Jonathan Parry's Promised Lands is a most welcome reassessment of the importance of the Eastern Question to British political, diplomatic, and intellectual life. While there is a wealth of scholarship, old and new, focusing on the period 1870–1923, Promised Lands sheds considerable light on earlier British engagements with the Ottoman Empire. Parry focuses on the period that has received less scholarly attention, from the late eighteenth century to the aftermath of the Crimean War, but which is nevertheless of considerable importance in the history of the emergence of the region we now call the Middle East.

This archival-based study traces the policies of successive British cabinets and their agents on the ground in Cairo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Baghdad toward the Ottoman Empire in the context of a wider geopolitical issue, the protection of the British Empire in India and the routes linking Britain's positions in the Mediterranean with the Indian subcontinent. This approach therefore overturns the idea that Turcophilism guided British foreign policy toward Constantinople in the nineteenth century. The book shows how Britain's policy toward the Ottoman Empire became distinct from that of its European neighbors, France and Russia, who were vying for influence in the Ottoman Middle East, a term Parry acknowledges was anachronistic at the time. According to Parry, the period 1798–1853 was a period of “stealthy rather than overt” British imperialism in the Ottoman lands (19).

Chapters 1 and 2 brilliantly demonstrate how Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798 was a seminal event in the invention of a British foreign policy toward the Ottoman Empire. Until then, Britain's relations with Constantinople had been largely commercial, conducted through the agents of the Levant Company. A group of politicians around Henry Dundas, who saw Britain's interests as fundamentally different from those of the Continental powers, abandoned the traditional policy of Eurocentric alliances and promoted a traditional “blue water strategy” (36). From 1798 and after the loss of the American colonies, the aim was to strengthen Britain's naval, political, and commercial positions in the East Indies, as the vast Indian Ocean World was then sometimes called, particularly at the expense of France. Alliances with local powers and trade were among the means by which British influence was promoted in the Ottoman Empire from the late eighteenth century. One of the most compelling innovations of Parry's study is to show, in chapters 3 and 4, how technology helped to enforce British presence in Ottoman lands. There are some fascinating pages on steam projects in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and Iraq, where Parry describes the efforts of Francis R. Chesney and the brothers Henry Blosse Lynch and Thomas Kerr Lynch to open the Euphrates to steamers. Steam was also a means of protecting the western flanks of India against potential French and Russian threats.

Chapters 5 and 6 complexify our understanding of London's policy toward the Pacha of Egypt, Mehmet Ali, who had come to power in the aftermath of 1798. Parry convincingly analyzes the strength of British-Egyptian economic and cultural relations, showing that Mehmet Ali cultivated British government officials and merchants as much as French ones. There are some exquisite pages on the successes of the private merchant Samuel Briggs in Egypt and the journey of the giraffe sent by the Egyptian ruler as a symbol of friendship with Britain to delight the visitors of the newly created London Zoo. For the British, Mehmet Ali's “centralising, modernizing rule” (160), which paid lip service to religious tolerance, sent the right signals, in contrast to the Ottoman principle of the Caliphate. As Parry shows, Bentham's reflections on the problem of governing Islamic societies loomed large in British attitudes toward Mehmet Ali's Egypt. However, British support for the Pacha vanished with the Eastern crisis when Mehmet Ali's imperial ambitions in Syria threatened London's economic and political interests throughout the Ottoman Middle East. For Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, by weakening Constantinople's rule, Mehmet Ali could pave the way for Russian influence in the Ottoman lands guarding the Anglo-Indian Empire.

Chapters 7, 8, and 9 show that liberalism was a guiding principle of British policy toward the Ottoman Empire. London, through its ambassador in Constantinople, John Ponsonby, championed the Edict of Gulhane of 1839, known as the opening salvo of the Ottoman reform program (the Tanzimat). Chapters 7 and 8 are a tour de force in comparing French and British attitudes to Constantinople from 1840 onward. Parry shows that London was concerned with promoting secular and liberal government in the Ottoman Empire, not with a possible Christian awakening. The chapters brilliantly analyze how Napoleon III's sectarian policy of championing the Chrétiens d'Orient contrasted with Palmerston's idea of protecting both Christians and Muslims to ensure peace and trade in the Syrian province. Chapter 9 ends with a fascinating recollection of Sir Austen Henry Layard's excavations at Nineveh and his interpretation of the city's fate. According to the archaeologist, Nineveh had fallen because of social disharmony. As Parry argues, Niniveh for Layard had suffered the same “political and religious illiberalism” against which British officials “crusaded at Constantinople” (296).

Parry's study concludes with an overview of Britain's growing influence on the eve of the Crimean War in the Ottoman Empire, in the Red Sea, in the Persian Gulf and Egypt, and in its foreign affairs, for example, when London sought to settle the border dispute between Tehran and Constantinople. Despite encroachments with the Ottomans in these regions, the leitmotif of London's policy toward Constantinople remained the search for order and good government, two principles that also guided British attitudes during the Crimean War and the negotiations of the Treaty of Paris.

One might regret that Promised Lands remains a study confined to British foreign policy, leaving out other major British players. The imperialism of the British Empire in India, in the region stretching from Egypt to Palestine, was crucial not only to the creation of the Middle East as a region but also to the forging of mandatory imperialism, a theme to which Parry alludes in his conclusion. The focus here on diplomacy tends to keep the spotlight more on London than on the competing priorities for the region of the administrations in Calcutta or Delhi. Despite these slight limitations, Promised Lands will be of vital importance to anyone interested in the history of the British Empire, the Middle East, or more generally in the history of the long nineteenth century.