In his 2009 Victorian Literature and Post-Colonial Studies, Patrick Brantlinger unravelled the skein of ‘post-colonial’ historiographies since the appearance of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978. Concluding that ‘there were, perhaps, as many Orientalisms as Orientalists’, he outlined the prior range of responses by nineteenth-century British visitors and colonial occupiers to the cultures they encountered and/or conquered – from brutal denial of all legal rights in the case of the Australian Tasmanians, on the one hand, to adoption of native ways and active participation in tribal practices and communities (‘going native’) in India and the Middle East, on the other.

The Near East, of course, already held a place in the British imaginarium as the site of Bethlehem, Jerusalem and the Sea of Galilee. Only in a metaphorical way could Britons claim with William Blake that their prophet's ‘holy feet’ had ever walked ‘upon England's mountains green’, and those who had read the Bible could not ignore the moral resonance of the names of Tyre, Babylon, Nineveh and other sites they would never see. As for the staples of ‘classical education’, had not the Greeks ventured to Troy and traded with the Phoenicians, the Syrians’ ancient ancestors (Figures 2.1 and 2.2)?

Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and Syria in 1798–99 had already intensified European interest in the region, and a number of British travellers had written accounts of their journeys in it. Among these were Edward Lane's Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), Thackeray's Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846), Richard Burton's Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855– 56) and Lucie Duff Gordon's posthumous Letters from Egypt (1865). Even Florence Nightingale had journeyed down the Nile in 1849–50. But the Ottoman Empire ruled Turkey, Palestine, Syria, Persia, Upper Egypt, the Sudan and Afghanistan, and so British visitors in these regions were conscious that they were crossing thresholds into someone else's imperial domain.

In roughly the same period, the British government discovered ‘special’ (read ‘military and commercial’) interests in some of these regions, which triggered three Anglo-Afghan Wars (the first 1839–42) and culminated in the suppression of the Egyptian independence movements of 1882–98 (see appendix ‘British Presence in the Near East’).