AJ Arberry’s British Orientalists (1943)

AJ Arberry’s British Orientalists (1943) was published as part of the very collectible Britain in Pictures series, a series of 126 books published between 1941 and 1945 as an important component of Britain‘s wartime propaganda to try and show their was a British civilization (and in this case very much an empire!) worth fighting to defend. The book focuses on South Asia but does include some discussion of China and Macao. It was written by Arthur John Arberry (1905-1969), an Arabic scholar who had worked at Cairo University before the war. During the Second World War he was a Postal Censor in Liverpool before being moved to the Ministry of Information where, among his task presumably, was writing British Orientalists. He later held the Chair of Persian Studies at SOAS in London.