Richard Wood (consul)

Wood's career spanned more than forty years of the Eastern question period, when the Ottoman Empire was in decline and the British were gaining power in the Middle East and North Africa.

[2] He returned home to Constantinople soon after leaving school, and his father was able to secure a position for him with the local factory of the Levant Company as a giovane di lingua, or trainee dragoman.

[2] In 1834, after Egypt had gained formal authority in Syria by the Convention of Kütahya, Wood returned to Constantinople, where he had talks with Lord Ponsonby, the British ambassador, about how Ibrahim might be brought down and the increasing Russian influence over the Ottomans undermined.

[2] In August 1835, during the Syrian Peasant Revolt against Ibrahim, triggered by heavy conscription and taxation, Wood returned to Syria and tried unsuccessfully to persuade Bashir Shihab II, ruler of the Mount Lebanon Emirate, to support it.

[2] In 1840, during the Second Egyptian–Ottoman War, Wood returned to Syria, this time with both British and Ottoman instructions, in support of a revolt by the Druze and Maronites against Muhammad Ali of Egypt.

[2][6] Not long after his arrival, Wood persuaded the Bey to grant him as a Residence a partly-built house in La Marsa, near Carthage, abandoned by the fleeing Treasurer Mahmoud Ben Ayed, and to pay for it to be completed to his plans.

[7][8] Following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, the prestige of France was badly damaged, and both Britain and the newly unified Kingdom of Italy wished to strengthen their influence in Tunisia.

[11] After his retirement, Wood lived in Nice, a historically Italian city in the south of France, and at Leghorn, in Italy, but also spent summers with a daughter in La Goulette, Tunisia.