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The Ottoman Empire and the American

flag: patriotic travel before the age of
package tours, 1830–1870
a
Susan Nance
a
Department of History , University of Guelph , 50 Stone Rd,
Guelph, ON, N1G 2W1, Canada
Published online: 19 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: Susan Nance (2009) The Ottoman Empire and the American flag: patriotic
travel before the age of package tours, 1830–1870, Journal of Tourism History, 1:1, 7-26, DOI:
10.1080/17551820902742715

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17551820902742715

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 Journal of Tourism History
Vol. 1, No. 1, March 2009, 7
26

RESEARCH ARTICLE
The Ottoman Empire and the American flag: patriotic travel before
the age of package tours, 1830 1870
Susan Nance*


Department of History, University of Guelph, 50 Stone Rd., Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada
(Received 16 March 2008; final version received 1 May 2008)

This article examines US flag display practices among American tourists in the
Ottoman Empire between 1835 and 1870. These practices emerged from the
intersection of the domestic American market for depictions of citizens abroad,
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Ottoman regulation on foreign nationals in the Empire that required flag display
on boats and camps, and the energy of Ottoman travel industry workers who
helped American visitors’ extend flag display to other colloquial touristic uses.
American consumers accepted patriotic flag display as a central part of travel
routines in the Middle East in order to ascribe patriotic meaning to their
vacations. It was the first articulation of the idea that travel was an American
activity through which citizens might serve themselves and the state by
representing their nation abroad as consumers. American uses of the national
banner in the Empire demonstrated that, a full century earlier than previous
research has indicated, leisure travel became a patriotic practice for many
Americans, and that tourism and nationalism were mutually reinforcing
phenomena.
Keywords: Ottoman Empire; American flag; patriotism; citizenship; tourism;
consumption

In 1853, Jane Eames approached an Egyptian tailor working in Cairo’s main bazaar
to make her an American flag. A Rhode Island native visiting the Ottoman Empire
for the first time, Eames, like many American tourists in the Middle East before
1870, had failed to pack a flag from home and searched local markets for someone to
construct one. Her inquiries verified the colloquial touristic opinion that local flag-
makers charged exorbitant fees for the service. Since back home she might have made
the flag with her own hands, after some thought, Eames sent her dragoman, Hassan
Mousa, and her husband, Anthony, back to the bazaar where they purchased fabric
so she could construct a banner herself. ‘Of course we must have a flag,’ she
explained. ‘Every party has its own flag. For when one boat meets another, the flags
tell of what nation are their occupants. To sail under any other than our own stars
and stripes, was not to be thought of.’ Thereafter, Eames, her husband and
dragoman flew her American flag from their boat as they sailed up the Nile River
and back. They hung the national banner from tent posts as they camped across the
Sinai to the Levant. All the way to Constantinople they sought out other American
flags, hoping to see them among other tourists and the US consuls scattered about

*Email: snance@uoguelph.ca
ISSN 1755-182X print/ISSN 1755-1838 online
# 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17551820902742715
http://www.informaworld.com
 8 S. Nance

the region. Eames was not disappointed, and, as for most travelers, the Stars and
Stripes were a frequent sight during her time in the Empire (Eames, 1855, 1860).
Why would early nineteenth-century American tourists engage in such flag
practices in the Ottoman Empire? Americans traveling for leisure in other parts of
the globe in those years seldom if ever displayed an American flag while abroad. My
survey of authors for this study showed that if they also wrote travel accounts of
visits to other global regions they often reported feelings of homesickness or pride in
seeing an American merchant or naval vessel in a foreign harbor in Europe, Asia or
Latin America, but no events of personal flag display. Likewise, it was uncommon
for citizens to fly the Stars and Stripes at home or to make any personal use of a
fabric American flag. All those hand-made banners American women sewed they
routinely gave away for government or naval use. In fact, national flag display was
largely limited to federal property, ceremonial exhibition by the competing political
parties of the young republic, or, in the abstract, as decoration on songbooks,
newspapers or household objects. Cecelia O’Leary (1999) explains the absence of
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common flag use, saying, ‘a mythologized Washington, a Roman eagle, and a

classically dressed maiden alternately called the Goddess of Liberty or Columbia, . . .
emerged as the preeminent symbols of the early nation’ (on this point see also
Guenter, 1990).
How do we explain the fact that before 1870 Americans engaged in enthusiastic
flag display in the Ottoman Empire more than any other place on earth? More
broadly, can this case help us understand how the patriotic opportunities of overseas
travel made tourism more appealing to Americans in those years, or how foreign
tourism informed American nationalism a full century earlier than previous research
has indicated? This phenomenon is especially important in the foundational period
before Cook Company tours began in the Empire in 1869, when British travel
promoters would begin marketing their travel services to Europeans and Americans
(Brendon, 1991). Before such package tours, there were no American travel guides
for the Empire and the only aid for tourists created by Westerners, Murray’s
handbooks for Ottoman travel, explicitly addressed an imagined British user
(Koshar, 1998). Instead, Ottoman tourism workers and American visitors coop-
erated to craft itineraries and routines that included patriotic flag display practices,
both those officially required and the colloquial, that made Ottoman Empire
holidays profitable for host and guest alike.
So far, we do not know how American nationalism and Ottoman Empire travel
became linked because scholars have largely neglected Ottoman Empire tourism and
American participation in it as subjects of explicit historical study. Scholars of
tourism in various disciplines have only barely begun to turn their attention to the
travel industries of the Middle East to ask why and how the Empire became one of
the most popular nineteenth-century destinations for Western tourists, and have as
yet only traced out the basic outlines of the travel trade (Andrew, 1993; Cohen-
Hattab & Katz, 2001; Katz, 1985; Nance, 2007; Rafeq, 2002). Further, the pre-
eminent source base for the study of the industry, published travel narratives, has
overwhelmingly been subject to theory-driven literary analysis, rather than a
historical analysis of lived experience that explains how tourism functioned. (For
some recent examples in this enormous literature, see Marr, 2006; Obenzinger, 1999;
Schueller, 1998; Shamir, 2003; Warzeski, 2002.) To be sure, more than one author has
noted that the travel narratives emanating from visits to the Middle East helped
 Journal of Tourism History 9

Americans at home to define themselves in contrast to foreign peoples, especially

since many interpreted the place as a Protestant ‘Holy Land’ for which Protestant
Christians were the only legitimate spiritual caretakers (on American identities and
travel, see Caesar, 1988; Obenzinger, 2003; Schriber, 1997; on American missionaries
and the Middle East interpreted as American Holy Land, see Davis, 1996; Le Beau &
Mor, 1996; Makdisi, 1997; Obenzinger, 1999; Vogel, 1993). Still, these religious
American interpretations of the region are only part of the story and scholars have
not gotten around to documenting how or why Americans and Ottoman subjects
developed patriotic practices in the Empire or how the Middle Eastern tourist trade
and American nationalism developed in symbiosis.
Nor does the interdisciplinary literature on American tourism help explain
nineteenth-century flag display by US citizens in the Middle East since most studies
link American nationalism to domestic tourism, or locate the emergence of explicitly
patriotic overseas travel by Americans supported by governments at home and
abroad only in the twentieth century (see for instance, Baranowski & Furlough,
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2001; Endy, 2004; Levenstein, 2004; Pretes, 2003; Schaffer, 2001). Moving back
across the Atlantic and 100 years in time, American citizens in the Ottoman Empire
were thinking about themselves as Americans and performing their citizenship there
by the late 1830s already. Meanwhile, a vast number of people have written about
nineteenth-century nationalism as a product of capitalism, facilitated by long-
distance communication and increasingly affordable and abundant print media
(Anderson, 1991; Breen, 1993; Fahs, 2001; Johnson, 1965; Waldstreicher, 1995). All
of these developments point to the fact that the technological and economic
revolutions of the period
the very ones that made trans-Atlantic travel possible for
Americans
simultaneously facilitated cultural shifts that included new modes of
consumer citizenship and patriotic practice that Americans solely exhibited while
abroad. Indeed, what better place to enact, evaluate and compare one’s national
identity than surrounded by foreigners while traveling overseas?
A history of touristic patriotic practice allows us to see that Americans, with the
cooperation of Ottoman subjects on site and American consumers back home, chose
to make patriotic flag display a central part of travel routines in the Middle East in
order to ascribe patriotic meaning to these vacations and make imagined national
distinctions real. Rudy Koshar (1998, p. 325) has ably explained how a ‘search for
knowledge and an ‘‘authentic’’ identity beyond the market place characterizes some
of the most (apparently) mindless and commodified forms of touristic behavior,’
suggesting that early nineteenth-century American travelers in the Empire similarly
coped with the commerce of travel by ascribing emotional meanings to experiences
they paid to have.
The resulting American
Ottoman patriotic practices emerged from the intersec-
tion of three historical trends. First, the domestic US market for depictions of
Americans abroad grew profitable enough to bankroll amateur and professional
writers who wrote publishable travel narratives. Second, Ottoman regulation on
foreign nationals in the Empire required that they define themselves primarily by
citizenship. According to Ottoman law, nationals of many Western states, known
colloquially as ‘Franks’ or in Arabic farangi, held extra-territorial status in the
Empire but had a responsibility to publicly mark their nationality. As one
contemporary tourist explained of the protocol, ‘all Franks must carry a Frank
flag’ (E.J. Morris, 1842, p. 225). Third, to make their services more valuable,
 10 S. Nance

Ottoman travel industry workers helped travelers to procure flags and comply with
Ottoman law, and also helped them develop colloquial flag uses by showing them
popular unofficial display sites.
In the bargain, American tourists in the Middle East temporarily put aside
domestic meanings for the US flag and the national paradox of a people who still
struggled at home with rampant discrimination and slavery, but whose tourists
claimed to represent free commerce and personal liberty abroad. Instead, between
1835 and 1870, Americans felt the need to demonstrate that the US was intact
politically and culturally, and prepared to send its citizens out into the world as
agents of reform through trade. Thus did American holidaymakers enact open-ended
flag display traditions unique to the Empire that associated all things ‘American’
with a broadly defined middle and upper-class, Anglo-American citizenry many
believed representative of the true US citizen (Horsman, 1981; Kaufmann, 1999;
Somkin, 1967).
When reported in travel narratives, these performances were a relatively
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uncontroversial way to get emotional identification from a reader residing in a

domestic context of intensely theatrical patriotism. The decades during which
Americans first began traveling to the Empire were marked at home by the
proliferation of marketing that espoused a vaguely defined American nationalism,
wherein the Stars and Stripes appeared in magazine illustrations, on newspaper
mastheads, and other printed materials as a kind of nationalistic background noise.
American flag display in the Ottoman Empire had a similar looseness of meaning.
Yet, the common message of the practice was that consumer travel was a way
Americans might serve themselves and the state by representing their nation abroad
as consumers. This message helped promote the appeal of Ottoman Empire tourism
among Americans, a market for experience that boomed during the last six decades
of the century (Melton, 2002; Steinbrink, 1983).

A note on sources and terminology

To account for this phenomenon of touristic patriotic display, I have surveyed 60
American-authored narratives of Middle Eastern travel, as well as various European
accounts, written by both amateur and professional authors before 1870. These
accounts appeared serialized in newspapers, as promotional excerpts in elite and
middling magazines, as live lecture tours, cheaply reproduced portraits, and finally as
book-length accounts that reached a broad segment of the middle and upper-class
American population.
For the scholar to use travel narratives as historical sources can be controversial
since they functioned as reports of events and journeys without doubt, but also as
literary works and commercial cultural products shaped to meet audience expecta-
tions. At the same time, extremely low literacy rates and a lack of broad publishing
industry to support a similar genre of literature within the Empire meant that poor
or middling Ottoman tourism workers were probably unable or unwilling to record
their personal experiences (Quataert, 2000; Strauss, 1994; Szyliowicz, 1986). Further
research in Ottoman Empire government records might in time tell us more about
how the Ottoman elite understood the link between national identity and leisure
travel by revealing how travel worker knowledge made its way through local
governors up to higher officials. These men would evaluate and record the
 Journal of Tourism History 11

consequences of Ottoman treaties with foreign governments and broad government

policy on tourism in the Empire, though at arm’s length from the industry. In the
meantime, the strength of commercial travel accounts lies in their specific
presentation of enormous amounts of anecdotal and qualitative data on the day-
to-day workings of Ottoman Empire tourism that does not exist in any other source
base (Barrett-Gaines, 1997; Brettell, 1986; Herlihy, 1975). To keep the references
from expanding to unmanageable size, I cite only representative examples that
demonstrate how the majority of American travelers enacted their citizenship abroad
and reported home about it.
Moreover, in order to avoid the confusion arising from problematic typologies of
‘tourist’ versus ‘traveler’ versus ‘visitor,’ I use these terms interchangeably merely to
denote foreign citizens traveling for leisure, or on working vacations in which they
might compile a publishable travel diary or archaeological survey but nonetheless
followed the general itinerary followed by leisure travelers. Many authors have
questioned the determinism and intellectual elitism ensconced in the old canard of
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the ‘tourist’ as a necessarily unthinking, predatory consumer of artificial experience,

who victimizes supposedly innocent and helpless local people. (A full enumeration of
this literature is not possible here, so see for instance: Buzard, 1993; Chambers, 2000;
MacCannell, 1976/1987.)

The Stephens prototype: patriotism and commercial success

When the New Yorker John Lloyd Stephens made his journey through the Middle
East in 1835, he was the first to link Ottoman Empire tourism and American
patriotism with commercial success in publishing. Stephens’ evident patriotism and
accessible writing style combined with ‘considerable advance publicity,’ existing
public interest in political events in the Empire, and the arrival of the Catherwood
Holy Land panoramas in New York and Philadelphia in 1836 to attract readers to
his story (Von Hagen, 1991, p. xl). The resulting published account, Incidents of
Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land, became a blockbuster, moving
21,000 copies from 1837 to 1839, and remaining in print for the next 45 years (Davis,
1996, p. 32). How did Stephens do it? He demonstrated to editors and other authors
how
in a country where literary elites complained there was no national literature

American travel narratives could appeal directly to the US market by foregrounding
the national perspective of the author (Frederick, 1959; Grant, 1967; ‘Introduction’,
1837, p. 14). This was especially so since, along with the more accessible destinations
like Cairo and Jerusalem, Stephens claimed to be the only US citizen to have visited
the mysterious (to Americans) Biblical land of ‘Idumea,’ namely the area of modern
southern Jordan around the old Nabatean city of Petra. Idumea is the land between
the Dead Sea and the town of Aqaba, then also known in Biblical terms as Edom. In
many nineteenth-century American interpretations, Biblical prophecy foretells of
God’s permanent dooming of Idumea to a barren waste after which, ‘None shall pass
through it for ever and ever’ (‘Desolation’, 1853, p. 496; Stephens, 1837/1991).
Incidents of Travel provided a template through which many others might view
their vacations in the Ottoman Empire as an exercise in national identification. For
instance, one afternoon the crew taking Stephens’ boat up the Nile had gone ashore
to shop for provisions at the bazaar at Qena. Conscription agents of Egyptian
governor Muhammad Ali’s army encountered and detained the group in order to fill
 12 S. Nance

local draft quotas with men from out of town. Since the 1820s, military service had
become an enormous problem for people all over the Empire as Western-style
conscription took the place of volunteer militias supplied by regional elites. Even
tourists knew that conscription officers routinely arrived in Egyptian towns and took
men of all ages into custody from the street regardless of business or family
obligations, with little chance they would return home in good health, or even alive.
Thus did Stephens (1837, p. 127) indignantly explain of his crew, ‘The iron bands
were put around their wrists and the iron collars round their necks,’ by these agents.
Stephens then proudly claimed that the men had immediately made ‘protestations
that they were in the service of an American,’ prompting a local official to visit
Stephens’ vessel to verify their story. ‘The American flag streaming from the
masthead of my little boat procured their speedy release, and saved them from the
miserable fate of Arab soldiers,’ he assured readers. Here no doubt he embellished for
dramatic effect. Still, he offered to interpret the event as proof of how the US flag
could wield power that protected Stephens and his crew from the seemingly arbitrary
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power of Ottoman officials (Fahmy, 1997; Schölch, 1993). Indeed, Stephens could
not afford to lose his boat crew without great inconvenience and cost.
Beyond such concerns, Stephens’ trip occurred in the context of a prevalent belief
in the US that the nation had an international reputation for ‘justice and humanity,’
as Greenfeld (1992) terms the contemporary ideal, which defined the US in contrast
to other nations and informed much domestic cultural expression. Thus had
concerned Americans provided unofficial funding and volunteers for the Greek War
of Independence against Ottoman rule, and followed with interest Commander
Patterson’s USS Delaware voyage to the Mediterranean in the previous decade
(Marr, 2006). Both events had served as important moments in the public espousal
of the idea that Americans could help foreign people fight the ‘royal arbitrariness
and aristocratic privilege’ of old-world absolutisms (Cohen, 1996, p. 326). In a period
in which the US was itself sitting between British and Spanish imperial territories,
vicarious attacks on more distant empires may have helped readers to work through
how US citizens might remain true to some Revolutionary ideal (whatever that
meant for a given person) and preserve the union through necessary contact with
foreign peoples. Such attitudes were only encouraged in the 1840s and 1850s by the
failed European people’s revolutions of 1848 that coincided with American debates
over expansion into Texas, the southwest and California, over whether American
political and cultural ideals were universal, and over how the existence of slavery in
the US factored in, if at all (Bender, 2006; Heiss, 2002; Horsman, 1981; Johannsen,
2000).
Consequently, the old cliché of a noble, liberty-loving people exploited by a
despot was especially relevant to American understandings of Egyptian conscription
as an ‘oppression of the people’ and a nefarious mode of ‘compulsory patriotism’
that contrasted with Americans’ supposed willing embrace of their national values
and identity (Crosby, 1851; Marr, 2006). However, these Egyptians, and many other
Ottoman subjects, often took employment with foreign citizens not out of
admiration for the ostensible American reputation for defending ‘liberty’ as
Americans understood the concept, but for the simple reason that Ottoman law
allowed those in foreign employ the prize of exemption from military service. Such
regulations protected the relative autonomy of both the travel worker and the foreign
 Journal of Tourism History 13

traveler, giving Americans and some Ottoman subjects a shared stake in the
continued development of Western access to Ottoman travel networks.
Stephens’ Incidents of Travel drew attention to this and other moments of
American self-identification in the Empire and publicized the new opportunities
American consumers had to travel there safely as citizens at leisure. Stephens
encouraged from Cairo, ‘A man must be long and far from home to feel how dearly
he loves his country, how his eye brightens and his heart beats when he hears her
praises from the lips of strangers, (and) my feelings grew prouder and prouder’
(p. 134). His words were doubly valuable. His use of the Stars and Stripes freed him
to engage local workers and travel at will, while his sentimentally nationalistic report
of his trip and flag waving was a central part of a successful commercial cultural
product that would invite other Americans to visit the Middle East.
Later American travelers consisted mostly of Anglo-Americans of the middle and
upper-classes from coastal Eastern states. Because of their privileged economic
position they were able not only to indulge in similar patriotic flag display in the
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Ottoman Empire, but also to circulate reports of their overseas use of the Stars and
Stripes abroad by way of their privileged access to book publishers, magazine and
newspaper editors, and lyceum audiences back home. Such travel narratives would
constitute some of the most ubiquitous and profitable of all published materials
a
‘burdened market’ preacher and author Olin (1843, vol. 1, p. vii) called it
available
to a growing readership stateside, exceeded as a genre only by religious texts (see also
Melton, 2002; Metwalli, 1979).
Thereafter, trade books written by both amateur and professional authors,
including even the many preachers who wrote such accounts, commonly used
patriotic stories to add comprehensibility to their accounts. In contrast, American
missionary, scientific or US government accounts of the Ottoman Empire contained
far fewer of these nationalistic episodes, perhaps because those authors sought to
appeal to readers primarily as Protestants, amateur archaeologists or bureaucrats. A
case in point: Lynch’s Official Report of the United States Expedition to Explore the
Dead Sea and River Jordan (1852), commissioned by the US government and later
published publicly in book form, contained no patriotic mention of the flag. The
trade publication emanating from the same voyage, Narrative of the United States
Expedition to Explore the Dead Sea and River Jordan (1849, p. v), however, did
describe the team’s use of the American flag
and the suitably awed reactions of
Ottoman subjects of course!
so as to include what Lynch called events, ‘necessarily
elicited by visiting such interesting scenes, that would be unfit for an official paper.’ In
that popular edition, Lynch’s volume included illustrations showing his party’s camp
or boats, in each case depicting the American flag flying in the breeze (Fig. 1 & 2).
Lynch and all Americans lived in an atmosphere of elaborate patriotism that had
been developing since John Lloyd Stephens’ day. Especially egged on by coverage of
the US
Mexico War, editors, authors, impresarios and entertainers loaded their
productions with American flags, poems to George Washington, images of eagles
and more, all of which told the reader: ‘This book/magazine/show is made by and for
Americans’ (Glenn, 2007; Johannsen, 1985; Moy, 1978; Roth, 2000; Somkin, 1967).
In order to reflect the spirit of the times, thus did various authors of Middle Eastern
travel narratives similarly identify themselves as ‘a young American,’ ‘An American
Traveller,’ or ‘An American Merchant,’ for instance. All the heavy hitters of the genre,
like William Thomson’s The Land and the Book (1859) and Mark Twain’s Innocents
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14
S. Nance
Downloaded by [167.62.41.228] at 13:46 04 April 2015

Journal of Tourism History

Figures 1 & 2. American boats and camp displaying the Stars and Stripes, illustrated for a trade publication. From William Francis Lynch (1849).

15
 16 S. Nance

Abroad; Or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869), would present the region in language
that affirmed the accuracy of an inimitable American perspective in the world (‘An
American’, 1858; Cooley, 1842; Train, 1857a, p. iv, 1857b).

American tourists and Ottoman law

The mutually reinforcing traditions of patriotic flag display in the Ottoman Empire,
and of cultural production reflecting it, was possible because between 1830 and 1870
US citizens simply had new opportunities to travel. International steamer service and
blooming domestic communications industries gave many Americans increasing
access to the world beyond North America as consumers. Europe was the favored
destination, with the Ottoman Empire a close second (Levenstein, 2000; Melton,
2002; Stowe, 1994, p. 3). By 1860, for instance, over 19,000 Americans would cross
the Atlantic, and 500 of them toured Egypt venturing well beyond the range of the
few US missionaries in the Empire (Finnie, 1967; Wegelin, 1962, p. 307). A typical
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route saw these tourists voyage in winter to Alexandria by ship, south through Egypt
by boat on the Nile and back, then by camel and horse caravan across the Sinai to
Palestine, Syria, and perhaps Anatolia. There they sought out some combination of
ancient ruins, ‘picturesque’ countryside, exposure to local cultures, and religious
inspiration. The well-traveled Ottoman Empire was home to diverse communities of
Arabs, Turks, ethnic Greeks, Sudanese, and European expatriates. People from all
these groups had been earning a living by providing hospitality and travel services to
Jewish, Christian and Muslim pilgrims from Asia, Africa and Europe for centuries
before Americans showed up. Consequently, the highly developed tourism networks
of the Ottoman Empire provided a cosmopolitan place in which Americans could
work out how to travel overseas as loyal citizens even if they could not participate in
patriotic practices that continued back home in their absence.
The privileges of US citizenship seemed to breed increasing assertiveness in
travelers and the idea that one’s touristic consumer privileges were a function of
national honor. In an unpublished memoir of a trip through Syria, Edward Clifford
Anderson had already warned in 1837, ‘I think our people are apt to domineer in a
foreign land over those with whom they are brought in contact . . .. And the
consequence is that in all our wanderings in the East . . . we invariably made others
give place to us and perform little menial acts which would never have been exacted
from the poorest peasant in America’ (as cited in Hoole, 1975, p. 638). Certainly he
showed a certain sense of denial about slavery and class inequality at home perhaps
indicative of a northerner of middling means (Anderson was a sailor).
Anderson’s point is well-taken nonetheless. Because they gained access to the
Middle East only with the help of local people, American tourists realized that they
were utterly dependent upon dragomen, translators, local officials, and merchants.
Personal autonomy became a serious, if usually unfounded, worry for most in a land
Americans found beautiful, intriguing and inspirational, but also strange and
potentially dangerous due to the language barrier and the dramatically different
cultures they encountered. American travelers smarted especially under the perceived
injustices of Ottoman officials who seemed to control access to many of the places
Americans wanted to go and inspired US citizens to self-identify with some vaguely
defined entitlement to ‘liberty.’ New Yorker Crosby deeply resented the Bey in Asia
Minor who obliged his party to endure 12 days of quarantine against cholera in a
 Journal of Tourism History 17

decrepit building, complaining of the Bey’s ‘despotic soul,’ which made Crosby and
his companions ‘big with indignation at the tyranny of his High Mightiness’ (1851).
Middle Easterners of any religion, ethnicity or social station who argued too
forcefully with an American visitor might be shouted down or refused business by
travelers who were intent on ‘show(ing) them I would not submit, when they
interfered with my rights,’ as Eames had insisted (1855, p. 277). Here, Americans
reflected a broader British/Anglo-American tradition that held people should have
freedom of movement, even leisure travelers (Koshar, 1998, p. 238).
To these American tourists, the Stars and Stripes served as a talisman, a
‘companion and protector in foreign lands’ that broadcast to all around that as US
citizens they had the protection of consuls, a foreign government, and their own
proud determination and solidarity (Taylor, 1854, p. 323). Indeed, when she spoke of
defending her ‘rights,’ Jane Eames was expressing a sense that Americans could
demand consumer access to the Middle East, first broadly publicized by John Lloyd
Stephens, which seemed increasingly justified to Americans in the 1840s and 1850s
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by the international agreements shared by the US and Ottoman Empire. The US had
taken a place among the nations whose governments had negotiated for concessions
from Ottoman authorities in acknowledgment of foreign economic and political
investments in the Empire. Known as ‘capitulations,’ these arrangements emanated
from the US
Ottoman commercial treaty of 1830 that exempted American citizens in
the Empire from Ottoman law. An 1848 Act of Congress strengthened the
relationship further by giving US consuls the power to adjudicate cases of Americans
accused of crimes in the Empire, although those consuls might or might not be
actual US citizens themselves (Ahmad, 2000; ‘Attempt of Turkey’, 1914; Gordon,
1928; Hale, 1877).
William Prime exhibited a common understanding of how such agreements
benefited American tourists with bald explanations to his readers about the
protections and privileges they could enjoy were they to travel in Ottoman territories:
By our treaty with Turkey, and by the treaties of all civilized nations, it is provided that
no American, Englishman, or in general no citizen or subject of either of the powers so
protected by treaty, shall be tried for any offence by Turkish law, but every offender shall
be tried by the law of his own land. The substance of this is, that he shall be handed over
to the consul of his government, and he sends him home for trial without witnesses
of
course without possibility of conviction (1857/1865, pp. 110
112).

Some American travelers had this reality clearly in mind when threats erupted over
disputed contracts and payments with merchants or dragomen. Moreover, at the
beginning of his voyage, Prime had acquired a firman, or decree, allowing him to
excavate tombs and export what he found, commanding officials in Upper Egypt ‘to
furnish me with all necessary papers and assistance, letters to inferior governors and
officers of whatever grade, and to provide men and beasts as I should demand, at any
point on the river.’ Most Americans do not appear to have demanded so much of
Middle Easterners as Prime did, but were probably aware of the ease of such access.
Prime advised them, ‘The cost of this paper was a polite ‘‘thank you’’’ (1857/1865, p. 38).
Prime’s arrangements were made possible by the American consul in Alexandria.
Consuls could be indispensable, helping travelers procure contracts for pack animals,
dragomen, food, camping equipment, banking services with local merchants,
audiences with Ottoman officials, and the all-important ‘packages of letters from
 18 S. Nance

friends in America’ (Durban, 1845, vol. 1, p. 49). Especially in lands under colonial
rule, like Egypt and the Levant, the US government used consuls to facilitate
American trade, including tourism, since the President could not legally send an
ambassador. By 1860, the US had six consulates from Egypt to Anatolia, part of a
growing network of global business representatives travelers were relying upon
overseas to enact a commonly understood role for the traveling citizen as a partner
with the national government in publicizing ‘American’ values, character and
commerce (Kennedy, 1990). Pennsylvanian John Price Durban praised one such
national representative to readers stateside in typical form, ‘a very agreeable,
intelligent man; anxious to render us any service, and in all respects worthy of the
post of American consul’ (1845, vol. 1, p. 9).
Travelers routinely described the combination of relief and sentimental patri-
otism with which they greeted the sight of the Stars and Stripes flying in Acre, Beirut
or Istanbul to indicate the residence of a US consular agent. In these situations, the
flag was an open-ended symbol of a generalized national identity defined by the
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intersecting powers of the national government and Anglo-American commercial

ingenuity, enacted by tourists as a kind of benevolent global trade that many believed
guaranteed American prosperity and thus security (see for instance, Breen, 1993;
Somkin, 1967; Weeks, 1994). Traveling American merchant Train explained, ‘The
peaceful messenger of commerce is always welcomed, while we only hail the ship of
war as a State necessity,’ going on to boost what he called ‘that wonderful commerce
which adds so much luster to our flag, and penetrates into every port that boasts an
anchorage, or where a commodity can be exchanged’ (1857a, pp. 26, 315).

Touristic patriotism in practice

For most visitors the voyage by boat up the Nile provided the first real opportunity
for flag display in the Empire. These Americans habitually described when, where
and how they had done so: ‘Our flag-staff is directly over the stern, and from it float,
in all their beauty, the stars and stripes,’ one typically reported (Spencer, 1857, p. 73).
Such displays often precipitated the arrival of ‘fellow-countrymen’ at a boat or
campsite. ‘I saw an American flag,’ said the lonely Reverend C.N. Righter of New
York to Samuel Prime at Thebes in those days, ‘and came over the river, hoping to
meet an American’ (as quoted in Prime, 1859, p. 329). Burt wrote of such an event in
1866:
Pleasant it is. The dullness of the time is relieved by the appearance of an approaching
Dahabieh (boat) . . . a first-class sensation. In the distance, the flags of the coming boat
are made out with our glasses; and, as she nears us, salutes of fire-arms are
interchanged; the small boat of the descending vessel being meanwhile dispatched
with dragoman, to learn and impart news, and effect an exchange of newspapers. (1868,
p. 150)

Here tourists used the US flag much as the American merchant marine had since the
1780s, as the sign of an autonomous commercial agent, now with American
consumers as traders of a sort (Cray, Jr., 2005; Guenter, 1990).
Touristic flag display both reflected and encouraged a marked national
consciousness that soon took precedence over other modes of self-identification
for American tourists, especially since many had just made their way through Europe
 Journal of Tourism History 19

and were feeling seriously homesick. Famous American author and publisher
William Cullen Bryant noted from Egypt in typically patriotic form: ‘Several
Americans were waiting at Cairo for the arrival of travelers to make up the requisite
number, when they heard of us and immediately came to propose the voyage (on the
Nile) to us. Our party consisted of fifteen
nine Americans, namely, Mr. Balch, . . .’
(1981, vol. 3, p. 226). At Shepheard’s Hotel in that city, Francis Train, a Bostonian,
recounted how the house register carried the signatures and comments of
‘Americans, German, English and French (who) have made up their parties, and
have noted down their tours
either to the first or second cataract (of the Nile
River),’ exposing Americans’ pronounced sense of national identity formed in
observation of other Western tourists. ‘The boat’s flag, as well as the national one, is
usually painted in the book over the names of the party, for the benefit of their
friends,’ he continued with some pride. ‘I am told that there are more Americans up
the Nile this season than any other nation’ (1857a).
Accordingly, the majority of American leisure travelers visiting the Empire made
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no attempt to blend in by appearance with the Ottoman subjects they met by, for
instance, seriously studying spoken Arabic or dressing in local costume. Although
Americans always traveled with Ottoman subjects who worked as dragomen, guides
and porters, they themselves moved around in Western clothes, often conspicuously
carrying large umbrellas for shade that marked them to observers as tourists.
Speaking English amongst themselves and with their guides, they often practiced
traditions from home that allayed homesickness or fear of sin, such as ceasing travel
on Sundays in order to hold ad hoc church services and rest (especially if there was a
preacher in the group). They also camped and picnicked in obviously touristic white
tents, normally crowned with an American flag, New Yorker William Prime
explained, ‘by way of notice to all travelers that here was a temporary American
home’ (Prime, 1857/1865, p. 346). Indeed, much of the time, flag display seemed to
create a temporary American space in the Empire for travelers, much as embassies do
today, a space that comforted and/or emboldened US citizens emotionally, while
marking publicly their extra-territorial status and its practical privileges.
To this end, Americans also sought more permanent ways of giving the US a
distinct presence in the Empire at sites of ancient and ongoing global communica-
tion. As early as 1838, the Reverend Edward Robinson’s party had scratched their
names in the ‘American corner’ among the ruins at Thebes. Earlier, Arab guides had
led them to the peak of the great pyramid of Cheops at Giza where they discovered
that it was ‘covered with the names of travelers, who have resorted hither in different
ages from various and distant lands; and have here stood as upon a common point in
the history of the world. Here too we found an American corner, with the names
both of living and departed friends’ (Robinson, 1856, vol. 1, pp. 26
27; vol. 2, p.
582). The graffiti form of colloquial patriotic communication, both in names and
actual US flags painted on ruins, suggested to some that the US was one of the
world’s pre-eminent nations, now joining in where other historically crucial nations
had left off. E.J. Morris similarly insisted, ‘there is a feeling of nationality among
Americans abroad that I think belongs to no other people.’ In the rock-hewn town of
Petra, he added his name on the ancient wall he found inscribed by homegrown
travel celebrities: ‘three Americans, Messrs. Stephens, Robinson, and (Eli) Smith; to
which I added my own humble autograph, being the fourth American that had then
visited Petra’ (1842, pp. 259, 295). Others were more wary and saw such flag display,
 20 S. Nance

not with fabric, but in the form of inscriptions and paintings of flags on ancient sites,
as acts that ‘conspicuously advertised [an American] to the whole world as a great
ass,’ as Joseph Taylor complained in 1869 (as quoted in Vogel, 1993, p. 90).
Tacky or not, patriotic graffiti demonstrated how Ottoman subjects were
increasingly catering to American desires to remain unique in the cosmopolitan
context of the Empire by leading them to newly established locations of touristic
patriotic expression like the ‘American corner’ of an ancient building. Local tourism
workers had since the 1830s been working hard
not without some debate of course

to open up existing travel and hospitality networks to Western travelers (Nance,
2007). Each time they facilitated American expressions of nationalism, they made
their services more valuable by persuading travelers from the US that official and
colloquial patriotic performances were acceptable to local populations. For instance,
as most visitors did, Spencer’s party had climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops when
they went to Giza:
As we were all Americans, too, we hoisted the stars and stripes, and one of the party
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taking the lead, three hearty cheers were sent forth as ever were heard on any occasion;
the Bedawin, who had attended us to the top, and were probably not unacquainted with
similar outbursts of national feeling, joined in with the cheering very lustily; but hardly
had they got through with this tribute to America, before they raised the Arab cry of
bakhshish! bakhshish! (1857, p. 42)

Cynical as this account may be, even Spencer could tell that these guides saw similar
demonstrations of patriotic flag use all the time among Americans, and probably
Europeans as well (E.J. Morris, 1842, pp. ii, 231
32, 235, 259, 295). Upon reaching
that same spot with the their party and Egyptian assistants 15 years later, Mrs.
Gilpin of Philadelphia gleefully waved an American flag to celebrate the event, but
only once it was thrust into her hands by the guide who had carried it up (Dorr,
1856, p. 53).
Because Ottoman subjects helped Americans pose specifically as US citizens
while on vacation, some American travelers hoped that they could defy blanket
Arabic terms like farangi, Christiano and howadji (trader/Christian gentleman) with
which local people lumped together Westerners of various nationalities. Ottoman
officials seemed particularly curious about the US. For instance, the Dorr party was
flattered to be asked ‘many questions about our country and its institutions,’ by the
provincial governor in Benisouef, and Caroline Paine found the local governor in
Aswan owned a map of the US that he studied with great interest (Dorr, 1856, p. 61;
Paine, 1859, chap. 18). Some Americans still wondered if most tourism workers had
only vague notions of where exactly on the globe the US might be, other than lying
to the West or North. For example, Rob Morris speculated that people he met in the
Levant knew about ‘America’ but had never heard of the ‘United States’ as such, and
often confused Americans with other English speaking visitors, specifically Britons.
Whether true or not, such comments showed that Americans were scrutinizing the
Empire for signs of worldliness among Ottoman subjects that they actually sought in
themselves as they sought to appear distinct from the British. A Kentucky native,
Morris also griped that the Britons he met in the Empire referred to all Americans as
‘Yankees’ (1872, p. 410).
With their commercial hospitality and polite interest in the US, Ottoman officials
and travel workers helped Americans replace domestic traditions of patriotic practice
 Journal of Tourism History 21

while on vacation. The lighting of neighborhoods by candles in house windows,

explosions of fireworks, town toasts and sermons, militia drills or parades fortified
with heavy drinking might be enjoyed by citizens of all classes at home, but were all
really out of the question in the Empire (Travers, 1997). Instead travelers and their
hosts engaged in modes of flag display that were tailor-made for the context, but
accessible only to the wealthy or industry-sponsored Americans fortunate enough to
be able to travel overseas and report home about it.
Visitors more often engaged in enthusiastic, highly visual flag display around the
Nile and in sparsely populated desert regions in the Sinai southern Levant, areas
with limited missionary activity and small indigenous Christian populations. By
contrast, in other Levantine regions and Anatolia this practice was less common
since visitors camped less, did not travel on boats, and were conscious of the growing
tension among Ottoman subjects in the early nineteenth-century over the status of
religious minorities, foreign missionaries and consuls. In those regions, patriotic
practice was restricted mostly to time spent seeking out the Stars and Stripes
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marking the presence of a US consul, or an American ship in a Mediterranean port,

and reporting home about it. In Haifa, for instance, noted travel writer Bayard
Taylor recalled that the flag could be spotted at the home of the local consul, where it
was ‘an unexpected delight . . . in this little Syrian town’ (1855, p. 41). Hornby
likewise explained her feelings when she saw an American ship in the harbor at
Istanbul after many weeks overseas, ‘It was the most wonderful sight. . . . In the first
place you never can, by any possibility, believe it to be real, that your are not
dreaming; and secondly, you are half-miserable because every body you like is not
with you’ (1866, p. 280).
To get a sense for how readers stateside understood stories of the Stars and
Stripes in the Ottoman Empire we can think about how the vicarious flag practice of
seeking out the national banner sighted flying from the top of a pyramid or a
Levantine consul’s home had emotional meaning to travelers because it was part of a
larger genre of stories imagining a ubiquitous American ‘Flag of Freedom’ (Roth,
2000, p. 117). Printed and illustrated tales of ships abroad routinely depicted the first
instance of the American flag rounding the Cape of Good Hope or arriving in a
famous foreign harbor on a merchant vessel. Throughout the period, stories
circulated of flags having saved US consuls from angry crowds or of robbers scared
off merely by the unfurling of Old Glory by American naval personnel or merchant
sailors (For typical stories of the flag on US naval or merchant ships as global
traveler and protector, see Preble, 1880). Guenter tells us that to Americans, ‘when
other governments recognized the flag and granted ( . . .) Americans safety of asylum,
newspaper and magazine accounts of the incidents enhanced the role of the flag in
demonstrations of nationalistic pride back home’ (1990, pp. 48
49). A writer for
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine agreed in 1854, ‘It is sixty years ago that a Yankee
ship first displayed the American flag on the river Thames, England. In the mean
time, it has appeared in numerous other places, much to the honor of the American
nation, and the interests of commerce,’ a commerce that many believed was necessary
to American prosperity and power (‘Editor’s Drawer’, 1854).
 22 S. Nance

Conclusion: Ottoman empire flag display and the American reputation

Even if it is difficult to say with great accuracy what American consumers stateside
made of reports of patriotic flag display in the Ottoman Empire, we can know that
the majority of these episodes nevertheless portrayed the US as an energetic nation
of traders and patriotic consumers. This kind of depiction was comprehensible for a
citizenry immersed in debates over American expansion and citizenship. In the hands
of American tourists in the Empire, the national banner represented a globalized
consumer identity that linked one’s personal autonomy to the international reach of
the US government and ‘the guardianship and watchfulness of one’s country’ as
evidenced by Americans’ extra-territorial status in the Empire (E.J. Morris, 1842, p.
146). The culture of flag use associated with American tourism in the region and the
trade in commercial products depicting that foreign travel would promote the idea
that travel was an American practice through which citizens might serve themselves
and the state by representing their nation abroad as consumers. American travelers
accepted American
Ottoman flag traditions as a central part of travel routines in the
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Middle East in order to ascribe patriotic meaning to their vacations and give each
person a personal stake in the market relations and global developments that made
them possible.
‘Comparison with other countries only makes me more boastful of the flag, place
them side by side and far above them all you will find my own,’ Train had
characteristically explained. ‘The young American, never can appreciate his country
till he has been abroad’ (1857, p. 342). Indeed, comparison should also be the
scholar’s priority, for we would do well to conduct further research into what effect
overseas tourism supported by government legislation at home and in foreign
countries had on patriotism in the US before the twentieth century. More broadly we
might ask how foreign tourism shaped nationalism for other populations in the
century during which the modern state and mass nationalism were born.

Notes on contributor
Susan Nance is a historian of communication and live performance in the US and the Middle
East, and is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.
She is currently working on a methodology for historicizing the behavior of performing
animals in nineteenth and twentieth-century menageries, circuses and rodeos.

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