Americans in the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century
This project explores and curates a variety of primary sources from historical databases, newspaper archives, published works, and other sources to study the experiences of Americans living and working in the Middle East during the long nineteenth century. Our focus is on the roles and perspectives of those Americans who participated in the “Great Transformation”: American diplomats, American entrepreneurs and company men, Americans who served as government advisors and military instructors, American protestant missionaries and educators, American jurists, American doctors, American artists and writers, and American tourists. In the process of learning about developments in the region, we reveal how Americans thought about and engaged with the Middle East, and we evaluate their influence and objectives from multiple perspectives. Through this work, we describe changes in the Middle East in the nineteenth century associated with modernization and globalization. Rather than focusing on the dynamics of state relations in this period, as the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Persia became places of interest to competing European powers, we investigate some of the specific ways in which the interactions between individual “foreigners” and locals shaped a variety of changes.
