American protestant missionaries, sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, initiated transcultural knowledge to Ottoman Syria. This book focusses on the generation of that knowledge involving local people from 1820 until the end of the nineteenth century.

It includes the study of secularity, the formation of knowledge on topography and particularly biblical topography, networking between academic societies, the development of a font of type for printing in Arabic and the introduction of journals in Arabic language. The material and analysis presented illustrate how modernity became a global phenomenon and who "owns" modernity.