In December 1880, the French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero (1846–1916) wrote a letter to British novelist Amelia B. Edwards, herself a budding Egyptologist, lamenting the veil of political brinkmanship that often overshadowed archaeological missions:

As much as Maspero objected, the search for antiquities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was fundamental to modern national, and imperial self-fashioning.Footnote ² This was the era when archaeology was being formalised as an established discipline, founded on a colonial ideology that often aimed to highlight and reproduce the supposed cultural superiority of the West. It was, therefore, inherently political. In the Middle East, the period from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century was a pivotal moment defined by the waning power of the Ottoman Empire and both the political and economic opportunities that this presented to rapidly expanding European empires. The increasingly volatile and unpredictable situation created space where influence was no longer limited to formal state actors, and archaeology became a crucial tool for competing powers. The eastern Mediterranean and Middle East held an important place in the unfolding power struggle, providing a link between Europe and the colonial territories beyond.

The five comments collected here originated in a workshop held at the University of Edinburgh in December 2023, funded by the Royal Historical Society, which sought to examine how individual archaeologists and collectors, operating at the intersection of science and empire, shaped political as well as scholarly outcomes in the Middle East between c. 1800 and 1947 through both official and unofficial channels. While our workshop employed the British Empire as an analytical lens, a similar imperial ethos shaped Western Europe’s approach to the region more generally.Footnote ³ The development of archaeology as a colonial science as well as a tool of imperial justification – and many of the key protagonists to both endeavours – have been the recent subjects of important studies.Footnote ⁴ The workshop contributions presented here offer case studies of individuals who not only participated in these processes of imperial knowledge production through their archaeological activities, but who were also able to leverage their sometimes ambiguous status within Britain’s imperial structures to affect popular imaginings of the past. Each comment discusses a distinct ‘type’ of actor in these narratives, individuals operating outside formal governmental (and often academic) structures, but who still wielded enormous influence at the junction of government policy and popular fascination. While they may have been pursuing varied agendas, their paths to those ends were still shaped by the established power hierarchies of the British Empire, resulting in an array of contradictions that continue to reverberate today.

The progressive weakening and eventual breakup of the Ottoman Empire over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created an intense rivalry between the Western empires that attempted to fill the power vacuum in its former territories.Footnote ⁵ This competition between European countries had far-reaching implications for the convergence of archaeology and imperial politics; as archaeologists sought the origins of ‘Western’ civilisation in newly acquired lands, they simultaneously advanced the imperial interests of their own nations, contributing to the conceptualisation of the eastern Mediterranean as part of the ‘Middle East’ and the ‘Cradle of Civilisation’ in need of resurrection.Footnote ⁶ That the Middle East was also the site of the origins of Christianity, but under Muslim control, only enhanced its historical appeal. While Ottoman officials had implemented increasingly strict legislation governing antiquities, the waning of direct Ottoman territorial control over the region created opportunities that European powers eagerly seized, claiming responsibility for exploring, collecting, and ultimately ‘preserving’ the heritage of the East.Footnote ⁷ Economic projects of ‘modernisation’ and infrastructure, such as the construction of railroads in Anatolia and Egypt, were justified by (and in turn facilitated) a new era of intensive archaeological excavation.

In many cases, the individuals highlighted in the comments here – academics, writers, and even a solicitor – became powerful agents of imperial influence through their creation of a ‘useable past’. Rather than merely discovering ‘history’, they actively constructed one that served not only contemporary political goals, but also their own personal and professional aims. Anna Kelley discusses how in Egypt, Amelia B. Edwards (1831–1892) framed the past through a biblical lens to make Egyptian heritage the shared intellectual property of Victorian Britain, in turn building her own popular and authoritative persona. Edwin Freshfield (1832–1918), the subject of Jessica Varsallona’s comment, framed his collecting as a devotional act connecting the Anglican Church to the origins of Christianity, portraying himself as preserving Christian heritage that might otherwise have been destroyed at the hands of the Ottomans. For Mandate Palestine, Daniel Reynolds details how the British constructed a narrative of a fertile ‘Byzantine Eden’ in the Negev Desert that was left to deteriorate under Arab–Bedouin and Ottoman control, usefully undermining the legitimacy of Ottoman rule while providing a historic model for Britain’s ‘greening’ projects.

In this respect Gertrude Bell (1868–1926), the subject of complementary explorations by Mark Jackson and Alessandro Carabia, was something of an outlier. Unlike Edwards and Freshfield, whose engagements with the past were shaped by religious frameworks, Bell’s avowed atheism released her from any personal investment in the historicity of biblical or early Christian narratives. This may help explain some of her relative openness to Islamic heritage. While she succumbed to Western pressure to ensure the acquisition of Iraqi heritage through the partage system, her sympathies for the nationalist movement in Iraq led her to plan a dedicated ‘Arab Room’ in the National Archaeological Museum of Iraq, intended to display and celebrate Islamic heritage. Nevertheless, her work on the churches of Binbirkilise in central Turkey alongside the historical geographer and biblical scholar William Mitchell Ramsay (1851–1939) still reflected Western claims to Eastern heritage.Footnote ⁸ Bell was not alone in this trajectory; T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935), her colleague in both archaeological fieldwork and wartime intelligence, underwent a comparable shift from servant of British imperial strategy to passionate advocate for Arab self-determination. His crucial presence in Mandate Palestine and the Wilderness of Zin Project (as Reynolds discusses) indicates that sustained personal immersion in the region and its peoples could in some cases complicate the imperial frameworks within which these individuals operated. Edwards, by contrast, only visited Egypt once, while Freshfield’s many visits to Anatolia were structured by his business interests.

The mechanisms of imperial nostalgia, erasure and appropriation explored in these comments reframed the contemporary Middle East into an ideological project, one in which the agency of those considered ‘unofficial’ was enabled by both religious imperialism and social networks, underpinned by – unsurprisingly – economic wealth. Bell’s privileged background and education allowed her to leverage personal contacts with archaeologists, such as Ramsay and Lawrence, as well as British colonial administrators. Freshfield used his legal firm’s connections to the Ottoman Railway Company, a key tool of British economic influence in the region, to gain access to and conduct ‘unofficial’ excavations at Ephesos. His personal networks enabled him to undertake the first investigations of the Church of St John, supposedly built on the tomb of John the Evangelist, and ultimately to add to his own collection of antiquities. Edwards, although decidedly middle-class in comparison, built upon her background as a novelist to mobilise public interest in supporting the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) and in the process transformed herself into an authoritative Egyptologist.

The contradictions highlighted at the intersection of gender and agency in the cases of Bell and Edwards are striking and reveal something important about the nature of unofficial influence more broadly. Both women occupied a paradoxical position: excluded from the formal structures of academic and political authority by virtue of their gender, they were freed from the constraints those structures imposed, thereby enabling them to construct personal networks dense with figures from official and unofficial circles. Edwards could appeal simultaneously to a subscription-paying public who supported the EEF, the academic establishment, and government officials precisely because she was beholden to none of them in the way a male academic might have been. Bell’s own early independence from any single institution (including the army, the Foreign Office, and the academy) meant she could act as a broker between all of them. Yet neither woman used this freedom to challenge the imperial systems that had shaped their opportunities. Bell was a keen supporter of Arab self-rule, while also serving as an officer in the northern branch of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League. Edwards, for her part, was a vocal advocate for women’s suffrage and served as the Vice-President of the Society for Promoting Women’s Suffrage but was also a firm believer in the need for the British presence in Egypt. Their gender transgression was real, but it operated entirely within, and ultimately in service of, the imperial frameworks they inhabited.

The broader cultural impact of these individuals’ work demands equally careful scrutiny. While their research was made possible and sustained by their various privileges and a sense of superiority (often resulting in exploitation), their activities also enabled novel means of the dissemination of knowledge. The popularisation of Egypt, spearheaded by Edwards and the EEF, reached an expanded audience and led to new forms of mass culture, inspired by aegyptiaca throughout the Western world.Footnote ⁹ Yet what Edwards disseminated was not so much knowledge of Egypt as investment in a specifically British claim to Egypt’s past, training her audiences to see the removal of antiquities as a matter of national prestige rather than dispossession. Similarly, Freshfield’s zeal for collecting was enabled by his wealth, and his financial support for the Byzantine Research and Publication Fund at the British School of Athens made it possible for architects and scholars such as Sidney Barnsley (1865–1926) to engage with Byzantine architecture,Footnote ¹⁰ contributing to a flowering of Byzantine studies in Britain. Yet his patronage also served to extend British cultural ownership over the Christian heritage in territories where Britain sought political leverage. Bell’s influence extended beyond the realms of politics, defining the Middle East and inspiring other travellers through her travelogues and photographs,Footnote ¹¹ but also creating a distinctly British way of seeing and therefore claiming the region as the subject of Western knowledge and administration. Finally, the biblical emphasis placed on the sites in Palestine and Anatolia fostered the development of modern pilgrimage, in conjunction with the rise in mass tourism, effectively embedding Western audiences in a physical and imaginative relationship with territories that Britain was also seeking to control.Footnote ¹²

As this special section demonstrates, the relationship between archaeology and British imperialism was therefore not simply structural or institutional; it was also deeply contingent on personal agency and driven by individual self-fashioning. These comments show how archaeologists and collectors, operating in the space between official sanction and private initiative, generated consequences far exceeding their formal authority. Edwards manufactured a mass popular investment in Egyptian heritage that outlasted any government policy. Freshfield surreptitiously excavated a Byzantine church before anyone gave him permission to do so and framed the reception of Byzantium in Victorian Britain through his collecting and patronage. Bell drafted the legal framework governing Iraqi antiquities while also undermining it. Lawrence’s survey with Leonard Woolley (1880–1960) shaped settlement policy in Mandate Palestine and Transjordan for a generation. What united these figures was the ambiguity of their status – not fully official, but also not strictly private individuals – which did not limit their influence but instead sustained it. Operating in the gaps between institutions, they were harder to hold accountable, more flexible in their methods, and often more effective than formal state actors. Despite the inequalities and power imbalances that structured archaeology, the circulation of images, narratives and material culture enabled by excavation played a significant role in shaping mass culture, making distant pasts familiar and recognisable to a broad public. Yet these same processes also entrenched knowledge hierarchies within academia, a subject that continues to vex scholars today. Archaeologists were not passive in these developments; their position outside official power structures allowed them to participate in and extend imperial practices while simultaneously rendering the past into an ideological memory, both comprehensible and appealing to the general public.