Improving Experiences: Eighteenth-Century European Encounters with Arabs

This article shows how some early-modern British travellers found in the idea of travelling among and writing about Arabs an opportunity to reflect on a changing society at home. In Enlightenment Britain, many philosophers and writers thought of economic achievements as the roadmap to civility, humanity and progress. Many conservative moralists and clergymen of the period, however, protested this ideology and associated excessive materialism with moral decline, but they were not the dominant force in society. British travel writings about Arabs during the period confirmed and unsettled this dominant discourse. In these accounts, the images of primitive and polite Arabs appeared as screens upon which British anxieties about improvement were projected. This paper concludes with the contention that British travel writers appeared more concerned about their own society than about those about whom they wrote.