Circulating Things, Circulating Stereotypes: Representations of Arabia in Eighteenth-Century Imagination

In his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789), Edward Gibbon provides a description of Arabia that sums up the distinctive features of the place in the collective imaginary of eighteenth-century British subjects: “The Arabian Peninsula contains the vacant space between Persia, Syria, Egypt, and Æthiopia; and the entire surface of it exceeds in a fourfold proportion that of Germany, or France; but the far greater part of it has properly acquired the epithets of the stony and the sandy. In the dreary waste, a boundless level of sand is intersected by sharp and naked