Cosmopolitan Cities and Cultural Integration? Alexander Russell on Eighteenth-Century Aleppo

Abstract

How did Alexander Russell (1715?-1768) and Patrick Russell (1727-1805) perceive and portray different ethnic groups in Syria in their Natural History of Aleppo (1756: second edition, 1794)? Various Christian groups including the Greek Orthodox Church, the Jacobeans, the Copts and Roman Catholics and Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Circassians, Russians, Venetians, French, Dutch and Englishmen played their part in the commercial framework of many Syrian cities. How did they describe the Ottoman empire's religious and ethnic minorities? By drawing on the text, the cosmopolitanism of eighteenth-century Aleppo is explored in this essay.