Conclusion: Turkey-in-Europe, Turkey-in-Asia, Turkey-in-Britain

Abstract

Educated English men and women inhabited a mental landscape created by their reading. For anyone who was even mildly ‘at home’ with books, the five writers discussed here lived cumulatively and simultaneously for their readers as the century moved on. Toynbee read Gibbon, and Disraeli knew his Byron. The attitude towards Turkey that is the almost inevitable result of reading their books is curious, respectful and generally positive. An English observer, reading in a newspaper about the transition of the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic in 1923, might have marshalled what he or she knew about Turkey, remembered from things by Gibbon, Byron and Disraeli, from Buchan’s novels and Toynbee’s newspaper articles. These authors furnished the minds of English readers with images that compelled fascination and bolstered an attitude which kept Turkey in Europe, unmistakably the most Eastern country in the West.