An 111-year-old document, digitised as part of a collaboration between the Qatar Foundation and the British Library, sheds light on the history of the Arabian Gulf, from early interaction with the British to the discovery of oil.
It is a slim, leather-bound volume, easily overlooked among the hundreds of thousands of papers that have languished, all but forgotten, in the darkest recesses of the British Library for decades.
Today, however, this remarkable document, created in 1906 as a record of every treaty and agreement forged between the British and the Arabs of the Gulf since 1820, is online for all to see and study.
It is part of a collaboration between the Qatar Foundation and the British Library, and is available in English and Arabic at www.qdl.qa.
Work on digitising the vast cache of papers, maps and illustrations from the East India Company and its successor, the British government’s India Office, began almost three years ago.
Now, even as construction continues in Doha on the modernistic Rem Koolhas-designed building that will house the Qatar National Library, due to open next year, the Qatar Digital Library has already opened its doors.
It is displaying the first of what will by the end of the year be a treasure trove of half a million historically priceless documents, free for anyone, anywhere, to pore over in high-definition detail.
“This is going to be a tremendous asset for historians, young and old,” says Richard Gibby, who has overseen the project for the British Library.
“These are unique documents, a written record of facts and history from an area which is simply not available anywhere else, and which represents a crucial period from the mid-1750s up to and including the discovery of oil and the laying of the foundations of the modern states in the Gulf region.”
Some of the deepest of those foundations are laid bare in the yellowing pages of a single volume, Existing Treaties between the British Government and the Trucial Chiefs, printed in 1906 as an aide-memoir for the officers of the British India Office.
There, in Arabic and English – although “in the event of doubt hereafter the English text shall be considered decisive” – is a history of the region in the making.
The record begins with the General Treaty of 1820, with what the British called “The Arab tribes of the Gulf”. This established “a lasting peace” with the British, although one with a number of conditions for the tribes, whose traditional way of life was to be changed irrevocably.
There would be “a cessation of plunder and piracy by land and sea on the part of the Arabs for ever”, and the treaty contained a blunt threat for those who might renege.
Any individual who carried out an attack “in the way of plunder and piracy and not of acknowledged war shall be accounted an enemy of all mankind, and shall be held to have forfeited both life and goods”.
The treaty was signed at “Ras-ool-Kheimah” at midday on January 8 and, in the section of the document where the signatories are recorded, a cavalcade of names from history, albeit with contemporary British spellings, marches off the page.
They include Hassun bin Rahmah, Sheikh of Hatt and Fahleia; Kazib bin Ahmed, Sheikh of Jourat Al Hamra; and Sheikh Shakbut of “Aboo Dhebbee”.
The collection opens with the very voice of colonial authority, echoing down over the years in the form of the text of an address given by Lord Curzon, viceroy and governor general of India, to the chiefs of the tribes gathered at “Shargah” on November 21, 1903.
That was 111 years ago this Friday. And the precise political motives for the first visit to the Trucial States by any British viceroy of India in a century or more may be all but impossible to divine.
But the meaning of the speech made by Lord Curzon is clear enough. He had come, he said, as “the representative of the great Empire of India of the British authority which you and your fathers and forefathers have known and dealt with for more than 100 years”.
His purpose was to reassure – and, it is clear, to threaten – that, “though you live at some distance from the shores of India, you are not forgotten by the Government, but that they adhere to the policy of guardianship and protection which has given you peace and guaranteed your rights for the best part of a century”.
Curzon’s visit was, perhaps, explained by the fact that the British were not many years from a European war that would all but drain their strength.
By then it was also clear that the Arabian Gulf, and the lands of the Ottoman Empire that lay along it, would probably become a theatre of war in which Britain would need all the friends it could muster.
As another document now online attests, by 1903 the British were already growing wary of Turkish claims on the Arabian coast.
It was, said Curzon, in the best interests of the chiefs and their people to stick to their agreements with the British, who had become their “overlords and protectors”.
Every one of the Trucial states had “bound itself, as you know, not to enter into any agreement or correspondence with any other Power. These engagements are binding on every one of you”.
But it is not all politics in the archives.
With a bureaucratic obsession for detail, the British observed, described and catalogued all aspects of life in the Gulf, from practice of religion to the seasonal vagaries of date and pearl harvests.
And there is plenty of drama. Documents such as Muscat Affairs 1869-1892, compiled by British political residents in the Gulf, offer priceless snapshots of a volatile period of history.
Here, we read of the 1869 Clyde Affair, in which a British gunboat was called to quell a revolt brewing in Muscat and the captain found himself fired upon by the very garrison he had come to relieve, “to the dishonour of the British flag which was flying all the time”.
Having survived his row to shore, Capt Elton of HMS Clyde reported to his superior officer that, “I refrained from taking any notice of this indignity until I knew your wishes, otherwise we could have silenced them in a few minutes”.
Priceless details about life in the region emerge from the painstakingly recorded accounts of all aspects of life. More than 52 pages of notes are dedicated to the sensitive politics surrounding a dispute over camels between the sheikhs of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, which dragged on from August 1946 to 1948.
By the time all 500,000 items are online by the end of the year, the digital archive will also include some of the British Library’s collection of 14,000 Arabic manuscripts collected over the centuries by various British bureaucrats and adventurers.
Among them is the remarkable ninth-century translation into Arabic of Greek medical texts by Hunayn ibn Isaq, who lived in what is today Iraq and is credited with having established Arabic as the international language of science of the day.
The digital archive also includes photographs, and perhaps one of the most telling images is that of an “Arab coal coolie”, a sepia-tinted photograph dating from about the mid-1870s.
It is unclear where the photograph was taken, or by whom, and the boy’s name is unknown.
And yet, as he poses for the camera, dressed only in a loin cloth and with his face and body smeared with the black dust of his gruelling work, his steady gaze conveys an unmistakable strength and pride.
He could not have known it, of course, but this young man, pressed into service for refuelling the ships of the colonial superpower of his day, was a forebear of a nation that would rise to global significance on a tide of oil that would sweep away the old steam-driven order, replacing it with the federation of nations that would become the UAE.
All of this material has always been available, says Mr Gibby, “but until now you had to physically come to the British Library in London to look at any of it.
“For the people of the Gulf region and researchers who don’t have the time or the ability to travel to London, this project opens it up in a way that’s never been possible before.”
And as impressive as the online resource is, the Qatar Digital Library has only scratched the surface. Deep underground, below the piazza at the British Library in St Pancras, countless treasures remain to be discovered.
“The British Library’s holdings from the region are vast,” says Mr Gibby. “The whole of the India Office collection occupies 14 kilometres of shelving. I don’t know exactly how far we’ve gone, but it’s probably no more than a couple of hundred metres.”
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