Levant Company chaplaincies functioned as covert studentships in Arabic studies.

Evidence

Pococke was to owe his excellent knowledge of Arabic to his prolonged sojourn in Aleppo from 1630 to 1636 as chaplain to the Levant Company. The Levant Company had been chartered in 1581 to trade in the lands of the Ottoman Sultan. An embassy was then established at Istanbul and consulates in Smyrna and Aleppo. The latter was the Levant Company’s main trading centre or ‘factory’ in Syria and it dealt primarily in cotton, much of which was grown in Syria and Palestine, as well as in silks imported by caravans coming from points further east. The chaplaincy at Aleppo in effect served as a studentship in Arabic and Islamic studies and several other distinguished scholars were to hold this post subsequently, among them Robert Huntington, who used his sojourn there in 1671–8 to collect Oriental manuscripts which he eventually bequeathed to Oxford’s Bodleian Library. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 163

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels how imperial and trading posts secretly subsidized scholarship — like colonial scientific exploration in other accounts.
• SHARE: For a friend interested in the texture of early modern trade-and-scholarship networks.