For centuries, Aleppo stood at a vital crossroads of world history – a city where ideas, languages and goods converged. As one of the great trading capitals of the Eastern Mediterranean, Aleppo was more than a commercial hub; it was a cultural intersection where East met West. The activities of the Levant Company in the 17th and 18th centuries turned the city into a key node in the web of international commerce. But beyond silk, spices and silver, what traveled through Aleppo were also habits of thought, scientific curiosities and modes of governance. In this sense, the city became a quiet yet powerful bridge between empires – not only of trade but of knowledge.
It was while researching my novel "Camera Obscura" that I first encountered the figure of Alexander Russell, a physician and natural historian stationed in 18th-century Aleppo. What began as a literary detour soon became an intellectual journey. Russell, a product of the prestigious Edinburgh Medical School, was not merely a chronicler of the bubonic plague, but a curious and capacious mind. In Aleppo, he found the freedom to explore what the Scottish Enlightenment back home had come to value most: the study of manners and customs, medical botany, political economy and the many interwoven threads of human civilization.
Russell’s "The Natural History of Aleppo" stands as a remarkable testament to a moment when science, ethnography and cultural openness converged in a single life. It also became, for me, a passageway into the world of Enlightenment Edinburgh and eventually led me to James Buchan – author of "Capital of the Mind," a brilliant history of 18th-century Edinburgh as a hub of ideas.
In a recent conversation with Buchan, we explored how Edinburgh’s intellectual revolution not only transformed Western thought but also shaped perceptions of the Ottoman world. What emerged was a profound reflection on the Scottish Enlightenment’s universal ambitions, its limitations and its relevance today.
“There are certain features of old Scotland,” Buchan explained, “that made it fertile ground for what became known, at the turn of the 20th century, as the Scottish Enlightenment.” These included the country’s persistent poverty, the dispersal of talent abroad due to wars and rebellion and the unique institutional survival of its universities and professions after the 1707 Union with England.
In Edinburgh, thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith reimagined morality, psychology and economics without reliance on inherited religious doctrine. Geologist James Hutton overturned biblical chronology with a secular account of Earth’s formation. Smith’s The Wealth of Nations tore down medieval monopolies and laid the foundations of modern commerce.
According to Buchan, while the Scots were less informed about the Ottoman world than their French counterparts, their gaze was notably free of the fear and superiority that marked later British colonial attitudes. “18th-century Edinburgh addressed Islam,” he noted, “without the fear and hostility of the Middle Ages or the colonial condescension of the British in the 19th century. (Adam Smith detested the colonial system.)”
Russell’s writings from Aleppo reflect this ethos of empirical curiosity and cultural respect. He represents not merely a bridge between Edinburgh and the East, but a symbol of how ideas could travel across borders, unburdened by conquest.
Today, Edinburgh still bears the imprint of that Enlightenment spirit. Its universities, legal traditions and medical institutions remain intact. “The town’s intellectual pride,” Buchan remarks, “which sometimes shades into boastfulness, is intact.”
For me, the exchange with Buchan was more than an academic encounter. It was a meeting between two writers – one tracing fictional paths through Ottoman shadows, the other illuminating Enlightenment light. Our dialogue affirmed a shared belief in the power of ideas to transcend time and place, to connect empires not only of territory, but of thought.
And so, Alexander Russell, in wandering from the lanes of Edinburgh to the markets of Aleppo, becomes more than a historical figure. He is a reminder that curiosity, when married with humility, can become a quiet form of diplomacy.
