This book, the first of three, offers an anthology of Western descriptions of Islamic religious buildings of Spain, Turkey, India and Persia, mostly from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries, taken from books and ambassadorial reports. As travel became easier and cheaper, thanks to viable roads, steamships, hotels and railways, tourist numbers increased, museums accumulated eastern treasures, illustrated journals proliferated, and photography provided accurate data. The second volume covers some of the religious architecture of Syria, Egypt and North Africa, while the third deals with Islamic palaces around the Mediterranean. All three deal with the impact of Western trade, taste and imports on the East, and examine the encroachment of westernised modernism, judged responsible for the degradation of Islamic styles.

Syria's Monuments: their Survival and Destruction examines the fate of the various monuments in Syria (including present-day Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine/Israel) from Late Antiquity to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. It examines travellers' accounts, mainly from the 17th to 19th centuries, which describe religious buildings and housing in numbers and quality unknown elsewhere. The book charts the reasons why monuments lived or died, varying from earthquakes and desertification to neglect and re-use, and sets the political and social context for the Empire's transformation toward a modern state, provoked by Western trade and example. An epilogue assesses the impact of the recent civil war on the state of the monuments, and strategies for their resurrection, with plentiful references and web links.

This book concentrates on the sometimes Greek but largely Roman survivals many travellers set out to see and perhaps possess throughout the immense Ottoman Empire, on what were eastward and southward extensions of the Grand Tour. Europeans were curious about the Empire, Christianity's great rival for centuries, and plenty of information on its antiquities was available, offered here via lengthy quotations. Most accounts of the history of collecting and museums concentrate on the European end. Plundered Empire details how and where antiquities were sought, uncovered, bartered, paid for or stolen, and any tribulations in getting them home. The book provides evidence for the continuing debate about the ethics of museum collections, with 19th century international competition the spur to spectacular acquisitions.

The French invaded Algeria in 1830, and found a landscape rich in Roman remains, which they proceeded to re-use to support the constructions such as fortresses, barracks and hospitals needed to fight the natives (who continued to object to their presence), and to house the various colonisation projects with which they intended to solidify their hold on the country, and to make it both modern and profitable. Arabs and Berbers had occasionally made use of the ruins, but it was still a Roman and Early Christian landscape when the French arrived. In the space of two generations, this was destroyed, just as were many ancient remains in France, in part because "real" architecture was Greek, not Roman.

Destruction of Cultural Heritage in 19th Century France examines the fate of the building stock and prominent ruins of France (especially Roman survivals) in the 19th century, supported by contemporary documentation and archives, largely provided through the publications of scholarly societies. The book describes the enormous extent of the destruction of monuments, providing an antidote to the triumphalism and concomitant amnesia which in modern scholarship routinely present the 19th century as one of concern for the past. It charts the modernising impulse over several centuries, detailing the archaeological discoveries made (and usually destroyed) as walls were pulled down and town interiors re-planned, plus the brutal impact on landscape and antiquities as railways were laid out. Heritage was largely scorned, and identity found in modernity, not the past.