned travelers en route to Arabia Felix. Much was entrusted to this party, but only one member survived to tell the tale, Carsten Niebuhr, about whom Michaelis had entertained doubts as he was the least accomplished in Arabic. This episode provides a concluding sequence in Simon Mills’s rich, engaging, and delightfully written account of the relationship between England and the Ottoman Empire from the seventeenth century through 1760. This book provides a story of much more than English activity alone. In the midst of a discussion focusing on the interrelationship between trade, religion, and scholarship under the unifying concept of a commerce of knowledge, Mills describes a set of engagements that was often cross-confessional (if not always on congenial terms) and deeply dependent on cross-cultural contacts. The extensive cast of characters featured here engaged in protracted attempts to source manuscripts in Oriental languages as well as coins and medals, and to decipher inscriptions and unfamiliar alphabets while encountering the landscapes of the ancient Near East, especially with a view to interpreting the Bible and understanding the cultures that inhabited the region in ancient times.
