Middle East Research
Since the late 18th century, western businessmen, journalists, scholars, missionaries, political activists, diplomats, soldiers and spies have interacted with the peoples of the Middle East in ways that has profoundly changed the course of global history.
This long history has also produced massive quantities of original records material now available in public archives and libraries spread across North America, Europe and the Middle East, and increasingly available through digital online collections. For the last decade, I have used much of the documentary historical record relating to this astonishingly diverse and complicated global region to perform research for historians writing books (most notably Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson) and for my own research, which resulted in a scholarly book on German activities in the Ottoman Empire I published in 2018 (Germany’s Covert War in the Middle East: Espionage, Propaganda and Diplomacy in World War I).
I have become intimately familiar with the archival and secondary sources relating to the history of the modern Middle East, and have acquired the languages necessary for doing such research (German, French, and to a lesser extent, Arabic), so if you need someone to seek and find original records relating to anything from the American war with the Barbary pirates, intelligence reports from British, American and German intelligence agents in World War I, background papers used by American delegates to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, World War II-era Arabic-language propaganda materials, US State Department and Foreign Service correspondence and the Arab-Israeli conflict, I can find it for you. Since my home base is in the U.S., my primary access to this material is among the records of the U.S. National Archives, but I am willing and able to travel to get the records you need.
