European empires and the hajj in 19-20 centuries: about Luc Chantre’s book
Prusskaya Evgeniya
The essay is a detailed review of the book of the French researcher Luc Chantre “Pèlerinages d'empire. Une histoire européenne du pèlerinage à La Mecque” (Paris, 2018). Due to the global nature and importance of hajj throughout history, the historiography of the Muslim pilgrimage is rich, and the colonial period of it is quite well covered, especially in the literature of the latter decades, which is largely due to the rethinking of the history of empires by researchers and the approaches of postcolonial theory. The monograph of Luc Chantre is a study in line with histoire croisée, allowing to look at the history of European colonialism and the processes of national rise in the Middle East and Maghreb through the central problem of Muslim pilgrimage. The work is based on a comparative approach to the history of the hajj in the era of imperialism at the junction of diplomatic and colonial history. Although the focus of the author is first of all on France the significant attention in the book is paid to the British Empire, Italy, to a lesser extent to Russia, the Netherlands, Spain with the mention of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Research for this article was funded with the support of project № 14.Z50.31.0045 from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation.