Throughout this book I have mentioned in passing the interrelated nature of the travel accounts, showing for example how certain phrases (such as “wide, paved, and clean”) are echoed from one author to another, and how the travelers, though speaking in their individual voices, nonetheless detailed remarkably similar visions of the Farangi ideal. In this concluding chapter I will take a closer look at the underlying discursive network that informed the authors’ perspectives and retrospectively helped shape a vision for the future. This discourse was strongly grounded in the elite Persian social circles to which the travelers belonged, and it was also based in the established literary patterns of the safarnameh genre in which they wrote. Although direct references to other travelogues are absent in the diaries, the authors demonstrate a clear genre awareness. Abolhasan’s diary, for example, as one scholar shows, “borrows … from the classical Arabic travel literature of rihla.” ² More specifically, both the title and the introduction of his book are greatly influenced by a late eighteenth-century travel account by Mirza Etesamoddin. ³