Paulina Banas, Visualizing Egypt: European Travel, Book Publishing, and the Commercialization of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century (American University in Cairo Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Paulina Banas (PB): Since my early years as an art history student, I have been interested in nineteenth-century European artists’ journeys to North Africa and the Middle East, and the travel imagery these artists brought back home. This interest grew stronger as I made my first trip to an Arab country, Tunisia, and continued to learn more about nineteenth-century European travel to the region and French and British colonial ambitions there. Although scholarship on Orientalist visual culture has largely focused on oil paintings, I was drawn to nineteenth-century published albums that combined illustrations with travel narratives. I wondered how these publications helped European armchair travelers imagine and experience faraway places. Egypt, with its views of ancient and modern country, as well as the Islamic architecture of Cairo, was one of the popular subjects treated in these books, particularly following the French campaign in Egypt (1798-1801), which, along with the new tastes for and modes of travel, stimulated greater European interest in the country. While examining these illustrated volumes, I began asking questions about their production process. What factors caused the long, costly publishing timelines? Why do the final plates sometimes differ significantly from the original drawings or photographs brought from Egypt? What intrigued me the most were the editorial decisions made during production and the extent to which they could shape the portrayal of Egypt for the nineteenth-century public.
When searching for a PhD dissertation topic, I also learned about the French author Émile Prisse d’Avennes, a well-known nineteenth-century specialist on Egypt, or what was often loosely understood at that time as the “Orient.” His vast archive, stored at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, contains notes, drawings, engravings, and photographs (some of diverse or obscure provenance), which helped him prepare his various publications on both ancient and modern Egypt. Since this Frenchman was one of the important key players of the European publishing industry on Egypt, and collaborated with authors and publishers of books on “oriental” culture in several European countries, his archive became my entry point to the investigation of this publishing industry. My project continued to evolve, as I researched a wider range of authors, publishers, and books in libraries in Europe and the United States, and learned more about nineteenth-century publishing, among other topics, which helped answer some of the questions mentioned above.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
PB: This book is about the production and circulation of French and British illustrated albums featuring Egyptian people and Islamic architecture and produced from the late 1830s to the late 1870s, during a period of heightened French and British colonial interests in the region, significant transformations in publishing, and expanding travel to Egypt.
I examine a variety of archival sources, publishers’ advertisements, and book reviews, in addition to the illustrated books themselves, and discuss the different stages of the production process, from the conceptualization of the book through the arrangement of its content, to its marketing and dissemination to a wider audience. By following the careers of the makers of these publications—artists, writers, printmakers, publishers, and sponsors—some of whom met or worked together in Cairo, London, or Paris, the book investigates the nature of these collaborations, revealing the conflicting views behind these projects, the multivocal nature of these products, and questioning the attribution of these books to singular authors.
While nineteenth-century European images of Egypt have often been seen through the lens of Orientalism, as cultural constructs sustaining larger ideological agendas, Visualizing Egypt brings attention to the commercial machinery of the publishing market. It discusses how the issue of economics, resources, and financial stakes of the publishing industry could prompt artists and publishers to shape both the content and the form of their books for particular audiences, considerably contributing to the diffusion of cultural tropes about modern Egypt. Key to my investigation was the importance of printing techniques and media, from wood engraving to (chromo-) lithography, and photography, in creating a marketable work on the Middle East.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
PB: Visualizing Egypt is my first book, the result of about a decade of research, building on my doctoral work, as well as a series of conference papers and two articles I published on nineteenth-century French and British publishing after completing my PhD. However, some of my earlier interests dealt not only with nineteenth-century printed albums and visual culture more generally, but also with the early modern world of material exchanges and the circulation of Islamic and Islamic-inspired decorative arts (metalwork, carpets, sashes) between Eastern Europe and the Ottoman and Safavid worlds. This research interest is represented in my two published papers, particularly the essay, which I was invited to contribute to the catalog of the 2013–14 exhibition The Persian-European Dialogue in Seventeenth-Century Art and Contemporary Art of Tehran (Rietberg Museum, Switzerland). Here, I discussed cultural appropriation of Islamic designs and the question of Polish identity in the context of the Eastern European encounter with the East from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The subject remains largely unstudied by art historians. Yet this part of Europe had a specific relationship with the Middle East that did not pertain to the Orientalist theories of exotic consumption often associated with Western European fascination for these commodities.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
PB: Visualizing Egypt discusses some of the earliest images of Islamic Cairo and the Nile Valley that were formulated by French and British artists in illustrated books for the public back at home. Some of these publications are still attracting considerable public interest today, as they have been reprinted in parts or as a whole, often as coffee-table books, and sought by researchers and collectors of Islamic decorative arts. Many of these images have also reappeared in new media and formats—from contemporary movies made in North America to the type of picturesque views that a tourist may find on their hotel wall when visiting Egypt—and thus have continued to represent the region or Muslim culture. Consequently, I hope that Visualizing Egypt can appeal to readers in Egypt, the larger MENA region, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, who are enthusiastic to see these images but also understand better how nineteenth-century publishing practices, and the related issues of economy and marketability, impacted the production, diffusion, and reception of these visuals.
By exploring the historical dimensions of European travel to Egypt and by engaging in the field of travel writing studies, my book can also appeal to a wider sector of scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and all those interested in global, transnational, and postcolonial studies and Orientalism. I hope that Visualizing Egypt will provide a better understanding of how books functioned within the cross-cultural world of the nineteenth century, and how the publishing industry helped stir up the circulation of more or less similar images of Egypt and Muslim culture, contributing to what has been understood as a “discourse” of Orientalism.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
PB: The nineteenth-century publishing industry still plays an essential role in my current and future research, as I continue exploring mid-nineteenth-century publications not only on Egypt but also other North African and African regions, many of which I was exposed to in archives and libraries when researching information for Visualizing Egypt.
My current work also extends into the twentieth-century context of exchanges and encounters through publishing between Egypt, Europe, and the United States. For some time, I have been looking at the work of Paul Strand, who helped pioneer the evolution of photography in the early twentieth-century United States. I am currently exploring a lesser-known episode of his later career, when Strand traveled to Egypt to create a new series of photographs published in 1969 in an illustrated book, Living Egypt. These artworks also represent the Egyptian people in the period following the 1952 Egyptian Revolution and during the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser. What I find particularly interesting is Strand’s engagement with publishers in the Eastern Bloc, as he attempted to make his work relevant to the Soviet audiences. I am interested in learning more about the extent to which the image of Egypt was reshaped through twentieth-century photography and the complex publishing networks in which Strand seemed to be involved in the 1960s.
J: What major challenges, as well as rewarding or surprising discoveries, did you encounter while working on this project?
PB: Some of the challenges I faced were related to the necessity of consulting multiple editions of these publications to better understand the scope of book production and the material qualities of these objects. However, some nineteenth-century illustrated albums exist only in fragments today, as their illustrations were separated from their attached texts, which makes it difficult to understand the original context of production and their reception by the nineteenth-century public. The luxurious editions of these albums are also dispersed across libraries in Europe, the United States, and Arab countries, or resurface on the booksellers’ market, sometimes sold for tens of thousands of dollars, making them difficult to access.
Some of my surprising discoveries actually stemmed from these challenges. When consulting illustrated albums in libraries in Europe and the United States, I found it fascinating that copies of the same edition of one book could be so different from one another. Some nineteenth-century publishers created their products in different formats and chromatic quality of the illustrations; many of them were also hand-colored. They could also customize the bindings and some of the content of the book to cater to customers with different levels of interest in Egypt and financial means who likely pre-ordered their copies in the publisher’s office. We may be accustomed today to various formats of the book, such as paperback, hardcover, eBooks, and audiobooks, but it is fascinating to also think about the different experiences of engaging with printed works that were offered to the nineteenth-century armchair travelers interested in Egypt.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pages 36 to 38)
The Publishing Journey
Rather than taking a comprehensive and encyclopedic look at this specific book production, the following chapters delve into various aspects of French and British publishing on modern Egypt, from recording information by artists to marketing new knowledge by publishers and to recasting the readers’ understanding of these books. These facets of publishing are seen from the different and often conflicting perspectives of the artists, writers, publishers, sponsors, and printmakers, who often crossed each other’s paths during these four unprecedented decades of publishing.
While this introduction has placed Orientalist publications at the convergence of images, texts, media, authorship, and various marketing and economic practices of the time, providing a methodological framework for the understanding of these products, chapter 1 draws attention to the often-overlooked role of their publishers. One such figure was the British entrepreneur James Madden. By using sources such as book prospectuses, advertisements, and reviews, I place his luxury 1848 product, the Oriental Album, in a complex net of relationships between the publisher; the authors; other travelers to the Middle East, as well as contemporary French and British works of this genre; and the activities of larger publishers, including the house of John Murray. Also related to these specifics of the industry are larger debates on aesthetics and the modes of visualization of the time. By engaging in the above, I showcase an extremely competitive and stratified market for books on the Middle East that was undergoing changes at that time.
The archive of the French author Émile Prisse d’Avennes is stored today at the BnF and encompasses manuscript notes and approximately two thousand visual documents authored by this individual and/or other known or anonymous artists. In chapter 2, I examine this valuable and understudied source, with a focus on Prisse d’Avennes’s drawings and clippings from books and periodicals on modern Egypt, to understand contemporary methods of recording information in Egypt and strategies for later conveying the image of this country to the European public at home. These strategies had to consider various and often conflicting demands placed on Orientalist products at that time, but also respond to previous images inscribed in reputed albums such as Description de l’Égypte.
By undertaking a visual analysis of pencil drawings and wood engravings, many of which are stored in Prisse d’Avennes’s archive at the BnF and/or were reproduced in books authored by travelers to the Middle East such as Lane, Roberts, Horeau, and Prisse d’Avennes, chapter 3 exposes the methodology of preparing the illustrative content of a mid-nineteenth-century book on modern Egypt. Specifically, I demonstrate that this methodology led to the production and repetition of stereotypical scenes of modern Egypt and was largely based on an unacknowledged system of borrowing and reusing previously published images. Some of these repurposed sources had also appeared in the commercial press of the time or represented other Middle Eastern countries. This chapter reasserts the agency of the publisher in producing a particular vision of the MENA region, while also showing how authors manipulated their own sources for various purposes.
Chapter 4 offers an internal reading of the Oriental Album, draws attention to the often-overlooked narrative of the book, and allows one to see more clearly the relationship between the textual and visual parts of this travel album. While attempting to reconstruct the audience’s understanding of the book, I suggest that Orientalist illustrations should be considered in relation to the accompanying narratives instead of being analyzed separately, and point out the multivocal character of such publications.
The ethnographic and picturesque representation of the Nile Valley featured in books studied in chapters 1 to 4 was progressively replaced in the second half of the century by a more specific interest in the promotion of Islamic design. This shift of interest and new visualization techniques—also seen in Prisse d’Avennes’s widely disseminated L’art arabe d’après les monuments du Caire depuis le VII siècle jusqu’à la fin du XVIII—were triggered by the progressive formation of scientific disciplines, the emerging practices of collecting and exhibiting Islamic artifacts, and a broader public desire for industrial design patterns at that time. Chapter 5 examines the archival sources related to the production of L’art arabe, such as Prisse d’Avennes’s personal letters to his friends, and illuminates the author’s relationships with the publisher, publishing investor, and the printmakers from the French company Lemercier & Cie. Consequently, I present the reader with a view of the publishing industry of the time as a battlefield of opinions and personal commitments, and demonstrate that the format and material included in L’art arabe largely depended on the commercial prerogatives of its publisher and the publishing investor rather than the author’s own objectives.
This new demand for more specified content and greater representational accuracy triggered new standards of book production, which demanded further technological innovations and greater collaboration between photographers, artists, and printmakers. Through the study of personal letters and photographs stored at Prisse d’Avennes’s archive at the BnF, chapter 6 exposes the working relationships between the presumed authors, photographers, and painters who contributed to L’art arabe. As a result, I undermine the prevalent notion of an independent Orientalist voice by pointing out how slippery the notions of authorship, collaboration, and appropriation were in the world of cross-cultural encounters, and how these concepts were undergoing changes in the second part of the nineteenth century—partly through the dissemination of photographs. It was not only the availability of the visuals, but also their size, visual legibility, and the technical difficulty that the copying of these images could impose during the production process that structured the knowledge on Egypt that was promulgated to the European public.
The epilogue offers concluding remarks on the transforming image, market, and book industry on modern Egypt from the late 1830s to the late 1870s. Visualizing Egypt ends by reasserting what was suggested above, that the publishing market contributed to what we know today as the “citationary” character of Orientalism.