Confidential Print: Middle East, 1839-1969
The collection contains documents from the British National Archives on the history of the Middle East and North Africa. These range from one-page letters or telegrams to extensive Dispatches, investigation reports and treaty texts.
Description of the provider
The collection is a fundamental building block for political, social and economic research. It arose from the need to preserve the most important papers produced by the foreign and colonial offices.
The documents range from one-page letters or telegrams to extensive dispatches, investigation reports and treaty texts. All items labelled "confidential print" were printed and immediately distributed to senior officials in the Foreign Office, the Cabinet and the heads of British missions abroad.
The archive consists of the confidential prints 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 Suez Crisis of 1956 and Western foreign policy after the Suez Crisis as well as the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Font recognition and download
The database is searchable in full text. The English texts in the archive were obtained by digital character recognition (OCR). Documents can be downloaded in their original layout as PDF files.
Licensing was carried out in cooperation with the Specialised Information Service for History.
"Confidential Print: Middle East, 1839-1969" completes the "Archives Direct" series, from which further national licences through the Specialised Information Service Asia were acquired.
The database can be searched in full text. Documents can be downloaded in their original layout as PDF files. The service is available throughout Germany and at German institutes abroad via the system of national licences accessible free of charge.