Commercialism Across Boundaries

Chair: Thomas Hine.

“Information of a Fraud: the Scottish Board of Customs and the Smugglers of Berwickshire.” by Derek Janes

In the campaign against smuggling in the second half of the eighteenth century, the authorities were heavily reliant on luck and informers. Naval ships patrolled the sea, and a small network of isolated officials – sometimes old or unfit – watched the coast and patrolled the hinterland. Without tip offs, the customs stood very little chance of intercepting a “smuggle”. Sitting in Edinburgh, the Board of Customs dealt with correspondence and reports from throughout Scotland, and received regular updates on legislation and other material from London. Forming part of a larger project on the Business of Smuggling, this paper looks at the development of the bureaucracy and execution of law enforcement in a small, close knit community enjoying the advantages of a rocky coastline and bleak hinterland.

The records reveal the nature of informers – from consular officials in Gothenburgh, to paid informers on ships – and the difficulty of following up on the information received and making prosecutions “stick” when communications were slow and unreliable and the locals unfriendly. Using examples from the records, the difficulties faced by the authorities can be clearly seen and understood.

“Abraham Parsons’ A Journey From Scanderoon To Aleppo, And Over the Desert To Baghdad And Bussora (1808): the Pursuit of Improvement within a Commercial Context.” by Mohammad Sakhnini

In this paper I shall demonstrate how an eighteenth-century travel narrative associates travelling across the Syrian Desert with achieving material improvements. In so doing, I shall argue that eighteenth-century British commercial interactions with the Arabs and Muslims inhabiting the Syrian Desert allowed for the circulation of rhetorical gestures of respect, civility and adaptation between a British traveller and the Muslim people with and among whom he travelled and conducted trade.

Abraham Parsons wrote this book after a long journey he performed in 1773 in Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia and India where he died in 1785. Before travelling to the Levant, Parsons worked as a merchant in Bristol. After winning a consular position in the Levant Company, Parsons set out to the Levant in 1767. While staying in Scanderoon, Parsons developed commercial links and relationships with the prominent rulers and merchants operating in the land and sea routes prevalent in the area. He quit his consular position in 1773 and then journeyed across the Syrian Desert route. Before setting out across the desert, he bought goods and commodities from Aleppo, Syria, intending to sell them in towns and cities along the road. He joined the Arab commercial caravan operating regularly between Aleppo and Basra. Parsons did not have any institutional affiliation with the East India Company while crossing the desert. Instead, he operated under the leadership of an Arab Sheikh whose command of the trade caravan across the desert route ensured the safety and security of travellers and merchandise. 

In this paper, I shall associate the circulation of commodities and travellers across the desert with the exchange of values and cultural attitudes. Across the Syrian Desert, Parsons does not figure as a vanguard of triumphalist capitalism as simplistic histories of imperialism would have us believe. Parsons rather depended on local knowledge, protection and cross-cultural interaction in order to facilitate the safe passage of his merchandise across the Syrian Desert into Baghdad and Basra. 

“Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the Transmission of Occultism Between France and Britain in the Mid to-Late Nineteenth Century” by Lori Lee Oates

Since the 1970s, scholars have argued that there was a transmission of occult philosophies from France to Britain during the mid to-late nineteenth century. The traditional narrative is that Eliphas Lévi of France transmitted his Tarot to Victorian occultists who then influenced the founding members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Questions have been raised, however, by writers such as Jocelyn Godwin and Alison Butler, as to whether Lévi might have in turn been influenced by the British occultist Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

Drawing on primary sources and new research, my paper will show how the path of the transmission of occultism between France and Britain is not as clear as has previously been thought. All of this will be done with a view to examining the development Victorian and French occultism within the context of the social and political environments in Britain and France in the mid to-late nineteenth century. I will address globalization and growth in mass communications as influences on the movement toward occult philosophies. Therefore, my paper will enable us to better understand the formation of secular society and magic in the late modern world.