When, how, and why did the English begin to imagine themselves to be a nation? Anna Suranyi has written a fascinating and provocative study on these questions in which she argues that, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a sense of English national identity emerged from the widely circulating accounts of the customs, manners, and beliefs of “other” nations that were being produced in increasing numbers by travelers. To many early modern historians, this will appear a controversial argument since, as the opening chapters of The Genius of the English Nation make clear, there remains a good deal of debate about whether the concept of “nation” can accurately or usefully be applied to describe conditions before the nineteenth century. Aware of the difficulties, Suranyi sets out to demonstrate “that the early modern English did recognize their own nationhood,” conceding that “while this emerging and nascent form of national identity was not identical to the full-blown nationalism of the nineteenth century, it did share some features with it” and that this “early modern nationalism” is best understood as a “fluctuating, unstable form of identification from within which individuals sometimes espoused contradictory positions with equal vehemence” (39). Yet despite these postmodernist notions of “fluctuating … identification[s]” and “individuals” espousing “contradictory positions,” Suranyi's larger purpose is not to advance a theory of early modern subjectivity as such or to theorize at all how this emergent sense of nationalism was “integrally tied to imperialism” (49). Indeed, if it were not otherwise evident from the empiricism of the study as a whole that her approach is distinctly theory free, the casual warning that Alain Grosrichard's seminal study, The Sultan's Court: European Fantasies of the East (Paris, 1979), “must be used with caution … because of its Lacanian overtones” (190) would confirm this avoidance.

Based on extensive quotations from travel writers and other ethnographic writings of the period, the best chapters of the book argue that English-language representations of, and presumptive attitudes toward, the Ottomans and the Irish provided a frame within which “Englishness” took shape, substance, and specificity as an imperial discourse. For the English, Suranyi suggests, “Imperial ambitions led them to perceive other societies in accordance with their emerging political aims” (17). The Ottomans were, according to reports by English travelers, an imperial power to be emulated, while the Irish—like the native inhabitants of the Americas—were a servile people waiting to be dominated. According to this presumptive logic, the Irish came to be viewed as wild, servile, and unkempt barbarians who ate vile and rotten food ill-manneredly, never washed, wore filthy clothes, and allowed their women to behave in immodest ways and were, in short, a backward people in need of the civilizing intervention of English colonialism. The Ottomans, however, came increasingly to be regarded—despite their adherence to Islam and their traditional place as fearsome enemies of Christendom—as a free and mighty people who, despite their obscure and humble origins, had developed an enviable imperial civilization of their own that was amply evidenced by their sobriety, personal cleanliness, fine clothing, military power, efficient judicial system, and control over their women.

In pressing her argument that an emergent sense of Englishness was the key to these representations, Suranyi is good at pointing out how attitudes toward the most commonly recorded features were shaped according to a prior logic and how particular features themselves could be valued differently. Some writers, for instance, made the extraordinary claim that the Irish were descended from the barbaric, nomadic, and uncivilized Scythians and that this accounted for their wild behavior and backwardness. Yet other contemporary writers argued that the Ottomans were descended from the Scythians, using this claim to suggest the extent to which they had developed from nomadic origins into a settled and civilized imperial power. “The two origin myths,” Suranyi notes, “meant very different things to the English. What was a bad mark for one nation was an accolade for another” (69). Similarly, in her fascinating chapter on how travelers wrote about food and eating habits in foreign countries, Suranyi notes that both the Irish and the Ottomans were said to eat “cakes,” not bread, and that both were said to sit on the ground to eat rather than at tables. However, while Irish “cakes” were deemed “unpleasant and uncleanly,” those eaten by the Ottomans were an admirable “sign of austerity” (101). Similarly, whereas the Irish “squatted on the ground because they lacked tables,” the Ottomans “ate deliberately … in a garden, presumably for the pleasant atmosphere” (100). Whether or not we accept Suranyi's argument that this “elasticity of cultural stereotypes” indicates that these “were not merely ethnographic observations, but contentions about national identity, as well as the justification of colonial military activity” (104), the chapters on food, cleanliness, and clothing and representations of foreign women provide a valuable, detailed, and intriguing storehouse of ways that English travelers perceived the world beyond their native shores, inevitably casting light on the habits, manners, and customs of the English themselves.

There are, however, problems, some of them relatively minor: it can hardly be claimed that the Ottoman Empire is a “central hub” of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) since Said barely refers to it (21); Henry Blount was never a member of the Levant Company (27); Keywords was written by Raymond Williams, not Raymond Walters (183); Asli Çirakman is a woman, not a man (171); the earliest printing of Paul Rycaut's Present State of the Ottoman Empire appeared in 1667, not 1668 (175), and can by no stretch of the bibliographic imagination be considered to have been an appendage to Richard Knolles's Historie of the Turkes (157). More seriously—and this is a problem that can more reasonably be attributed to the directors of the dissertation from which this book originated than to any “shortcomings” of the author (10)—is the constant use of the terms “Turk,” “Turkish,” and “Turkey” when referring to the Ottomans and their empire. The Ottomans were indeed “Turks,” but not all “Turks” were Ottomans, and among the Ottomans “Turk” was a term of denigration used to refer to the Anatolian peasantry over whom they had come to rule. During the period under consideration here, English, French, and Italian writers used the term “Turk” to refer to the Ottomans, but it was most commonly used to refer to Muslims regardless of place of origin. Moreover, “Turkey” did not come into being until 1923 despite the use of the term by earlier writers to refer to Anatolia, or “Asia Minor” as some classicists continue to say. In a study seeking to describe the emergence of national identities, these are not unimportant quibbles. We read: “The Turks, in particular the ‘Barbary’ Turks from North Africa …” (56), yet the corsairs of Ottoman North Africa were mostly Greek, Sicilian, Portuguese, Spanish, and, indeed, native-born English renegades. We read: “In his travels through Turkey, Henry Timberlake …” (79), yet Timberlake traveled from Egypt into Ottoman Palestine and never visited Anatolia. We read: “John Evelyn's report on the royal audience of the Moroccan ambassador also emphasized the Ottoman official's civility” (58), yet Morocco never was part of the Ottoman Empire, and Joseph Pitts almost certainly did not imagine that “Moors” were “nomadic peoples within the Ottoman Empire” (131). Nevertheless, Anna Suranyi has compressed a great deal of invaluable research into a fine and provocative study arguing that early modern English travel writers contributed massively to an emergent sense of how the English were distinct from people from other countries and how that sense of national difference was inextricably linked to nascent imperial ambitions.