ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century, the European literature about the northern coast of Africa was growing. This literature was intertwined with the European experience in this area, the experience of slaves, merchants, and diplomats. The literature was written in a variety of genres: slave narratives, consular reports, topographical descriptions, and eventually also historical narratives. This chapter discusses one such text, Georg Høst's The History of the Moroccan Emperor Mohamed Ben Abdallah (1791), which followed upon Høst's earlier description of the domains of the Moroccan emperor, Marrakech and Fes (1779). The book is noteworthy for being a book-length history of a sovereign from a state in Barbary, narrating the life of the emperor and thereby the most recent history of the area. It represents a shift towards history as a genre for conveying knowledge about the Orient, in both Høst's writing and in the orientalist literature as such. The chapter explores the conditions of production of this work and its place in a historiography that moved towards the archive.
