Ethnic Studies

1800 - mid 20th century; South Asia Archive is as a specialist digital platform delivering global electronic access to culturally and historically significant literary material produced from within, and about, the Indian subcontinent. Subject specialist editors from India have selected and catalogued the documents specifically for this archive. The content originates mainly from the Bengal area of India, consisting of unique and rare documents from primary and secondary sources. A significant proportion of the collection is in English, but thirty percent of the documents are written in various vernacular languages of the period/region(s). Serial collections are (where possible) complete, consisting of all available editions/volumes. To simplify locating a collection, content has been broken down into a number of top-level document types such as maps, reports, and journals.

This collection draws upon the unique manuscript archives of the National Library of Scotland. It provides a fully searchable online resource for studying the relationship between Britain and the British Empire in India in which the Scots played a unique and central role as traders, generals, missionaries, Viceroys, Governor-Generals and East India Company officials.

This collection weaves the story of India and Empire through the writings of Governor-Generals, Commander-in-Chiefs, Indian Princes, soldiers, traders, missionaries, explorers, historians and authors of literary works, indigo farmers and tea and coffee planters. It is composed of original manuscript material, comprising diaries and journals, official and private papers, letters, sketches, paintings and original Indian documents containing histories and literary works.

Especially strong for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this collection will be of particular interest to historians studying:

The British Indian Empire; government, administration and politics.
The relationship between Britain and the British Indian Empire.
The relationship between the British Indian Empire and Indian Princely States.
The Mysore and Maratha wars and other conflicts.
The role of the Scots in India.
The Indian Uprising.
Trade and Agriculture.

Critical Collective is a digital archive and an art magazine devoted to the visual arts of South Asia. The resource covers all time periods from the ancient world to the present, and includes articles about art history, cinema, photography, and gender studies, as well as museum studies, artists' profiles and interviews, exhibitions, and more.

Current, historical coverage varies; provides national and state-level socio-economic statistics about India culled from various secondary level authentic sources. Includes statistics on population, health, higher education, economy, agricultural and industrial production. Also provides data on sectors like banking and financial institutions, companies, co-operatives, crime and law, environment, foreign trade, labour and workforce, housing, media, energy and power, transport, urban-rural settlements, telecommunications, tourism, and other areas. Data and statistics can easily be downloaded in MS-Excel/Word/ and HTML formats.
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1951-present; Ethnologue is an ongoing research project involving hundreds of linguists and other researchers around the world. It's a comprehensive reference work cataloging all of the world's known living languages and is widely regarded to be the most comprehensive source of information of its kind. The academic subscription provides access to language and country profiles, maps, statistics, language family trees, and more.
Note: Country reports are sold to individuals separately and raw data needs to be licensed independently of this subscription.

These volumes of original despatches, correspondence and reports record aspects of the Kurdish situation starting from the period following the First World War. Although the Kurdish peoples are numerous, their aspirations for unity and independence have been repressed by the dominant regimes in the region, effectively minoritising the Kurds within a group of established states. Since the end of the First World War the former Ottoman Kurdistan has been administered by five sovereign states: Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the former Soviet Union. In 1918 Kurdish hopes for an independent Kurdistan provided for by the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) were quashed by the constitution of modern Turkey, founded by Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), and by the division of Kurdistan between Turkey, Syria and Iraq by the French and British, formalised in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

This large collection of primary source material consists of original political despatches, correspondence and reports covering: Christian communities in the Levant 1838 to 1955 in overview, and the affairs of the Assyrian communities 1880 to 1951, the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Jacobite, Chaldean and Syrian Catholic communities, and Protestant communities in the Levant and Iraq, in particular, with further detail about the Maronite communities in the Levant 1841 to 1958, and Coptic Christian communities in the Levant and Egypt 1917 to 1967. These volumes also cover the Jeddah murders of 1858 and 1895, and the treatment of Armenians in Turkey and the Levant, including the Armenian massacres during the First World War.

This group of six volumes is the first available set in the multi-part collection of Minorities in the Middle East. It covers the arrangements and conditions for Jewish communities living under Islam, throughout the Arab world, from 1840 to 1974. The situation of Jewish communities has varied according to the country of habitation and the particular time period although it is thought generally to have deteriorated from 1800 with the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Up to 1948 more than a million Jews lived in the Muslim countries of the Middle East. By 1992, excluding the non-Arab states of Turkey and Iran, the number was only c. 20,000. Although they cover more than 100 years the papers do not form a continuous record of events but rather provide a series of snapshots of history from which it is possible to ascertain something of the contemporary position of Jewish communities at particular points.

These four volumes, concerning Muslim minority communities from 1843 to 1973, consist of contemporary political despatches, correspondence and reports composed by British diplomats, some of whom were resident in the country under debate. The papers are written very clearly from a British perspective but this authoritive voice of government allows us an insight into high politics at a time when the British were inextricably involved in the government of the Middle East. The kind of information and insight that the documents provide is aptly illustrated in the extracts below but what is also evident, from even a quick reading, is the extent to which the position and treatment of minority cultures is a central consideration in achieving peace and good governance. Perhaps inevitably the material concerning minorities is partial and unsatisfactory in some ways; but taken together these volumes provide a continuity of evidence for how little has changed from historical to modern times.

1959-present; Ethnic NewsWatch is an interdisciplinary, bilingual (English and Spanish) and comprehensive full text database of the newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press beginning in 1990. This includes ENW: A History, which covers the years 1960-1989. The experiences and contributions of African Americans, Hispanics, Native Peoples, Asian Americans, European Americans, Jewish Americans and Arab Americans illuminate three critical decades in U.S. and world history.

Current; Oxford Islamic Studies Online is a comprehensive reference center with a global perspective and is a source of timely, reliable, and accessible information on the history, peoples, beliefs, individuals, and cultures that constitute the world of Islam. The site includes two essential English-language interpretations of the Qur'an, the first electronic version of the standard Concordance used by English-speaking scholars around the world, and primary source documents. Special features and tools include timelines, Qur'an Verse Look-up, a Date Converter for Western and Islamic calendar dates, and more.

1906-present; Index Islamicus is an international bibliography of publications in European languages covering all aspects of Islam and the Muslim world, including history, beliefs, societies, cultures, languages, and literature. The database includes material published by Western orientalists, social scientists and Muslims.

This volume of Encyclopaedia Islamica is the first of a projected 16-volume publication, consisting of an abridged and edited translation of the Persian Dā'irat al-ma'ārif-i buzurg-i Islāmī, one of the most comprehensive sources on Islam and the Muslim world. One unique feature of this work of reference lies in the attention it gives to Shiite Islam and its rich and diverse heritage, which makes it complementary to other encyclopaedias.