'Palestine is Thus Brought Home to England': The Representation of Palestine in British Travel Literature, 1840-1914

Abstract

This thesis reviews a selection of around forty travelogues on Palestine produced from 1840 to 1914 by British traveller-writers, in addition to a range of supporting material relating to Palestine travel. It argues that this genre of texts has had a profound influence on Palestine’s history. This thesis aims to define what image of Palestine and its people was embodied in the travelogue genre in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, and what its influence has been, through posing four questions. How was the Palestinian people represented by British traveller-writers? How was the land of Palestine itself represented? How did these representations serve to advance a colonial, or settler-colonial, claim upon Palestine? And how have they influenced subsequent colonial and settler-colonial ideologies and practices, specifically those of the British Mandate administration and the Zionist movement before 1948, and the State of Israel afterwards? Chapters are dedicated to the representation of Palestine’s Muslims and Islam, Christians and Christianity, Jews and Judaism, and smaller social and religious minorities; to representations of Palestine as a land of the past and of the existing landscape; to representations of Palestine’s urban environments; and to prototypes of settler colonialism devised by British travellers in the late Ottoman period. Theoretical frameworks of Orientalism and settler colonialism are used throughout in considering how travel narratives took on a life off the page, becoming actualised in the attitudes, beliefs and choices of two classes of colonisers, the British and the Zionist movement.