The Rule of the Road

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

  • BuyAfter Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empire by John Darwin
    Penguin, 592 pp, £10.99, March 2008, ISBN 978 0 14 101022 9

In the year 1283 of the Hegiran era, or 1866 of the Common Era, the Ottoman traveller Abdur Rahman bin Abdullah al-Baghdádi al-Dimashqi arrived in Brazil on the imperial corvette Bursa to begin a three-year visit. He later published an account of his experiences, entitled Maslihat al-gharib bi-kull-i amr ‘ajib (‘The delight of the traveller concerning all that is marvellous’). It is an important text for a number of reasons, including the light it sheds on the status of Islam among slaves of West African origin in 19th-century Brazil; but also because it allows us to reflect on what exactly empires are and were.

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