An Arabian Utopia: The Western Discovery of Oman (Studies in the Arcadian Library) - Hardcover

Hamilton, Alastair

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199581606 ISBN 13: 9780199581603

Publisher: The Arcadian Library, 2010

Synopsis

Even though Oman had always been familiar to travellers sailing between Europe and India or Persia, it was its coast alone that was known. Greeks and Romans had charted it, medieval merchants traded on it, and in the early sixteenth century the Portuguese conquered its main towns, yet the interior of Oman was all but entirely unknown and would remain so until the early nineteenth century. Only after the ejection of the Portuguese in 1650 and an independent Oman had built an empire of its own, stretching round the Indian Ocean from India to Zanzibar, did Muscat, the capital, start to be visited by western powers eager to obtain commercial concessions and political influence. In the nineteenth century, for the first time, a very few, mainly English, explorers ventured inland and embarked on the true discovery of Oman. But even that was sporadic. As long as there was a powerful ruler, the travellers were protected, but by the late nineteenth century the rulers in Muscat had lost control over the interior and it was not until well into the twentieth century that explorers such as Wilfred Thesiger could investigate the south and that the oil companies could begin to chart the centre and the west. Oman was the last Arab country to be fully explored by western travellers and this book examines and discusses the ways in which the emergent knowledge of Oman was propagated in the West, from the earliest times to 1970, by explorers, missionaries, diplomats, artists, geologists and naturalists, and by those scholars who gradually uncovered the manuscripts and antiquities that allowed them to piece together the history of the area.

About this title

About the Author

Alastair Hamilton, Former Louise C. Thijssen Schoute Professor of the History of Ideas at Leiden University, is currently the Arcadian Visiting Professor at the School of Advanced Study, London University, attached to the Warburg Institute. He has worked for many years, and published extensively, on relations between Europe and the Arab world. His more recent works include The Copts and the West 1439-1822 (2006) and (with Francis Richard) André Du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth-Century France (2004).

Edition details

• Publisher: The Arcadian Library
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0199581606
• ISBN 13: 9780199581603
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 260