International Association for the Study of Arabia (IASA)
THE LAST WORD
The Last Word in this Edition of the IASA Bulletin goes to the British Library/ Qatar Foundation Partnership. Please click on the blue hyperlinks in the article to read more. News from the British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership In November 1720 Captain William Hutchinson, Commander of the East India Company ship Sunderland, wrote the first entry in his journal of a return voyage to Mocha, Yemen.
‘A considerable fortune: the wealth, and death, of Sheikh Jasim bin Muhammad Al Thani’ IOR/L/MAR/B/675, f 4 Following its digitisation of the Sunderland’s log-book the British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership (BLQFP) is following that journey as it progressed. The digitisation of the IOR/L/MAR ship log books, including that of the Sunderland, is just one of the recent exciting developments taking place in the British Library/ Qatar Foundation Partnership programme. Since its inception in 2012 the British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership and the Qatar National Library (QNL) have worked in partnership to develop the Qatar Digital Library, launched in 2014 which provides digital access to a hugely significant collection of archives and manuscripts relating to the Gulf region and wider Arabic-speaking world. Dr Talal al-Rashoud, Kuwait University, comments that it has ‘the potential to revolutionize the study of the Gulf region’. The BLQFP is committed to contextualizing and understanding the India Office Records relating to the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula as a British colonial and imperial archive. Key features include: • a bilingual resource in English and Arabic • over 130 contextual articles written by experts to bring the collection to life • enhanced cataloguing for over 7000 files • improved search tools, including optical character recognition of typed text • everything available for free for everyone. From the early days of the project new insights were shed on Qatari history and British involvement in the Gulf. 64
As this Bulletin goes to press the BLQFP is approaching the milestone of its 2 millionth image digitised since inception of the partnership in 2012 with over 1 million users accessing the collection for free online to date. The content selected for the QDL is varied. The core is taken from the British Library’s India Office Records spanning the period from the start of the 17th century to the mid20th century but there are also a range of Arabic Scientific Manuscripts including a manual on the principles of navigational theory and innovations in music notation. The India Office Records files that have been digitised under Phase 3 (2019-2021) of the Partnership include the IOR/L/ MAR Marine Department Records, 1600- c.1879 and the IOR/G East India Company Factory Records following on from earlier files such as the Departmental Papers: Political and Secret Separate (or Subject) Files (IOR/L/PS/10) and IOR/R/15/1 Political Residency, Bushire. Recent highlights have included British Library blog articles on the ‘…the General Maritime Treaty of 1820 and British imperialism in the Persian Gulf’ and ‘The Gombroon Diaries: a Rich Source on Eighteenth Century Persia and the Persian Gulf’. Further unknown footnotes to history such as ‘The curious case of Jean Robbio’ during the Napoleonic Wars have been examined, and the mystery of the Roebuck unravelled - a ship seemingly in two places at the same time - following detailed archival investigation. By using backlighting the BLQFP has literally shone light on the early watermark designs found in the ship logs to understand and appreciate them more fully. Many maps of the Gulf and Arabia and connecting trade links of the region are available
