خلاصه ماشینی:
By stressing a triangular power relationship between England, North Africa and the Ottoman world, and the new American colonies, Matar convincingly argues that it was the very failure of the English to conquer the Muslims in the face of English successes in America against the indigenous populations that led Britons to transfer their ideas about "savage natives" from the American Indians to the Muslims.
Matar is also careful to point out that English representations of Muslims cannot be taken at face value as accurate historical sources describing lived experiences of Muslims, but rather, as representations of how the English viewed the Islamic world they knew vis-a-vis the other major group of non-Christians with which they were actively engaged, Native Americans.
Chapter One (''Turks and Moors in England"), Chapter Two ("Soldiers, Pirates, Traders, and Captives: Britons Among the Muslims"), and Chapter Three ("The Renaissance Triangle: Britons, Muslims, and American Indians") focus on specific venues in which Britons and Muslims encountered one another, while Chapter Four ("Sodomy and Conquest") and Chapter Five ("Holy Land, Holy War") present particular thematic cases explored in English literature regarding Islamic society.
The links made between Muslims and American Indians in the Age of Discovery were enhanced as the English gained more prominence in their imperialist endeavors throughout the world, establishing the foundation of colonial knowledge collection that ultimately resulted in the Orientalist pursuit.
By knowing--or at least representing themselves as knowing=the Muslim world through centuries of encounters, coupled with their conflation of non-Christians they subdued with those they wished to conquer, the English were on the way to becoming the preeminent imperialist power of the Age of Imperialism.