BARKER (Edward B.B., editor) &
[BARKER (John).]
Syria and Egypt under the last five Sultans of Turkey: Being Experiences, during Fifty Years, of Mr. Consul-General Barker. Chiefly from his letters and journals.
BARKER (Edward B.B., editor) &
[BARKER (John).]
Syria and Egypt under the last five Sultans of Turkey: Being Experiences, during Fifty Years, of Mr. Consul-General Barker. Chiefly from his letters and journals.
“One of the best-known consuls of the nineteenth-century Middle East was John Barker, who was consul in Aleppo from 1799 to 1825 when the consulate was temporarily closed after several years of increased turbulence in the city. The Barker family had been merchants in the Levant trade for several generations. John was born in Smyrna, where his father was a merchant. He was sent to school in England but returned to Constantinople about 1797 as private secretary to the ambassador. In Aleppo… he was both consul for the Levant Company and agent for the East India Company, responsible for forwarding mails. He married the daughter of a previous consul and both their two sons (one of whom was a godson of the traveller John Lewis Burckhardt, who stayed with the Barkers in Aleppo while studying Arabic) entered the consular service in the Levant” (Sarah Searight, The British in the Middle East, London, 1979, p. 114).
Ibrahim-Hilmy I, 52.
