Between December 2022 and March 2023, I travelled to Los Angeles, London, Oxford and Cambridge to visit rare books libraries, in search of how people read the Maghreb (Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli) in early modern England. While there are books and articles galore about the things written about the Maghreb and published in early modern England, I started this project because I couldn’t find much at all about how these writings were received. Who owned these books? Why did they want them? What did they think of the information inside? 

Though I dreamt it up during COVID, this was a project that couldn’t be done remotely. Databases like Early English Books Online and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online make reading the text of early modern books accessible the world over. Still, they only take one copy of each book and generally pick the cleanest copies they could find. But what I needed was books that had been used, that had been read, opened, closed, bought, sold, carried around, written in, and thought about. Books with hints of provenance (records of ownership, like signatures, library bequests, bookplates), marginalia (notes or comments and the margins of books) and annotations (non-writing marks like underlinings, manicules, doodles, and so on). This meant identifying all the copies I could and going to see them in person.

I started with the English Short Title Catalogue (http://estc.bl.uk/), and a list of a few hundred books mainly about the Maghreb or recognized as having something important to say on the topic: captivity narratives, travel accounts, political tracts, plays, novels, and a slew of other genres. Accounting for books that went through multiple printings and editions, I ended up with a list of more than 800 titles, with more than 7,500 individual copies around the world. Each of these copies was linked to a specific rare books library somewhere in the world – about half in the British Isles and half in North America, with a scattering of copies elsewhere. 

By visiting libraries in London (1000+), Oxford (1000+), Cambridge (400+) and Los Angeles (250+) I could, in theory, cover about a third of the total. But even with more than three months at my disposal, this would be a tall order – librarians could only fetch so many from the shelves, I could only check so many pages, and the holdings were often extremely diffuse (in Oxford, the books were held across more than 40 individual collections!) So I went to each library’s catalogue – some online, some offline; some centralized, some individual; none the same – and looked for used books. Wherever I found these hints, I followed them to the shelves and took chances on many other books with no catalogued reader marks. In the end, I could see about 600 books on this trip – less than 10% of the total, but a festival of fascination. Let’s take a look!

A Curious Intellectual

Here’s a copy of the second edition of Thomas Shaw’s monumental illustrated travel account Travels, or Observations relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant (London, 1757). Shaw was chaplain to the English merchants in Algiers from 1720-33, and during his time there travelled to Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula, Cyprus, Jerusalem, Jordan, and Mount Carmel, in addition to various trips around Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Tripolitania. He published the first edition of his Travels in 1738, in which he commented, in imperious Enlightenment-intellectual fashion, on the natural and human history of these regions. For ten years before his death in 1751, he was the Principal of St Edmund Hall and Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. 

For an expensive and high-brow book, Travels was very popular among enquiring elites, and more than 230 copies survive to this day. One of these, housed in Oxford’s Balliol College, I saw on a punt – there was no reason from the catalogue to think it was full of marginalia – but what I found was fascinating. Many of the marginalia were like these: notes repeating or summarizing what was interesting or worth remembering in the text. Here, the reader was interested in the various ethnicities in the Maghreb, and their origins.

In others, the reader asked questions – as here on a description of Roman inscriptions in Algeria: ‘Gothic Pilasters Query whether that style of Architecture was not long after the birth of our Saviour’ – or added their information – ‘this Poetry seems in the Stile of Monks Latin Rhime’. This indicates that the owner had some knowledge – of their own or from other books – about the topics in question, and was willing to put that into dialogue with Shaw’s.

At various points elsewhere in the book the notes offer hints of what other books they might have read, as the reader puts Henry Maundrell (1665-1701), Richard Pockock (1704-65), and Thomas Birch (1705-1766) as well as a range of ancient authorities including Pliny, Herodotus, and numerous books of the English Bible, into dialogue with Shaw’s observations.

At one point, Shaw gives some barometric observations of the region around Algiers, to which the reader adds their detailed observations from Woodford in Essex in December 1778 and March 1783, both dating their reading to after 1783 and indicating a detailed interest in weather observation. Once Shaw moves beyond the Maghreb into Egypt, however, our reader’s annotations become more detailed and argumentative: where before their annotations indicate interest and curiosity, as they perhaps learn about an area of which they know little, in Egypt they extensively quibble with Shaw over the precise measurement of the Great Pyramid and other Egyptian antiquities, giving detailed calculations across different nationalities’ units of measurement; and sarcastically lambast Shaw for his ‘ingenious suppositions’ about weather, needing so much extra space to debate Shaw’s account of ancient seasonal surges in the Nile flood plain, that they paste in an extra page to contain everything they want to say.

An Enthusiastic Digester

Where Shaw’s readers liked to write in his book, other readers preferred to annotate instead. Joseph Pitts (1663-1735), an Exeter sailor, was taken captive as a teenager by Algerian corsairs in 1678, converted to Islam and undertook a hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, before escaping and returning home in 1693 or 1694. Ten years later, he published his captivity account, A True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mohammetans, one of the most detailed accounts of Islam and North Africa to be published in the period. The work survives in at least six editions, including a copy of the 1731 edition housed at Regent’s Park College, Oxford. Filling the front and back endpapers with a range of moments of highest interest, this reader made more than 200 individual annotations – Xs, cross-referenced pages, and the occasional brief comment – throughout the book.

The Weird and Wonderful

As much as I would like it, these relatively intelligible annotations are rare. Many books had just an underlining or two, an unidentifiable signature, or nothing at all. And some had only the charmingly bizarre, like these that follow: ‘Tom you smoul like a basket of Chips’, written in pencil on the inside cover of Lancelot Addison, The Present State of the Jews (London, 1675) at the Huntington Library.

‘mary wodward kiss my ars’, inked in a curly hand between the fifth and sixth (Africa) volumes of Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage. Or Relations of the vvorld and the religions obserued in all ages and places discouered, from the Creation vnto this present (London, 1613).

These elaborate doodles and signature practice in a copy of Richard Hakluyt, The principall navigations, voiages and discoveries of the English nation (London, 1589), at University College London:

And this festival of aggressive signatures and lovely little drawings in a copy of Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage. Or Relations of the vvorld and the religions obserued in all ages and places discouered, from the Creation vnto this present (London, 1614), also at University College London: 

Next Steps

Ultimately, this journey is just beginning. I’m hoping to see many more books and fill in the catalogue records for many more so that I can trace the movement of books relating to the Maghreb across social networks and geotemporal maps, and consider annotation and marginalia in aggregate to determine the passages of particular books that aroused greatest interest and how these found their way into the intellectual, political and military corridors of power as well as the broader English-reading public. But for now, it’s clear to me that there is much to learn about how English people thought about the Maghreb and the Islamic world through the marks they left in books, and I look forward to sharing more.