Based on papers presented at an international three-day conference, sponsored by the British Academy and held at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in April 2009, this collection of essays provides a comprehensive and accessible synthesis of the most advanced specialist and scholarly knowledge to date concerning historical perspectives on relations between Britain and the Muslim World. Ranging from the early-modern period to the present day, the essays collected here represent work by leading writers and scholars from relevant fields-history, international relations, economics, religion, law, art history and design, film studies, and sociology, as well as literary and cultural studies. These essays explore the historical impacts of cross-cultural encounters between Islam and Britain by variously addressing the question of how relations between Britain and the Muslim world in the past have brought us to our current situation and, in some cases, by proposing directions for necessary further consideration and research.
About the Author: Gerald MacLean is Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter in the UK, co-director of Exeter Turkish Studies, and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Historical Society of London. A scholar of early-modern English literature and its historical contexts, since 1993 he has devoted his research to the many works published in English during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describing the Ottoman Empire, and to charting the nature and range of East-West encounters during the early modern period. His books, Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (2007), and The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720 (2004) have both appeared in Turkish translation. He is also editor of Re-Orienting the Renaissance (2005), and Writing Turkey: Explorations in Turkish History, Politics and Cultural Identity (2006). He is a founding member of The Evliya Celebi Way Project, an international group of scholars and equestrians who, in 2009, travelled across western Anatolia on horseback following the route of the great Ottoman travel writer and historian. This project of historical re-enactment has been supported by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and has led to UNESCO naming 2011 the Year of Evliya Celebi.