A Commerce of Knowledge tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who worked in Ottoman Aleppo during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By reconstructing their careers, Simon Mills shows the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and English scholarly and missionary interests.

For nineteenth century scholars the Holy Land was not just a region of the globe - it was an idea, an intellectual and moral space charged with the heat of debate between those trying to understand the religious, social and scientific upheavals of the time. Edwin Aiken explores the various ways in which geographical knowledge was used in these debates. In particular he shows how religious writers called upon geographical knowledge to the benefit of their readers. The result is an original and stimulating work of scholarship that demonstrates the significance of the geography of the Holy Land in Western thought and argument, and makes important contributions to the history of geography, the nature of Orientalism, and to the evolving relationship between religion and science.