Arabs and Arabists contains nineteen selected articles by Alastair Hamilton on the Western acquisition of knowledge of the Arab and Ottoman world in the early modern period. The first essays are on Arabs who visited Europe and gave instruction to Western Arabists, and on Europeans who either visited the Arab (or the Ottoman) world in search of manuscripts and information or who, like Franciscus Raphelengius, Isaac Casaubon and Adriaen Reland, studied it at a distance and remained in the West. These are followed by a section on the actual study of the Arabic language in Europe, and above all the creation of the first Arabic-Latin dictionaries, and another on the European study of Islam and Western translations of the Qur’an.

Lieutenant Colonel Harold Fenton Jacob (1866-1936) was an officer in the British Army, stationed primarily in Yemen at the turn of the 20th century. He served as British political agent at Dhala and chief political officer to the Aden Field Force. Between 1917 and 1920 he was an advisor on southwestern Arabian affairs to the British high commissioner in Egypt. The work presented here, Kings of Arabia, examines the history of the Ottoman Turkish presence in the Hejaz region of Arabia, but focuses mainly on the small Arab kingdoms of Yemen, most of which later became part of the British-controlled Aden Protectorate. The book provides detailed background on the history of Yemen from the 17th century until the aftermath of World War I, including information on the rulers of the Sherifate of Mecca and the Zaidi Imamate of Sanaa. It also recounts the Turkish and British attempts to dominate the region, especially the sea route to Asia through the Straits of Bab el Mandeb. The Ottoman Turkish presence in Yemen began in the early 16th century with the seizure of Aden and the Red Sea coast during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. However, after continued unrest in the interior, the Turks evacuated the region in 1630, leaving it in the hands of the Shiite Zaidi imams of Sanaa. Muhammad Ali, Viceroy of Egypt, established a presence in the region after he defeated the Wahhabis in Hejaz in the early 19th century. The Turks returned in 1849, establishing themselves in various cities and ports, where they remained until they surrendered to the British in 1918. Aden fell to the British in 1839. The Aden Protectorate was established at that time, and included the tribal kingdoms in the hinterland around the city that signed protection agreements with the British. The protectorate ceased to exist in 1963, and in 1967 the region declared independence and became known as the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen), which united with the North in 1990 to form present-day Yemen.

In Hajj Travelogues: Texts and Contexts from the 12th Century until 1950 Richard van Leeuwen maps the corpus of hajj accounts from the Muslim world and Europe. The work outlines the main issues in a field of study which has largely been neglected. A large number of hajj travelogues are described as a textual type integrating religious discourse into the form of the journey. Special attention is given to their intertextual embedding in the broader discursive tradition of the hajj. Since the corpus is seen as dynamic and responsive to historical developments, the texts are situated in their historical context and the subsequent phases of globalisation. It is shown how in travelogues forms of religious subjectivity are constructed and expressed.

Spanning Europe, Asia and the Pacific, Encounters with Emotions investigates experiences of face-to-face transcultural encounters from the seventeenth century to the present and the emotional dynamics that helped to shape them. Each of the case studies collected here investigates fascinating historiographical questions that arise from the study of emotion, from the strategies people have used to interpret and understand each other’s emotions to the roles that emotions have played in obstructing communication across cultural divides. Together, they explore the cultural aspects of nature as well as the bodily dimensions of nurture and trace the historical trajectories that shape our understandings of current cultural boundaries and effects of globalization.

Long distance travel and mass tourism are not recent phenomena. Papers from the 2015 ASTENE Conference in Exeter demonstrate that over the centuries many individuals and groups of people have left the safety of their family home and travelled huge distances both for adventure and to learn more about other peoples and places.