Alison Shan Price, “Consuls, Crinolines and Camels”

Alison Shan Price
Alison Shan Price (MBE; Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society) is a cultural historian and dramaturg who has researched and presented historical presentations in the form of lectures and performance. Her ongoing research on the cultural evolution of independent Western women travelling through the Middle East has been presented in at the Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah, the British Embassy of Kuwait, BISI, the British Academy (London), UK’s National Trust and Rewley House, University of Oxford. In 2017, she received an MBE from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth 11, and, in 2020, the Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society.

Consuls, Crinolines and Camels
In 1582, a time of Ottoman expansion and domination of the Mediterranean Sea, the Caliph, Sultan Murad III, signed a treaty with the protestant Queen Elizabeth I of England, forging diplomatic and trade relationships which would last over three hundred years. By the end of the nineteenth- century,‘Ottoman-occupied Arabia’ had become the subject of additional Egyptian, French, German and Russian interest. With Anglo-Ottoman diplomacy in the balance, the arrival of the ‘New Woman’ from the West, educated, independent, and supporting liberal ideals, was, at the time, unwelcome. She defied convention and advice when traveling and living with local people. Her accounts offer an alternative history. This lecture will follow the physical and personal journeys of several such women.