Adam Matthew

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Emory’s African historians have had a great spring. Not only has the graduate program been recognized with a high ranking (No. 6 in the U.S.) but the library’s purchase of Adam Matthew’s digital collection, Confidential Print: Africa, has made the lives of anyone studying African history much easier. 

What are confidential prints? They are unpublished but printed internal documents of United Kingdom’s government departments. The confidential prints related to Africa are drawn from the Colonial (C.O.), Dominion (D.O.), and Foreign (F.O.) Offices files and are extremely important primary sources. The contents include a variety of reports, dispatches, analyses, and correspondence. There are also 300 maps. The originals are housed in the Public Record Office in Kew. 

While selected parts of these confidential prints have been printed or filmed, this digitized collection provides researchers unprecedented access to these materials which cover British interests in all of Africa, except Egypt. All documents are fully text-searchable once located by assigned headings or key words. Selections were made by a distinguished editorial board.

The time frame, 1834-1966, includes the early stages of imperial expansion and indigenous resistance in the interior of western and southern Africa, the European scramble for the continent in the late nineteenth century, and the expansion of settler colonialism in southern and eastern Africa, as well as the rising challenges to imperialism in the twentieth century that culminated in the rapid European withdrawal from the continent in the 1950s and 1960s.

Some sample contents: 

CO 879/1-190  Africa General, 1848-1861 reveals the spread of British sovereignty in west and South Africa, including the discovery and mining of diamonds. 

CO 885/1-140 Colonies general (selected files) covers the period from 1907 to 1929. These files concentrate on disease and medicine in Britain’s tropical African colonies, including sleeping sickness, hookworm, and leprosy.

FO 341/1-3 German Empire miscellaneous covers the years 1884 to 1900. These papers focus on the West Africa Conference (also known as the Berlin Conference and Congo Conference), which took place in Berlin in 1884-85 and marked the beginning of the European powers’ ‘Scramble for Africa.’

FO 403/1-482 Africa general spans the period from 1834 to 1959. Topics covered include the Activities of the Church Missionary Society in Lagos (1850s) and the establishments of the British East Africa Protectorate (modern Kenya) and Northern and Southern Rhodesia (1890s).

FO 458/1-157 and FO 485/1-3 Liberia cover British interests in Liberia during the years 1882 to 1950.

DO 201/1-53 Commonwealth Relations Office (selected files) covers the period between 1949 and 1966. Covers the independence of a number of colonies, including Nigeria.

For a fuller listing of contents, see the Nature and Scope page on the website.

Essays to give context to the collection will soon be included. 

Confidential Print: Africa is part of Adam Matthew’s Archives Direct program of digitizing selected contents of the British Public Record Office. Similar collections for the Middle East and Latin America are also available. All Adam Matthew digital collections can be cross searched through Adam Matthew Archive Explorer.

In preparation for Emory's Primary Evidence QEP, the library has just purchased 18 additional primary source databases from the vendor, Adam Matthew, that can be incorporated into course assignments or aid scholars researching a broad array of subjects. 

The Grand Tour database contains accounts of the English abroad, c1550-1850, and serves to highlight the influence of continental travel on 18^th century British art, architecture, urban planning, literature and philosophy.  Students can find primary source  (letters; diaries; account books; guidebooks; published travel writing; paintings, drawings; and maps) material to illuminate everyday issues and illustrate larger themes of the age of enlightenment and politics of the day.

• Explore interactive maps  of 18^th century Europe
• Study photographs of key Grand Tour locations in Florence, Venice, Rome, and Naples
• Research paintings and sketches inspired from by the Grand Tour, many from the Yale Center for British Art 

Click on the “popular searches” directly below the search box and find topics from Ancient Monuments to Women Writers, as well as pre-set searches on countries, regions, cities/towns, and people.

The database also digitizes the secondary source reference book, A DICTIONARY OF BRITISH AND IRISH TRAVELLERS IN ITALY 1701-1800, with easy to search  biographical entries on grand tourists,  students of the fine arts diplomats, merchants, Jacobite exiles, and British and Irish families already living abroad.  These entries also link directly to images of archive notes, when available, from the Brinsley Ford archive.

There are helpful essays, chronologies, and bibliographies BUT the meat of this database collection is the primary documents and images from impressive archives and museums.  Martha Fogg, Project Editor for The Grand Tour, picks the following three examples to show the range and variety of sources 

• Susan Horner Collection: Journal, 1861-62 (British Institute, Florence)
• Joseph Wright of Derby, Vesuvius from Posillipo, c1788 (Yale Center for British Art)
• Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, 1766

Take a tour of this database now and remember it when starting an project dealingh with 18th century Europe.