• DOI:10.1080/00263200601114190
• Corpus ID: 144623036

A new age of discovery: India, the Middle East and Britain

@article{Roberts2007ANA,
  title={A new age of discovery: India, the Middle East and Britain},
  author={Peter Roberts},
  journal={Middle Eastern Studies},
  year={2007},
  volume={43},
  pages={321 - 330}
}

• P. Roberts
• Published 1 March 2007
• History
• Middle Eastern Studies

Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter, the editors of Archives of Empire Volume I: From the East India Company to the Suez Canal, define it as ‘useful for pedagogical and scholarly use [and] of considerable interest and continuing usefulness to students, teachers, researchers, and readers of the imperial narrative’. It invites questions about the contribution of post-colonial scholars of literature to understanding the history of South Asia and the Middle East and even Britain, where most of the writers cited in this volume lived. It also prompts curiosity about the editors’ historical method. Such matters are perhaps best considered in more detail than a reviewer usually needs to indicate the main points of a book. The title of the anthology is perhaps slightly misleading. There are few extracts from the vast collection of the archives of the East India Company (EIC) on which its historians tend to draw. The few quotations from printed collections of such documents are outnumbered by passages from novels, not always contemporary with the EIC’s existence. ‘Empire’ refers almost exclusively to the British Empire. Specialists on the Middle East are well aware of the influence on the area, especially during and immediately after the Napoleonic Wars, of the EIC’s Governors-General, who were responsible for its activities beyond India, especially around the Persian Gulf. However, none of the hundred or so items (including cartoons) from printed sources, quoted in the section on the Company, deal with that aspect of its history. Some might, nevertheless, have served as a useful introduction to the subsequent section. They show how reluctant the British were to acquire territories in the area. The 40 or so ‘archives’ in that shorter section are more relevant to Middle Eastern studies, dealing not only with the Suez Canal but also with some aspects of Egyptian history from the building of the Canal to about 1882, with marginal exceptions. The extracts chosen range from correspondence on the composition and later performance in Cairo of Verdi’s Aida and De Lesseps’s solicitation of support for building the Canal to reminiscences of British travellers in the area: Lucie Duff Gordon, Burton, Lane-Poole and Doughty. A group of entries on the Urabi uprising draws on publications of Gladstone, Cromer, E.M. Forster, W.S. Blunt and, his close associate, Lady Gregory. A narrative outline is provided from a chapter from a not quite objective history of Egypt by D.A. Cameron, published in 1898. Just over half the illustrations in the compilation relate to the Middle East. Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2, 321 – 330, March 2007