Seminar on Collecting and Display
Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU
Monday 8 June at 6 p.m.
Dr. Simon Mills, EUROPEAN COLLECTORS IN EARLY MODERN ALEPPO
In the sixteenth century, the Syrian city of Aleppo emerged as an
important centre of the European Levant trade. The establishment of
French, English, and Dutch consulates brought an influx of merchants to
the city, lured by the trade in spices and silk. Yet Aleppo also drew a
number of Europeans with interests rooted in scientific and scholarly
concerns, in search of different kinds of commodities: manuscripts,
antiquities, and the flora and fauna of the Near East. This talk will
explore the careers of several European collectors in Aleppo, their
motivations, and their interactions with Ottoman scribes and dealers.
Tracing the development of the merchant communities in the city and the
increasing European interest in the antiquities and natural history of
Syria, it will argue that commerce interacted with science and
scholarship to enable a new kind of early modern collector. It will then
survey some of the manuscripts, antiquities, and natural specimens
brought back to Europe between the late sixteenth and the eighteenth
centuries, and assess the importance of their place in the development
of European libraries, museums, and scientific collections.
Dr Simon Mills is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of
Kent. His current project explores the link between overseas trade and
various forms of early modern scholarship by tracing the links between
English commercial and diplomatic expansion in the Near East and the
development of oriental and antiquarian studies in Britain. He was
awarded his PhD at Queen Mary, University of London in 2009, and has
held fellowships at the Council for British Research in the Levant;
CRASSH, University of Cambridge; and the Dahlem Humanities Centre, Freie
Universität, Berlin.
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