Customer Reviews

Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World

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I appreciated the subject matter more than the book itself.

Endless books are available on the East India Company and the resulting Raj with its economic, political and military impact on Britain starting in the eighteenth century. It is much harder to find comparable studies of the Levant Company and its influence on Britain of the seventeenth century. I was thus very excited to discover this book.

The title is somewhat misleading. This is not a study of "traders and travelers in the Islamic world" as the subtitle explains. It is a study of British citizens in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And it is really a history of the Levant Company, a rough equivalent of the East India Company, established as a monopoly trade company between England and the Ottoman Empire.

The strength of the book is the extensive use of quotes from primary sources, often letters and dispatches from Levant Company officials and British diplomats.

My main criticism is that the book attempts too much for its short length (240 pages plus notes, bibliography & index). The author also presents us with two young men in the seventeenth century apprenticed to the Levant Company. But after providing back stories and several pages on the first journey to Turkey by one of them ,the author loses interest in the two, and we rarely hear from them again. Puzzling.

There is an extensive bibliography for those wishing to further investigate this fascinating subject. Two arguments raised by the author but not sufficiently discussed to sate my curiosity were: 1) the Levant Company was never interested in militarily conquering Turkey or other parts of the Ottoman Empire, unlike the East India Company in India; and 2) while many books touch on the impact of trade from India in the eighteenth century in developing Britain's consumer and fashion society, the author makes an intriguing argument that trade with the Ottoman Empire had a similar, though less far reaching, impact during the seventeenth century.

The book ends with an unfortunate epilogue of scenes from Raj-era India and a summary of Britain's increasingly narrow and bigoted view of Islam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since these are at best a tangent to the book's themes, it was a puzzling way to end the book.

A fluently written and thoroughly researched book. Mather presents the reader with a fascinating account of the power of the `Supply and Demand' economic trend long before the `consumerism boom' of the eighteenth century. Mather decides to follow the history of The Levant Company from its beginnings in the sixteenth century to its eventual decline in the nineteenth century. He emphasises the struggle for the monopoly against the Company's main competitors - namely the Spanish, French, Dutch and Venetian traders. A superb narrative, filled with colourful characters, Pashas paints a picture of peaceful tolerance and interaction between the Anglo and Islamic cultures, showing a rare account of the English men who fully immersed themselves in eastern life by exploring its culture, religion and customs. Pashas is a book that gives the reader an intimate account of the men who worked for the Levant Company, a superb read for anyone looking into the trade between Britain and the Ottoman Empire.

Mather's first book "Pashas" is subtitled "Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World." The title alone would lead one to believe that the book covers a wide range of interaction between Westerners and Muslims. However, the book is actually far more limited in scope and is about the Levant Company, a quasi-governmental British trading organization in the Ottoman Empire.

The book describes, often in very great detail, all aspects of the Levant Company and its history, from its antecedents to its demise in the 19th Century. However, Mather is far too inconsistent with the level of detail he provides in the book. He focuses on individuals, phenomena and entities and then seems to drop the discussion awkwardly and haphazardly. To be consistent Mather would either have to focus on the Company's history more generally, or otherwise lengthen the book.

I found the extensive quotations problematic and distracting. While they detail a great level of research and are the actual words of many directly involved in the history of the Levant Company, the language used 300-400 years ago is difficult to understand at times (often with very variant spelling from that used today), and very regularly broke up the flow of the reading. The author's own language is very academic in style and with the large volume of quotations this book made for very slow reading.

I also was confused by the epilogue which discusses British interactions with Muslims in 19th and 20th centuries, and deplores the current relations, almost as a lament to previous, apparently more tolerant relationships during the time of the Levant Company. However, the book does not justify this conclusion. The book discusses the layers of separation between British and Ottoman citizens, how the Levant Company "factors" led very isolated lives in Ottoman lands, the numerous types of discrimination faced by non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, as well as Christian disdaim for Muslims and Islam generally. The author concludes the book by hoping that there will again be a "peaceful, mutually enriching encounter between Britons and [Middle Easterners]." While the Levant company's work was apparently mutually enriching, and was not done at the point of a gun, in light of the numerous points of contention between the Ottomans and Company members, I doubt that the encounter described by Mather could truly be described as "peaceful."

If possible, I would probably have rated this book a 3.5. But due to the awkward writing, internal inconsistencies, and unaddressed contradictions in the book's contents and conclusions, I feel that I can only give this book a 3. If this book were presented as a graduate thesis or dissertation, it would be far easier to understand the book's style, language, and extensive quotations. I recommend this book for serious scholars of Ottoman and British history between 1580-1820, particularly those interested in trading relationships. But for the more casual reader or someone not interested in an account of the Levant Company, this is not likely to be worth your time.