America’s presence in the Middle East and the Arab world has been far longer and older than its presumed entry to the region after the Second World War. American military officers helped Khedive Ismail, in the 1870s, restructure the Egyptian army, leaving a mixed legacy in the minds of many Egyptian officers and politicians of the time. A half century before that, America had various entanglements in North Africa, largely to protect American maritime vessels from attacks from the Barbary states of the region. American visitors, ambassadors, and even those who had been imprisoned in North Africa often at the risk of being sold as slaves, had written accounts of their time in North Africa, that caused sensations back home. From the mid nineteenth century, the American mind began to see the Middle East, not only as the Holy Land, or the abode of Islamic societies, or attachments to the Ottoman Empire, or a necklace of ports important to American trade in the Mediterranean, but through a wider lens, in which strategic, economic, and religious angles intersected. So, as America celebrates its 250th anniversary, there might be value in reflecting on America’s experience in the Arab world and the wider Middle East in the past two centuries, and on Arab experiences of America in that period.

This series will focus on the understandings, the perceptions, and the thought, because these, much more than the specific political objectives of different times, that contributed most to shaping America’s and the Arabs’ experiences of each other in the past two centuries.

Narratives about America and the Middle East tend to focus on hard expressions of American power in the region. America’s protection of the states of the Arabian Peninsula in the seven decades since the meeting between President FD Roosevelt and King Abdelaziz al-Saud in Egypt in 1945, and the occupation of Iraq in the first decade of the twenty first century, understandably, take the lion’s share of such narratives. But America’s engagement with the Middle East were hardly always anchored on expressions of power. Many readers might find it surprising that for few years in the early nineteenth century, America was paying over 15 per cent of its national budget as effective tributes to the Barbary states. This was not a reflection of relative power between America and these North African states; it was a reflection of America’s hesitation to engage with the world, especially with a part of the world it hardly understood at the time (and and Congress opted to pay these states tributes to avert the threat of piracy to American ships in the Mediterranean).

Religion was the lens through which America had first viewed the Arab world and the wider Middle East, including the core of the Ottoman Empire. It was not a pretty lens. No less than Samuel Langdon, the President of Harvard University in the late eighteenth century, wrote an acutely negative assessment of the history of the region, based on his views of Islam. In his account, and those of other American observers of that period, Arabness, Ottomanness, and Moorish culture blurred with Islam in a mix that was, in this narrative, far from appealing. The following period, especially the years in which Thomas Jefferson, in my view the most impressive mind amongst America’s founding fathers, was president of the United States, saw more tolerant and more interesting appraisals of the Arab and Islamic worlds, which entailed more nuanced attempts at understanding the experiences of the societies of the Near East. Jefferson himself had quite a negative, yet pensive, reflection on the region, that saw the Arabs and Muslims, including the Turks and Iranians, as descendants of a once venerable but long decayed civilisation. The same line of thinking led several American observers of the Middle East in the early and mid nineteenth century to wonder how the refinement of old had turned of late into primitiveness and sordidness.

This plethora of views mingled with America’s view of itself as a light among and unto the nations, and led to successive waves of proselytising, by different schools of American Evangelism, in Turkish and Arab communities in the early and mid nineteenth century.

Then as is the case now, messianism was present in the American mind when it looked at the Middle East. Far from dismissible groups in terms of size and influence, particularly in affluent circles in nineteenth century New England (in the northeastern United States) espoused evangelical views that tried to shape American policy in and towards the Middle East round efforts, they believed, fulfil the prerequisites for Christ’s Second Coming.

Politics and economics were not far from America’s thinking about the Middle East, however. Several American strategists, particularly in the second generation of policymakers in the then nascent American republic, such as John Quincy Adams, sought to gain a foothold in the markets of the Ottoman Empire, in Turkiye, the Mediterranean, and in today’s Arab world. In this thinking, there was a big prize to be won by American trading houses if they were to secure influential positions in the Ottoman Empire’s sprawling, and at the time hardly regulated, markets.

As the next article in this series will show, this melange of drivers and objectives amongst the first Americans to engage with the Middle East led to quite surprising experiences for those political adventurers and economic entrepreneurs as well as for the people of the region who had got to deal with them.