ABSTRACT
The Middle East is a construction of the European mind. In intellectual and cultural terms, as has already been observed in the idea of Orientalism’, the Middle East is a product of the European imperial and bourgeois imagination. What might be termed the ‘politics of exotica’ describes the whole ethos of nineteenth-century European exploration, not only of the Middle East but of much of the globe. The era of exploration was financed very often by European governments for political/ imperial reasons, but the incentive for the individual explorers and travellers themselves was a fascination with the ‘exotic’, with alien peoples and their cultures, customs and languages.1
