Articles From Our Experts

An overview of the records created by the Bahrain Political Agency, 1899-1953

An overview of the records in the IOR/F/4 Series, including how they were created, their format, and subject matter.

A guide to the East India Company ships’ journals and related records (IOR/L/MAR/A and B series files) and miscellaneous East India Company and India Office marine records (IOR/L/MAR/C files) on the Qatar Digital Library.

How and why did the British Library come to hold 14,000 Arabic manuscripts within its collections?

During the early ʿAbbāsid period (ninth century CE), a diverse group of scholars collaborated on the long-term project of translating an elaborate work of pure geometry dealing with the properties of the parabola, ellipse and hyperbola – Apollonius’ Conics.

A vast array of cartographic material has been hidden amongst the India Office Records’ administrative files; this material provides a fascinating insight into the workings of British imperial knowledge gathering in the Gulf and beyond.

An overview of the records created by Britain’s Political Residency at Bushire between 1763 and 1948, including a description of the records and the subjects they cover.

From East India Company intelligence to news of the discovery of oil, the India Office Records demonstrate the exchanges that took place between Britain and Qatar over the last three centuries.

Certain collections within the British Library’s manuscript holdings represent dark links between Britain’s nineteenth-century colonial and military activities, and its acquisition of cultural and intellectual heritage.

How did an illustrated Arabic manuscript on the Art of War come into the possession of an illegitimate son of a King; his extraordinary and ultimately tragic life leading to its acquisition by the British Library?

A vast range of material that spans several thousand years, including a large collection of Arabic manuscripts and material related to the Gulf, is held in the British Library collection.

A government department unique in its scope and power, the India Office had a profound impact on the history of the Gulf.

In medieval Islamic societies, education in the mathematical sciences was based not on solving problems, or producing new results, but rather on careful study of the accomplishments of past masters.

The establishment of the Bahrain Agency in 1900 cemented previous British interest in the Persian Gulf and set the tone for increased economic and political involvement in the 20th century.

For over a hundred years, in tandem with the colonisation of Palestinian land, Palestinian history has been systematically erased, suppressed, and distorted. The QDL however contains multiple sources on Palestine and Palestinians.

For eight hundred years, the Arabic scientific tradition was superior to that found in western Eurasia. It gave birth to new theories and fields of scientific inquiry that laid the foundations for the Scientific Revolution, and continued to flourish thereafter.

How did a fourteenth century illustrated ‘Treatise on the Art of Riding and using the Instruments of War’ end up in the British Library’s Arabic manuscript collection? A ‘Nincumpoop’ of the Napoleonic era, who moonlighted as an antiquarian, holds the answer.

Today’s leaders look to their medical, economic, military, and other expert advisers, but historically rulers have also consulted astrologers, dream-interpreters, and specialists in other forms of divination and occult sciences.

Ptolemaic astronomy became known in mediaeval Europe mainly through translations from Arabic. Latin translations of the Almagest reflect the complex tradition of Ptolemy in the Arab world and show the translators' individual approaches to a demanding and unfamiliar science.

Not only did the Asian subcontinent’s hot and humid climate present a significant threat to the health of British administrators, but it also presented new challenges to their business of recordkeeping.

Around 150 AD Claudius Ptolemaeus wrote the great handbook of astronomy, later known as the Almagest, which became the prevalent handbook for the knowledge of the stars in Europe for about 1500 years. The text was handed on to the Europeans through Arabic translations in the ninth century AD, and translated into Latin in the twelfth century.

Ships have always been important in the history of the Gulf, and therefore are prominent in the India Office Records and other documents on the QDL. This is the first article in a series of three by the author, providing context and explanation for nautical terminology in the records.

What do the records created by the British Political Agency at Muscat have to offer us?

This article looks at the India Office Records Map Collection’s holdings relating to the Arabian Peninsula and The Gulf. It considers why the India Office assembled such a significant collection for so distant a region, and outlines the variety and organisation of the material.

In the pre-modern Arabic-speaking lands, as the world over, the lives of people and animals were intertwined in manifold ways. This resulted in the production of numerous Arabic scientific, veterinary, and related texts on the world of beasts.

An East India Company diary from the early nineteenth century demonstrates some of the challenges encountered when cataloguing older India Office records.

Scribal notes in a Mughal-period manuscript of fourteen musical texts shed light on its historical context and the process of its creation.

During a period often characterised as one of decay and decline, the Andaluso-Tunisian astronomer Ibn al-Raqqām wrote his Risālah fī ‘ilm al-ẓilāl, the most important treatise on sundials of the Islamic West. The instruments he describes are much more elaborate and sophisticated than the surviving examples of Medieval sundials from al-Andalus and the Maghrib.

Among pre-modern Arabic scholars, the Almagest was generally regarded as the most authoritative work on astronomy. This esteem for Ptolemy's text, however, contrasted with a common practice among Arabic readers not to consult the Almagest directly but to rely on later commentaries for studying Ptolemy's theories.

The peoples of the Islamic world excelled at designing and building water-clocks as these manuscripts show.

Mathematicians in medieval Islamic societies were the first to grasp the real significance of Menelaus’ Spherics. They followed Menelaus’ approach to spherical geometry and went on to develop spherical trigonometry as an independent branch of mathematics.

The vast archive known as the India Office Records, occupying approximately nine miles of shelving in the British Library, contains the documents created or received in London by three organisations crucial to the British colonial effort in the period 1600–1858.

The Persia Collection: casting light on Britain’s thorny relationship with Persia [Iran] throughout the 1930s, Second World War, and Anglo-Soviet Occupation.