Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World by James Mather
Yale University Press, £25
Even those of us who harbour unrequited longings for the commanding heights of the economy to be brought under workers’ control without compensation (except in cases of proven need) may feel a guilty frisson of something like admiration for the sheer energy of mercantile capitalism. For those who have not experienced this sinful emotion, I recommend this extraordinary book by an author who has ensured my eternal enmity by being impossibly good looking, about 25 years old, a qualified barrister and a former Kennedy scholar.
James Mather has set out – with meticulous use of superbly annotated primary and secondary sources – to write a history of the Levant Company which waxed and waned from the time its charter was granted by Elizabeth I in 1581 until the late 18th century when India became too ripe a fruit to resist and all avaricious traders sought to fill their boots in the footsteps of the East India Company.
Mather has, however, written a book within a book. Tales of old Aleppo and the murderous journey from its seaport, Skanderoon, flow into chronicles of Smyrna, the Galata side of Istanbul and Alexandria and he details the precarious trade in English cloth that saw silk, currants, drugs and spices fill the emptied holds of the company ships and flow into the richly scented warehouses of the River Thames. He details the capricious nature of the Ottoman Sultanate where certain rules were rigidly observed and others made up on the spot. He conceals lightly his distaste at the extraordinary behaviour of the men of the Aleppo factory who rode to hounds with silken tents built by the riversides and enjoyed vast feasts of pork and alcohol that seem to have been tolerated by their Muslim hosts. He deep mines contemporary sources to excavate such gems as the cry of the Levant trader who, in 1628, bemoaned the fact that merchants “are in no part of the world so screwed and wrung as in England” and that “even in Turkey they have more encouragement”. Clearly the CBI existed as an impulse – if not as an organisation – even then.
Mather tells of the toll on young traders, the constant commercial and military warfare with first the Venetians and the Portuguese and then with the devious French who actually produced better cloths of brighter colour and lower price, and the utterly bloodthirsty and brutal Dutch who seemed to glory more in butchery than in bargaining at the bazaar.
This book is more than worth its cover price as a history of the Levant Company; but then the author veers away from double entry book-keeping and double-crossing customs officers to what could well be the subject of not one but many other books: the impact of Islamic science, culture and theology on Europe and – loosely – the West. This is especially pertinent during the so-called Enlightenment when advanced thinkers in the West saw Islam as a logical if austere religion that espoused an eminently practical way of living. Converts to Islam began to appear and Arabic was widely studied in European universities.
Voltaire may have said that on the London Exchange “the Jew, the Mahometan and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all professed the same religion, and gave the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts” but this was not tolerance based on trade but a profound philosophical examination and acknowledgment of Islam as more than the warrior faith that it had once been seen as.
During the 18th century Western thinkers assumed only two religions to exist on earth – Islam and (Judeo) Christianity. The meticulous Mather tests this with references to shamanism, Shinto, ancestor worship and the many faiths of the Americas as well as the land beyond Samarkand but his analysis is accurate as the vast source index soon confirms. This flowering of fascination with Islam began in the 17th century when Edward Pococke brought the study of Arabic to England and whose contacts as Aleppo chaplain enabled agents in the Sultanate to send Arabic works and translations to him when he rose to a professorship at Oxford in 1636.
He inspired Archbishop Laud to introduce what Mather calls a sort of knowledge tax under which returning traders would bring “Arabick and Persian bookes” home for study. Although Avicenna was known in England and even studied from the 12th century the Qu’ran (then called the Alcoran) was first translated into English in 1649; the Cambridge Professor of Arabic had loftily concluded a few years earlier that Catholicism was so utterly irrelevant and discredited that the “onlie pressure on the bodie of the Church of Christ is Mahomet’s Alcoran”.
Of course, it all ended in tears on the battlefield as the Great Game began to be played and the Ottoman Empire faded into the sweet scented sybaritic society that fascinated and repelled – just look at Alma-Tadema – but scholars studied Islam with deep respect and in terms that would amaze today’s reader. Mather manages to produce this book within a book with authority and elegance and cannot be commended too highly for the achievement. I find it hard to believe that this is his first work. I pray it will not be his last. l
Stephen Pound
