The centrality of ideas of ‘Western impact’ or ‘encounter’ to accounts of modernity in the Arab world have lost much of their hold, at least on scholarly views of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the notion of the period before ca.1850 as a ‘time before’ remains important for the role it played both for the thinkers of the nahda themselves, in their self-perceptions and appreciation of their own recent history (usually to its discredit), and for their subsequent interpreters in identifying what it was that the movement of the nahda in literature and culture (or those of islah in religion and tanzimat in politics) was reacting to. The long eighteenth century (of c.1700-1830s) in the Arab-Ottoman world, that is, was a time before the ‘reforms’ and ‘revivals’ that sought to rescue culture, state and religion from what would come to be thought of as ‘blind’, unthinking and stagnant ‘exclusive attachment to things inherited from our fathers’, as ‘Abduh would put it. Longstanding discussion of ‘eighteenth century revival and reform’, as well as the newer historiography of the early modern Ottoman empire, has done much to improve our understanding of this period. This paper takes up this question from the remoter margins of the region, to ask how scholars writing in both older and newer idioms, and travelling across both spiritual and political landscapes that were already experiencing momentous change in the century before 1850, envisaged the world around them. Beginning with the world of Husayn b. Muhammad al-Warthilani (ca.1713-79) from the Kabyle mountains of Algeria, as described in his rihla, Nuzhat al-anzar fi fadl ‘ilm al-ta’rikh wa’l-akhbar, the paper explores the continuities and creativities of Maghribi scholarly culture before ca.1850 in its engagements with and understandings of both regional and larger global forces of change, as evidenced by two very different figures, the Mauritanian traveller and ‘alim Ahmad ibn Tuwayr al-Janna al-Shinqiti (d.1848/9) whose account of his pilgrimage in ca.1830 gives a rare insight into the horizons of a scholar from the deep western Sahara, and in the life of the Ottoman-Algerian scholar, merchant and statesman Hamdan b. Uthman Hoca (c.1775-1840), a leading member of the Algiers elite at the time of the French conquest who travelled in England and France and ended his days in exile in Istanbul. All three were much attached to ‘things inherited’; but none lived in a world of closed ‘tradition’ unconcerned with change.