Spoils of Many a Distant Land: The Earls of Crawford and the Collecting of Oriental Manuscripts in the Nineteenth Century

The collecting and cultural signification of oriental manuscripts in nineteenth-century Britain are a hitherto under-researched field that is ripe for re-evaluation in the light of postcolonial theory. The Bibliotheca Lindesiana, assembled by the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth earls of Crawford in the years coterminous with Victoria’s reign, contained one of largest and most diverse collections of oriental manuscripts in Britain. This paper deploys the Bibliotheca Lindesiana as a case study in order to investigate the motives and mechanisms which underlay the formation of oriental manuscript collections in Victorian Britain, and to explore the diverse ways in which such collections folded into wider issues of race, imperialism and organisations of knowledge. The earls of Crawford are contextualised though comparison with other collectors of oriental books and manuscripts, in terms of their backgrounds, interests, motives and mechanisms of collecting. While they were not intricated in the official structures of orientalism, the earls of Crawford are shown to have engaged with and contributed to wider orientalist discourses through their acquisition of books and manuscripts (some of which were implicated in aggressive imperialism), via their employment of experts to catalogue the material, and in opening the collections to academic investigation.