Though most people recognize John Van Ess as the most influential missionary in Iraq during the World War era, Dorothy Van Ess a less flamboyant character, was the force behind the American missionary schools of High Hope and family consumer clubs for girls in Basra-Iraq from 1912-1955. Nevertheless, her contribution in education and in outreach methods was always overshadowed by her husband’s seniority. Despite the effectiveness of the missionary woman’s outreach methods in Basra not much credit was given to them in the historiography. The Van Esses’ position as language and culture experts during the great political transformation in Iraq enabled the couple to participate in imperial negotiations between local power brokers and the British occupation authority. Even in a male dominated society, Dorothy managed to gain the trust and the attention of power brokers in the region. She may be the only woman besides Ms. Bell to witness the important talks between the paramount sheikhs of the region and the British to determine present and future alliances. Take into account, Dorothy’s personal journals, letters, and her well-known publications for the Arabian Mission, this paper evaluates Dorothy’s methods of outreach and her access to women’s household in and around Basra. It demonstrates how she recruited her students, gained favors among influential families, and became associated with powerful British authorities in the region like Ms. Bell. This paper defines Dorothy’s role not just as a facilitator of her husband’s work but as a main player in the success of the schools, including her husband’s school for boys.

In 1909, two court cases in America debated the racial classification of two Ottoman male immigrants, one Arab, the other Armenian. Both cases ruled that the men were classified as “white,” a relevant decision given that according to the 1790 naturalization law, citizenship was limited to only “free white persons.” This paper illuminates how American racial debates were not confined to only US history but created ripples in the fin de siècle Ottoman Empire, notably through the encounter between American missionaries and local Ottomans. In this context, the treatment of Arab and Armenian Ottomans did not reflect the court ruling: they were assigned to the category of “native” which was considered by missionaries not only as different to that of the category of “white,” but often as oppositional. Beirut is the geographical focus of this paper, where American racial classifications encountered, and were combatted by local notions of identity, particularly in the context of the Syrian Protestant College (SPC). Whilst the fin de siècle history of identities in the city so often focuses on confessional divides, this paper views masculinity as a politicized identity that worked to combat racial and ethnic prejudices. Proving or disproving manhood of different sorts became part of the power dynamic between missionaries and Ottoman-Beiruti intellectuals. The case of John Wortabet is a clear example of how race and notions of masculinity intersected politically. Wortabet’s identity was entangled, but not uncommon of Ottoman Beiruti upper-middle class men; he was an Ottoman-Armenian-Arab, a Protestant, a nahdawi intellectual, a doctor, and faculty member at the missionary-run Syrian Protestant College (SPC). More unusual was that he was the only native “Founding Father” and early faculty member of the college. Through sources gathered from the American University of Beirut archives, the missionary press, the local Arab press, and Armenian biographical secondary sources, this paper traces Wortabet’s career at the SPC, and reveals how his position there brought him up against American racism, highlighting the contradiction between American claims of racial equality of Ottomans, and the reality of racial power dynamics as they played out. This paper concludes that despite overlaps, Wortabet ultimately chose to align himself with Ottoman notions of manhood, that had local understandings linked to prestige and class. He embraced the term “native” as a positive, rather than negative, securing himself as an ´adabi man, who was working for the good of civilisation and progress of Syria.

For several decades historians have struggled with the dynamics of cross-cultural contact and the creation of perceptions of the Other. Detailed studies of the image formed by Europeans of the Islamicate World during the pre-modern period, with a few exceptions, rarely analyze why and how these representations were formed. Through the analysis of Jesuit missionary correspondence made during the middle of the seventeenth century, this paper will present the variables that affected the development of Jesuit attitudes toward the people and environment of Greater Syria. This paper will also reveal these projections were contingent on the form of communication: personal letters, annual reports, and published works. Each of these modes of communication reflected degrees of detachment and embellishment to suit the audience. Where the letters sent to the Superior General in Rome typically disclosed the chronology of events that influenced the course of the missions, the reports (sent to the provincial hierarchy and were circulated throughout the Jesuit colleges) conveyed in flowing narrative a more subjective and theatrical rendition of their experience. Comparing the letters of the missionaries to their annual reports reveals their capacity for objectivity and the realities of the relationships they developed, as a means of wading through common tropes about Southwest Asia and Ottoman society in general articulated in the reports. In writing for a public audience, the Jesuits show how the form of communication influenced the methods and language used to describe Ottoman-Syrian society. Yet, the paper also considers that while the Jesuits had pre-conceived notions of Syria, their constructions of Syrian society were also influenced as much by local factors as their ideologically-driven stereotypes. These local factors, mixed with the violence of strongmen and the Jesuits failure to affect conversions to Catholicism, filled the pages of their reports with apocalyptic visions and made heroes of holy men.

From the Mundane to the Intellectual: A reconstruction of the life and times of a hybrid Levantine Consul through his inventory. On October 5, 1849, John Barker, famous British consul and horticulturalist, died in Souedia in Ottoman Turkey. The authorities took an exhaustive inventory of Barker’s effects, noting everything from his cutlery to his wide-ranging personal library of works. While the inventory certainly details the life of the man, it also allows scholars to assess the specific dual identity--and the significant dual roles--of European Levantines in the Ottoman Empire The Levantines formed a uniquely hybrid community that straddled the divide between the Ottoman Empire and Europe during the early modern period. To do so, they retained a fairly fluid, even opportunistic, identity, integrating into their adopted land through varied ways, including mastery of its languages, diplomacy, and trade. Thus the merchant consuls were the linchpin of that community, useful and favored not just as commercial go-betweens enabling Imperial-European trade, but as diplomatic connectors linking the Porte and the West and as importers and exporters of each sphere’s technology, science, and culture. John Barker, a merchant consul and second-generation Levantine, exemplifies the evolving, increasingly essential network of native-born foreigners who lived and worked in the Empire yet held on to their origins. Born in Smyrna, Barker spent most of his life in various Ottoman cities as a merchant, pro-consul and consul serving the British Levant Company and the British government, while simultaneously serving as a commercial, diplomatic, and cultural bridge between the locals and the Europeans. Even his private life bespeaks the flexible, hybrid Levantine identity: He married a local Levantine; his children were all born in the Empire but sent to school in England; and they all became important members in both Levantine and British circles. Using his sizable and comprehensive inventory of books, this paper reconstructs the life and influence of John Barker in his role of consul and hybrid member of the Levantine community. It also highlights his considerable influence on diplomacy, commerce, culture as well as his important legacy as a horticulturalist, all of which bridged the divide between the two empires.