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

William Dalrymple applauds an exemplary study of the 16th-century Levant Company and England's dealings with the mighty Ottoman empire

For 200 years, from the mid-15th century, the Ottoman Empire was the most powerful force in all Eurasia and Constantinople was the Mediterranean's greatest port. The sultan and his viziers ruled a great patchwork of peoples, languages and religions, an empire comparable in size and importance to that of Rome. Decisions made in Ottoman Constantinople affected millions across the globe, from Ireland through Poland to Sumatra. There was no other city in Europe that in size or grandeur could begin to compare.

1. Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World
2. by James Mather
3. 320pp,
4. Yale University Press

By contrast, 16th- and 17th-century England was a small and relatively impoverished mono-religious and mono-lingual state, perched precariously on the cold northern edge of Christendom. Compared with the might of the Ottomans, it was neither a major political nor military power. Although Britain's navy was sufficient to defend it from its immediate neighbours, Ottoman technological superiority at sea led to the capture of large numbers of British vessels and by the 1620s the Turkish navy had extended its reach into the waters of the British Isles.

Yet despite this, much of the contact between Britain and the Ottoman empire was both peaceable and profitable. After the founding of the English Levant Company in 1581, through a charter of Queen Elizabeth I, Britain was closely engaged with the Turks as the Ottoman empire expanded westwards through central Europe and Britain's trade network expanded eastwards to meet it. The company sold wool and tin (to be used in Ottoman armaments and munitions production) and in return bought huge quantities of Ottoman silks, Indian spices and indigo and, oddly enough, currants.

There was, in consequence, a great deal of movement between the two worlds. Elizabethan London had a burgeoning Muslim community that encompassed a large party of Turkish ex-prisoners, some Moorish craftsmen, a number of wealthy Turkish merchants and a "Moorish solicitor". At the same time, large numbers of Englishmen – from traders and diplomats to renegades and galley slaves – lived in Ottoman lands. When Charles II sent Captain Hamilton to ransom some Englishmen who had been enslaved on the Barbary Coast, they refused to return: the men had converted to Islam and were now "partaking of the prosperous Successe of the Turks... they are tempted to forsake their God for the love of Turkish women," wrote Hamilton. "Such ladies are," he added, "generally very beautiful."

James Mather's wonderful book is the first full-length study since 1935 of the Levant Company, the organisation that oversaw both England's trade and diplomacy with the Ottoman world, and which supervised and set the tone for the odd yet remarkably successful relationship between the two. As Mather shows, by the end of the 17th century trade with Turkey accounted for one quarter of all England's overseas commercial activity. It was the first non-Christian ­environment in which Englishmen established a major and distinct national presence and was an important and largely forgotten precursor to the centuries of empire ahead.

Yet as Mather is at pains to emphasise, there was an important distinction between these early contacts and the later colonial relationships that grew out of them. The attitude of the Jacobean travellers was utterly different from the arrogance of their Victorian successors. In the Ottoman Middle East, it was they and not their alien associates who had to conform; indeed, at this period, most Turks had never heard of England and as one imprisoned Englishmen put it, in Ottoman Jerusalem "the Turks flatly denied... they had ever heard of either of [his] Queen or country".

Mather excels at portraying the ­everyday life of the Englishmen who joined the Levant Company. He traces their recruitment, apprenticeship and training and the adventure of their maiden voyage out: "The Seae beating sometimes into my very Cabin; & I tossd & tumbled sometime my bed upon mee, & sometimes I upon my bed... all wet & dabbled, & in a confusion of Torments." Another factor compared life on ship to "imprisonment... with a chance of drowning besides".

Many seem to have lived like modern expats, keeping to their own compounds, importing their own cider, butter, beer and bacon, playing "bowles" and "krickett", indulging in amateur dramatics and drinking too much. The Aleppo factors even imported their own pack of English hounds. Others mixed in, recording the detail of Ottoman life in a series of fascinating dispatches, though few Englishmen seem to have had as much intimacy with Ottoman life as Francesco Lupazzoli, the priapic Venetian consul in Smyrna, who lived until he was 114, fathering no less than 126 children, 105 of them illegitimate, from his five wives and innumerable Smyrniot mistresses. The English factors, in contrast, had to vow to avoid all indulgence in "fornication and matrimony" as well as "cards, dice, tables, taverns and playhouses".

It is a fascinating and little studied subject and Mather's work is a major contribution to the historiography of Britain's relationship both with the Mediterranean and the world of Islam, which at that point was much more tolerant than religiously repressive Reformation Europe. It is also a vital corrective to the influential but wrong-headed readings of the flagbearers of intellectual Islamophobia such as VS Naipaul and Bernard Lewis, both of whom have manufactured entirely negative images of one of the most varied empires of history and the complicated European relationship with the Ottoman world.

One of the most interesting questions Mather raises is why the Levant Company never went the way of its younger contemporary, the East India Company, and turned into an empire-building, land-seizing, imperial-military power. After all, in the early years, the two companies overlapped to a considerable extent in terms of both investors and personnel: in the 1630s, 28 of the 47 directors of the East India Company court were also Levant Company members. It was not, he believes, for lack of opportunity so much as because of the conservative way in which the Levant Company was managed. It always erred on the side of caution and tried to avoid the devastating expenses incurred by its India counterpart in the course of its military adventures.

Ironically, though, it was the East India Company that eventually helped bring down the company that had inspired its birth. After the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, the East India Company moved into the country and the Levant Company sank into financial impotence. Yet at its height in the 1630s, it was "the most flourishing and beneficial company to the commonwealth of any in England" and the agent through which Britain engaged with and interacted with the Islamic world. Given this, the importance of this excellent and balanced study cannot be underestimated.

William Dalrymple's most recent book is Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Bloomsbury)

Source: The Guardian: Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World by James Mather