Archive Editions Ltd - UK publishers of primary source research collections
The Company
Archive Editions is a wholly independent British company conducting original research in government records and other sources. Our aim is to make available to libraries and scholars historical reference materials which otherwise would remain unknown, difficult to access, or fragmentary.
The Publications
We produce new titles every year, as current affairs encourage us to cover topical material. Our publications provide hundreds of thousands of pages of facsimile original documents, as well as many maps, on the national heritage and political development of many countries. Our material is particularly rich for the study of boundary formation, claims and disputes. For many years we have specialised in the history of the Middle East and our titles provide an extensive library collection of resources on the modern political development of the Arabian peninsula and Persian Gulf. Significant additions to the list also provide material on the Balkans, the Caucasus, South East Asia and the Far East and a series of work on tribal/ethnic minorities. Facsimile reproduction ensures the historical authenticity of the original documents.
The Content
Archive Editions titles, with some exceptions, fall into two types: collections of key documents, and series of political reports; researched from files available in the public domain including, but not exclusively, the National Archives of the UK. The choice of projects reflects the company's experience in serving or anticipating the research needs of academic or governmental communities.
The collections of key documents are always made on specific and well-defined areas of research and each collection has the added value of arrangement into specific topics and document by document identification/description. The series of political reports focus on completeness and organisation of material previously unknown or scattered. Each collection is researched and edited by a professional researcher and sometimes also in cooperation with an academic specialist and presented in facsimile.
Archive Editions also reproduces, in facsimile, some classic standard works of reference particularly in the Middle East list, including Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia; Saldanha’s Persian Gulf Précis and Low’s History of the Indian Navy.
Acknowledgments
Much of the material in these volumes is subject to British Crown Copyright and is published under licence from the National Archives. The publishers acknowledge the assistance of many research sources, including the National Archives, London; the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library; the universities of Cambridge, Durham, Exeter, London, Oxford, Harvard and others; and further sources in Europe and the USA, including US State Department files.
Language Of Publication
For the most part the publications are in English, this being the language of the original
documents. Some publications are partly or substantially in Arabic (this is indicated in their
description). Some documents are found in French, or occasionally German or Turkish.
Quality Of Presentation
All volumes are printed on acid-free paper and bound in high quality library bindings. Many publications include folding historic maps, often in colour, in a map box matching the volumes. Many of the publications include detailed document lists, quoting source file references, for the benefit of researchers. Some older titles have less detailed descriptive contents and four titles have their references withheld. Where reproductions of standard works are concerned, such as Lorimer’s Gazetteer, the contents are as they were in the original.
It is in the nature of facsimile reproductions of original documents to display foxing and spotting and we take great care to maintain a quality of contrast that may be easily read. However, it is almost impossible to reproduce everything perfectly and we sometimes take the view that retyping an original is the only option. We always indicate a retype with a footnote below it. Occasionally we have retained as facsimile a document that looks as though it should have been retyped, on the grounds that we cannot be sure what it says. We take the view that for historical integrity we should include such documents even where parts of the text are obscured.