George Hay, 8th Earl of Kinnoull, was an unconventional ambassador. A Scottish aristocrat who had been imprisoned for his Jacobite sympathies and almost bankrupted by his involvement in the South Sea Bubble, Lord Kinnoull had no previous diplomatic experience when he was unexpectedly appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1729. Leaving his wife and family of ten at their Yorkshire home, Lord Kinnoull departed England for Constantinople with his political, financial and personal suitability for the role all in doubt. How would he cope with the complex world of international politics? Or negotiate the sensitive relationship between Muslims and Christians? And why was he subsequently recalled to England in disgrace?"The Earl and His Butler in Constantinople" traces Lord Kinnoull's eventful journey to the heart of the Ottoman Empire, where he served as ambassador for seven years - and back again. His butler, Samuel Medley, was his constant companion throughout this time and his is almost the only surviving servant's diary from the period. From this unique and colourful source, as well as from Lord Kinnoull's despatches and family letters, Nigel and Caroline Webb have produced a remarkable biography which casts fresh light on the Ottoman Empire and British politics in the 18th century. It also offers vivid portraits of the cosmopolitan city of Constantinople at this critical stage in its history and of an idiosyncratic Earl and his exceptional butler which will captivate readers.

Exposes new relationships between literary representation and colonialism, focusing on the metaphorizing colonialist discourse of imperial power in the tropics.

In 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s husband Edward Montagu was appointed British ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire. Montagu accompanied her husband to Turkey and wrote an extraordinary series of letters that recorded her experiences as a traveller and her impressions of Ottoman culture and society. This Broadview edition includes a broad selection of related historical documents on Turkey, women in the Arab world, Islam, and “Oriental” tales written in Europe.

This A-Z reference work provides the first comprehensive reference guide to the wide range of historical writing with which women have been involved, particularly since the Renaissance. The Companion covers biographical writing, travelogue and historical fictions, broadening the concept of history to include the forms of writing with which women have historically engaged. The focus is on women writing in English internationally, but historical and historiographical traditions from beyond the English-speaking world are also examined. Brief biographies of individual writers are included.

Chosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Until recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the nineteenth century. The first book to look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long eighteenth century, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some women of this period chose to write the same kind of history as men—one that marginalized or excluded women altogether. But as Devoney Looser demonstrates, although British women's historically informed writings were not necessarily feminist or even female-focused, they were intimately involved in debates over and conversations about the genre of history. Looser investigates the careers of Lucy Hutchinson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Austen and shows how each of their contributions to historical discourse differed greatly as a result of political, historical, religious, class, and generic affiliations. Adding their contributions to accounts of early modern writing refutes the assumption that historiography was an exclusive men's club and that fiction was the only prose genre open to women.