The lack of scholarly interest in the Levant Company is noteworthy, particularly when compared with the interest scholars have shown in the Levant Company’s great rival the East India Company. Christine Laidlaw’s The British in the Levant: Trade and Perceptions of the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century aims to redress that imbalance, offering a detailed study of the men and women who worked for and served as auxiliary residents in the company’s factories in the Levant in the second half of the eighteenth century. Divided into six chapters (including an introduction and a conclusion), The British in the Levant centers around three chapters that look at specific communities—the administrators, the chaplains, and the physicians—working in company factories, as well as an additional chapter that sets out sketches of what family and social life in a company factory might have looked like in the late eighteenth century.

In these chapters, Laidlaw offers a treasury of individual accounts of those who worked, either officially or in a supporting capacity, in company factories in the Middle East. What we learn from these accounts is that the Levant Company was run by a group of wealthy London merchants who had no direct knowledge of the Levant and really cared very little about the structures of factory settlements, so long as those structures did not impinge on the company’s trade, cause tensions with the Ottoman authorities, or bring discredit generally to the company itself. As such, the chaplains and physicians that Laidlaw studies in The British in the Levant operate as independent agents. Never officially significant to the company’s work or its mission, neither the doctors nor the chaplains were ever viewed as being “Company men.” Company chaplains, for instance, did more work maintaining the quotidian religious lives of other factory residents—the baptisms, marriages, and funerals—than they did working toward a larger evangelical goal. The same could be said of the doctors. Despite their unparalleled experience in both the local culture and the local languages of the East, neither Alexander Russell nor his half-brother Patrick Russell (both of whom were physicians with the company) ever seems to have been consulted in an official capacity.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Levant Company’s work in the East was that its agents were forced to act not only as merchants but also as ambassadors of the British government more generally. As Laidlaw notes, the Levant Company effectively footed the entire cost of England’s (and later Britain’s) diplomatic representation to the Levant until 1825. Men like John Murray, ambassador at Istanbul from 1766 to 1775, therefore, had to juggle the, often competing, needs of their employer as well as those of the English/British state. It was, Laidlaw suggests, the result of this balancing act that the company seems to have “shrugged off [its] responsibilities for dependents at its factories” (215). With concerns about international relations and international commerce on the line, the Levant Company (at least in its official capacity as represented by its elite leadership) could hardly have been expected to worry about the medical and spiritual well-being of those living in its Eastern factories.

The social world of company employees in the Levant that Laidlaw paints is, therefore, interesting precisely because it sits just outside of the official gaze of the company’s managers and their diplomatic-commercial interests. To be sure, there are many figures in The British in the Levant who will be familiar to readers—Mary Wortley Montagu is foremost among them—but Laidlaw situates these people in a new light, detailing the semiofficial world that existed alongside the part commercial and part governmental functions that were the primary purposes of the Levant Company’s factory settlements. This work reaches its zenith in the chapter on family life and recreation in company factories, for it is that chapter that integrates all of the characters—the ambassadors, their families, the doctors, the chaplains, and so on—into a synthetic portrait of life in an eighteenth-century company factory in the Levant. Indeed, if one wanted to quibble with Laidlaw about the content of her work, the place to do so might be over the book’s subtitle, for what Laidlaw has offered here is less a study of “trade and perceptions of the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century” than something akin to what Percival Spear offered for East India Company employees in this same period in his work The Nabobs. Laidlaw’s is a study of the social life of the English in the eighteenth-century Levant.

The British in the Levant will be of great interest to anybody studying the history of Britain’s overseas relations with the Middle East, and it will be particularly interesting to those who study the Levant Company itself. However, Laidlaw’s research is at its most interesting (at least to this student of the East India Company) in the instances in which it draws comparative connections between the Levant Company and its East Indian rival. On several occasions, Laidlaw notes the significant overlap in the senior leadership of the two institutions. That the same men might generate divergent operational codes for these two companies begs questions about the structural concerns—political, geographic, economic, social, racial, historical, and so on—at play when companies and empires overlapped. The comparative study of corporate imperialism has the potential, no doubt, to become a rich field of historical inquiry. For those interested in pursuing this work, Laidlaw’s book will be a valuable starting point.