Paulina Banas, "Visualizing Egypt: European Travel, Book Publishing, and the Commercialization of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century" (American University in Cairo Press, 2025)
August 2, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readIn 1848, a London publisher released The Oriental Album, an illustrated book on Egypt whose plates were made by a French specialist named Émile Prisse d’Avennes, while the accompanying text was written by the British writer James Augustus St. John. The collaboration was not harmonious. St. John used his narrative to push back against the romantic, exoticized images Prisse d’Avennes had created, describing Egyptian daily life in more grounded, even critical terms. This tension between image and text is the kind of detail that gets lost when scholars treat Orientalist pictures as self-contained ideological statements. In Visualizing Egypt: European Travel, Book Publishing, and the Commercialization of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century (American University in Cairo Press, 2025), art historian Paulina Banas argues that to understand how 19th-century Europeans came to see Egypt, we need to look not just at the paintings and prints themselves, but at the messy, profit-driven publishing machinery that produced, altered, and sold them.
The Publishing Machine, Not Just the Painter
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:34) **Introduction and Guest Background** - Host Samar Nasser introduces Paulina Banas, assistant professor of art history at UAB, and her new book on European travel book publishing and the commercialization of Egypt in the 19th century.
- 2 (07:00) **Departing from Said and Mitchell: The Commercial Machinery** - Banas explains how her work moves beyond Edward Said's Orientalism and Timothy Mitchell's Colonizing Egypt by focusing on the publishing industry's commercial logic rather than purely ideological critique.
- 3 (12:09) **The Oriental Album: A Case Study in Text-Image Tension** - Banas introduces the 1848 Oriental Album, a collaboration between French artist Émile Prisse d'Avennes and British writer James Augustus St. John, published in London by James Madden.
- 4 (16:47) **Key Scholarly Influences: Gregory, Roberts, and the Power of Books** - Banas names the works that shaped her focus on the commercial and structural aspects of illustrated books.
- 5 (21:51) **The Push and Pull: Authorial Intent vs. Market Demands** - Banas discusses the tension between what authors wanted to represent and what the European market demanded.
- 6 (26:30) **A Shift in Focus: From Everyday Life to Ornament** - Banas confirms a shift across the 19th century from illustrated books showing everyday Egyptian life (1830s-40s) to a focus on Islamic architecture and ornament (1860s-70s), but notes the market remained stratified.
- 7 (28:25) **Why Egypt? The Napoleonic Trigger and the Description de l'Égypte** - Banas explains why Egypt became the primary focus for European illustrated albums, citing the Napoleonic campaign of 1798 as the key trigger.
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Show Notes
Following Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 campaign in Egypt, new possibilities of travel and improvements in printing technology saw an emergence of publishing ventures in France and Britain dedicated to the production of albums and travel accounts featuring images of Muslim Egypt and Islamic architecture and catering to a growing European fascination with the East. In her debut book, Visualizing Egypt: European Travel, Book Publishing, and the Commercialization of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century (American University in Cairo Press, 2025) Paulina Banas analyzes the context and process of production of these highly illustrated publications, from their conceptualization to the finished product and its afterlife, from marketing to the sales of these books, and from circulation to their reception by nineteenth-century audiences. By tracing the long, arduous, and often risky publishing journeys of the makers of these books, including publishers, writers, and artists, such as the Frenchman Émile Prisse d’Avennes, Banas reveals a complex terrain of changing market demands, collaborations, and conflicting views, and the unsettled authorship of these works, prompting us to think more profoundly about artistic and intellectual exchange in the world of nineteenth-century Orientalist book production. Visualizing Egypt considers nineteenth-century book illustrations on Egypt and the “Orient” not merely as expressions of enduring ideology and colonial propaganda, but as representations shaped by the often-overlooked commercial exigencies of the growing publishing industry and the reckless competition within it.
Paulina Banas is an Assistant Professor of Art History at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she teaches course on Islamic world arts, 19th century European visual culture, and cross-cultural encounters between Europe and the Middle East.
Saman Nasser holds an M.A. in history from James Madison University, where he currently works as an educational staff.
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