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Western travelogue writing has long been a crucial source of information for scholars of the Arabian Peninsula, but nonetheless, this body of literature has not yet been studied comprehensively and systematically by a modern scholar. This article addresses that deficiency by collecting data on the nationality, routes travelled and intertextual citations of 91 authors active in Arabia from 1800 to 1950. The results of this study provide quantitative verification for several existing theories on Western travel writing in Arabia, including Edward Said’s claim that ‘Orientalism’ was predominantly an Anglo-French project, and observations by Said, James Canton and others that European travellers had intimate ties with European imperialism. At the same time, this study challenges some existing arguments about Western travel writing in Arabia, especially claims by Alaine Hutson and others about the inherent unreliability of this corpus of sources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a curious but little-known agricultural system based on imported African slaves thrived in the Northern and Central Arabian Peninsula. Born of a unique set of biological, environmental, cultural, and economic conditions, this slave system employed African labor mainly in the date palm plantations of the wadis, or floodwater channels, of the Hijaz and Najd regions of Arabia. This paper will seek to expand our knowledge of this neglected agricultural system by synthesizing traditional documentary sources employed by historians with new findings from the medical sciences, especially studies of genetic adaptations to malaria. Overall, this study will suggest that wadi slavery in Arabia, like slavery in the 16th-19th century Atlantic world, had a strong biological basis. As in the Atlantic world, African slaves, who frequently possessed genetic and acquired immunity to malaria, were used as proxy farmers to exploit landscapes that were unhealthy to the ruling elites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Peter Forsskål (1732-1763) was the naturalist on the Royal Danish Expedition to Arabia (1761-1767), a particularly rich example of the eighteenth century era of scientific exploration and a quintessential project of the Enlightenment. Forsskål is noteworthy for his early writings in philosophy and politics and for his outstanding contributions to the botanical and zoological knowledge of the Middle East, specifically Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, principally Yemen. His biological work stands out for the large number of species identified, its attention to detail, the expansiveness of his descriptions, his knowledge and use of Arabic and his early ideas on plant geography. Forsskål's research in the marine biology of the Red Sea was also pioneering. His publications and collections represent the single greatest contribution to the knowledge of the natural history of the Middle East in the eighteenth century and are still valued by scholars today. His skill in retaining local terminology in Arabic and his respect for the contributions of local inhabitants to this work are also worth noting. When he died of malaria in 1763 in Yemen, the eighteenth-century world of natural science lost a promising and adventurous scientist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]