The British Arabists
Victorian travellers had made Arab studies a romantic discipline; but, writes Alaric Jacob, British involvement in Arab affairs arose from the First World War.
The collapse of the Turkish Empire in 1918 added a new field of responsibility to what, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now discern to have been a dangerously over-extended British Empire. It also brought to light a new cadre in the Imperial service which had scarcely existed before - the Arabist.
British support of the ailing Ottoman Empire throughout most of the nineteenth century, as a barrier against Tsarist incursion into the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, had made Arabia terra incognita to the normally ubiquitous British traveller.
The exception was Aden, captured by Captain Haines of the Indian Navy for a coaling station in 1839: Haines became the virtual Sultan of Aden and his long years of diplomacy with the sheiks of the hinterland entitle him, perhaps, to be considered the first Arabist.
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