Sources from The National Archives, UK
The collection contains documents from the British National Archive on the history of the Middle East and North Africa. These range from single-page letters or telegrams to comprehensive dispatches, investigative reports and texts of treaties.
The database can be searched in full text. Documents can be downloaded in their original layout as PDF.
The database allows full-text search. Documents can be downloaded in their original layout as PDF. The collection is available free of charge in Germany and in German research institutions abroad via national licence.
About the Archive
Description by the provider Adam Matthew Digital
The collection is a fundamental building block for political, social and economic research. It originated out of a need to preserve the most important papers generated by the Foreign and Colonial Offices.
These range from single-page letters or telegrams to comprehensive dispatches, investigative reports and texts of treaties. All items marked ‘Confidential Print’ were printed and circulated immediately to leading officials in the Foreign Office, to the Cabinet and to heads of British missions abroad.
This collection consists of the Confidential Print for the countries of the Levant and the Arabian peninsula, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Sudan. Beginning with the Egyptian reforms of Muhammad Ali Pasha in the 1830s, the documents trace the events of the following 150 years, including the Middle East Conference of 1921, the mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia, the partition of Palestine, the 1956 Suez Crisis and post-Suez Western foreign policy, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Character recognition and download
The database allows full-text search. The English texts of the archive were obtained by digital character recognition (OCR). Documents can be downloaded in their original layout as PDF files.
Cooperation
The licensing was arranged in cooperation with the Specialized Information Service History.
“Confidential Print: Middle East, 1839-1969” completes the series “Archives Direct”, from which further national licenses were acquired by the Specialized Information Service Asia.