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This chapter first shows the diversity of the agendas underlying the survey of the Middle East–to-be in the mid-19th century. It examines the haphazard processes that lay behind the mapmaking. The position of fieldwork in the dynamic processes that shaped geographical imaginations is of central importance to the understanding of the cultural production of the area. It then looks into the factors and the technical restraints behind survey expeditions. It describes how the surveyors captured the topography and nomenclature of a place, how spatial knowledge was first collected and recorded before its translation into the printed authority of cartography. It also tackles the question of the interactions between the local population and British agents. It pursues one of the main lines of reasoning of this book: the dialectical elaboration of cartographic and geographical knowledge. The chapter goes on to consider one of the first systematic surveying campaigns in the region, that is, the Palestine Exploration Fund project, with a view to observing the interactions of the aforementioned processes through a case study. The last sections describe the final stages of the construction of knowledge, from mapping to mapmaking as such, from the field notes to the cartographic document.

This chapter describes the explosion of large-scale maps and the multiplication of increasingly scientific surveys that followed the intensifying involvement of Britain in the East. It demonstrates the existence of British sub-empires using their expertise as a legitimizing elements. The competition between the different components of the British Empire from the Mediterranean to the Indian ocean testifies to the existence of various networks presiding over the construction of the region.This chapter also shows that local populations were not passive bystanders in the construction of spatial knowledge on the region. The interplay between self-styled European dominance and indigenous resistance or collaboration was multifaceted. One section demonstrates how local countermaps played their part in the spatial definitions of places in the East.

Chapter 2 is the first of three chapters that explore the resilience of a biblical culture of antiquity and the scriptural framework that served to comprehend the Near Eastern past. Scriptural visions of Palestine and Transjordan (a part of the Palestine mandate) were given new lease of life during the First World War. The Bible, the oldest and longest surviving framework for interpreting the Holy Land and the territories bordering it, shaped modes of writing about and experiencing them, as well as offering a narrative of the past and a scriptural temporality. The chapter demonstrates that notwithstanding the professionalization of archaeology and its adoption of scientific practices, the Scriptures remained dominant in discussions of the ancient past, and that archaeological discovery of a material Near East served to illustrate and corroborate scriptural texts. However, biblical culture—including research, travel-writing, and tourism—was adapted to modern technologies of transport and tourism, particularly to railways, cars, and aviation. The chapter examines the modernization of biblical narratives and of the physical experience of scriptural landscapes by considering a broad repertoire of writing: guidebooks for tourists, manuals and timetables, popular writings by archaeologists, and visual and material representations of the biblical past in metropolitan colonial exhibitions and in Palestine’s Museum of Archaeology. The chapter demonstrates how the modernization of uses of the Bible suited the mandate’s own rationale and agenda of modernization and development, and was endorsed and sometimes sponsored by officials.

Chapter 3 explores the search, during the 1920s, for the origins of David’s city and a monotheistic Jerusalem. It recovers international, metropolitan, and local mandate initiatives for verifying the location of Jerusalem’s oldest part, Mount Ophel, known as the City of David, by considering the activities of the Anglo-American press, organizations such as the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), and Palestine’s antiquities administration. It also considers the effect of the excavations on the mount on local landholders and owners. The chapter relates the excavations to mandate policies in regard to town planning (which reached its vogue during the interwar period), and to the visions of British urban planners and designers, like William McLean, Charles Robert Ashbee, and Patrick Geddes, administrators such as Ronald Storrs, Jerusalem’s military governor, and archaeologists. It examines how they sought to integrate the city’s antiquities and archaeological remains and their notion of a walled city into a vision of its modernization. The chapter recoups the early limited attempts to excavate the Davidic city and discusses the complex negotiation over access to Ophel and other historical monuments, between the mandate authorities, archaeologists and their institutions, and local landholders who cultivated the excavation sites. The negotiation and disputes about who owned land were also clashes over the worth and value of antiquity.

In the 1880s and 1890s Walter Besant was one of Britain’s most lionized living novelists. Today he is one of the least read Victorian fiction writers of comparable standing. In addition to outlining the contents of this volume, the introduction provides an overview of Besant’s life and career.

Where did Africa end? When were you really East in the 19th century? Geographic delineations are the result of a variety of historical legacies, physical realities, imagined ethnicities. This chapter uses nomenclature as a means to understand the cluster of representations related to the geography of the Orient from a British perspective. It considers geographical constructs of the intermediate East that predated the invention of the "Middle East". It also explores how Palestine was labeled and defined in the mid-19th century.