The period just after Napoleon's final defeat in 1815 was not the most eventful in European diplomatic history. It is known today as a quiescent, conservative time. Even in the faraway United States, it is called the ‘Era of Good Feelings’. Although the American appellation referred mainly to internal politics, it could just as easily describe the period in international relations, so long as normal, peaceful relations among states are considered uneventful, while wars, revolutions and other conflicts generally are not.

However, when Henrietta Liston arrived in Turkey with her husband Robert in 1812, Napoleon had not yet been finally defeated, so Britain was still at war; Britain and Turkey had been at peace only since 1809, and Russia had only just ended its own war with the Ottomans, also in 1812. The French had attempted to induce the Ottomans to extend the war with Russia, and British diplomacy under Robert Liston's predecessor, Stratford Canning, had worked against that result, with success. The Listons arrived to an embassy and a country at peace.

This peace, which presumably aided or at least allowed for the possibility for Henrietta's travels and observations throughout the Empire, would last more or less until the Listons’ departure in 1820. The only significant conflict probably worth noting was an uprising in Serbia (to which Henrietta makes reference in the journals – see p. 181). The awarding of a British protectorate over the Ionian Islands at the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) occurred without great opposition at this time, and the Greek War of Independence, which involved the British in a major way, did not begin to happen in earnest until after their departure.

Thus, the years Henrietta Liston spent in Turkey appear as a ‘somnolent interregnum’ (Cunningham 1993b: 8), in an otherwise volatile nineteenth century, whose first half culminated in a multinational conflict (the Crimean War, 1853–6) and the adoption by Britain of an important role as the healer or crutch of the ‘Sick Man of Europe’, that is, the Ottoman Empire.