An Arabian Utopia: The Western Discovery of Oman
London and Oxford: The Arcadian Library with Oxford University Press, 2010.
First Edition. Hardcover. 12 7/8" X 9 3/4". 252pp. Mild edgewear and a hint of dust soiling to dust jacket, with gentle bumping to head and tail of spine. Bound in red cloth over boards, with spine lettered in gilt and publisher's device in gilt to upper board. Gentle bumping to tail of spine and light shelfwear to binding, with slight lean to spine. Binding remains firm and sound. Pages are clean and bright. A very presentable 2010 first edition of this first full survey, clearly structured and richly illustrated, of the western discovery of Oman. Studies in the Arcadian Library, No. 5.
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ABOUT THIS BOOK:
Even though Oman had always been familiar to travellers sailing between Europe and India or Persia, it was its coast alone that was known. Greeks and Romans had charted it, medieval merchants traded on it, and in the early sixteenth century the Portuguese conquered its main towns, yet the interior of Oman was all but entirely unknown and would remain so until the early nineteenth century. Only after the ejection of the Portuguese in 1650 and an independent Oman had built an empire of its own, stretching round the Indian Ocean from India to Zanzibar, did Muscat, the capital, start to be visited by western powers eager to obtain commercial concessions and political influence. In the nineteenth century, for the first time, a very few, mainly English, explorers ventured inland and embarked on the true discovery of Oman. But even that was sporadic. As long as there was a powerful ruler, the travellers were protected, but by the late nineteenth century the rulers in Muscat had lost control over the interior and it was not until well into the twentieth century that explorers such as Wilfred Thesiger could investigate the south and that the oil companies could begin to chart the centre and the west. Oman was the last Arab country to be fully explored by western travellers and this book examines and discusses the ways in which the emergent knowledge of Oman was propagated in the West, from the earliest times to 1970, by explorers, missionaries, diplomats, artists, geologists and naturalists, and by those scholars who gradually uncovered the manuscripts and antiquities that allowed them to piece together the history of the area. (Publisher). Very good + / very good. Item #17331
ISBN: 9780199581603
Price: $115.00