This article tells you how to use manuscript sources for British History. It was written in 1995 by RJ Olney from the Historical Manuscripts Commission.

Using manuscript sources for British history

THE HISTORY OF BUSINESS COMMUNICATION is a H promising field for research and a congenial research area for anyone with expertise in the analysis of texts. In the colloquium that follows, five scholars working in the history of business and professional communication examine some of the questions facing the would-be researcher. Together, we determined the questions we wanted to address. Each person wrote answers, which were then compiled. Then we had two rounds of revision, enabling us not only to clarify or expand but also to respond to issues the others had raised. The result is a &dquo;conversation&dquo; conducted by e-mail and floppy disk. The following comments come from our answers to five questions:

Studying the History of Business Communication.

As many scholars have noted, in the immediate years after the First World War, the British Empire faced important challenges to its future survival, not least of which was the growth of three key movements: Bolshevism, Islamism and nationalism. This thesis examines how Britain coped with these problems, by exploring the internal government debates regarding foreign policy formulation towards South Asia, specifically in the countries of Persia and Afghanistan. It is the contention of this work that the current literature on this subject suffers from certain flaws, the first being that not enough writers have discussed the interrelation of these three movements. Secondly, there has been a lack of focus on how officials in London and in Delhi thought quite differently on the issue of Britain’s foreign policy in South Asia after 1918. This thesis will address these, and other, gaps in the literature. It will contend that there were those within the Home government who displayed a particular mode of thought – a ‘Great Game mentality’ – towards this region. This mentality was influenced by the legacy of the earlier, 19 th -century rivalry between Britain and Russia, and resulted in a tendency to over-emphasise the threat of Russian Bolshevism to Britain’s imperial interests in South Asia, whilst at the same time under-emphasising the threat of nationalism and pan-Islamism across Persia, Afghanistan and India. When the Indian government questioned this Great Game mentality, it was largely ignored and frequently maligned. The work will demonstrate how those of the Great Game mind-set dominated the creation of Britain’s policy towards Persia, Afghanistan and adjoining regions in 1918 and 1919, how events of 1920 and 1921 forced London to reassess this Great Game thinking, and how (by 1922 and 1923) this re-evaluation had developed into re-formulation of British foreign policy in South Asia.

Bolshevism, Islamism, nationalism : Britain's problems in South Asia, 1918-1923

s of Sikh Studies, 2000. Asiatic Quarterly Review, 1898 and 1909. Calcutta Review, Vol. LX, 1875. Calcutta Review, Vol. LXXI, 1880. Calcutta Review, Vol. LXXII, 1881. Calcutta Review, Vol. LXXIII, 1881. Journal of Asian Studies, 1968 Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 1991. Journal of Religious Studies, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1970. Journal of Sikh Studies, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, 1974, 1999. Journal of Studies in Sikhism and Comparative Religion, 1995. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1848. Journal of the United Service Club, Simla, 1903. Punjab History Conference Proceedings, 1980. Punjab History Conference Proceedings, Patiala, 1981. Samajak Vigyan Pattar, Publication Bureau, Punjabi Univeristy, Patiala. The Journal of Religious Studies, Punjabi University, Patiala. The Missionary, Quarterly, Sikh Missionary Society, Delhi.

The Sikh Studies and The British Administration - Case Of M.A. Macauliffe

This article discusses the centrality of the letter form in the conveyance of the "evidence of experience" from India to Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century. It examines the Letterbook of John Bruce, which preserves the correspondence between Bruce—the "official historiographer" of the East India Company hired in 1793—and various Company officials in India he was attempting to recruit for a project of revisionist imperial historiography. A study of the Letterbook as a record of the project's novelty for colonial bureaucrats unused to the relationship between historiography and the letter form as "evidence of experience," the article investigates the institutional, historical and theoretical conditions under which these epistolary texts get classified as literary, personal, or historical documents.

Martin Moir

Papers

A general guide to the India Office Records