Showing 6112 results

George Macdonald Home Playfair was born on 22 August 1850 at Shahjehanpore, Bengal, India, and educated at Cheltenham College, Gloucestershire, and Trinity College, Dublin. He joined the China Consular Service in 1872 as a student interpreter. He continued in the Consular Service until his retirement in 1901, rising through the ranks to become Foochow Consul in 1899. He retired to England with his wife, Winifred May Playfair, and died there in 1917.

David Price was an orientalist and army officer. Born in Wales, his father died when he was young and, despite being given a scholarship for university he was unable to afford to complete his course. Instead he joined the army of the East India Company and in 1781 sailed for Bombay. However he volunteered for temporary service in the south and took part in the siege of Negapatam and the capture of Trincomali in Ceylon. His ship completed its voyage to Bombay on 22 April 1782. As well as serving as an army officer Price undertook Persian studies. He retired in 1807 and returned to Wales.

He was a member of the Royal Asiatic Society, to which he bequeathed over seventy valuable oriental—chiefly Persian—manuscripts. He was published by the Oriental Translation Fund.

Iltudus Thomas Prichard was born in 1826 in Bristol, the fifth son of physician and ethnologist James Cowles Prichard and Anna Marie Estlin. He attended Rugby School before entering the Bengal army, serving through the mutiny before retiring in 1859. Prichard returned to England and studied law. He then returned to India, where he edited the Delhi Gazette and served as a barrister. Throughout his life, he turned his Indian experiences into several books, including a memoir of his mutiny experiences (1860), a novel "How to Manage It" (1864), and the satire "The Chronicles of Budgepore" (1870). It would seem that Prichard was one of the men who were involved in the translations used by Henry Myers Elliot in his History of India (edited and published by Dowson posthumously).
Prichard died in 1874 in India.

His family home was at Woodfield, near Eyrecourt in Co. Galway, Ireland but he spent most of his life in Asia as a Merchant-ship-officer and trader. He went to India in 1792 and did not return to Ireland for 27 years. The letters in the Collection were written to his sister Mary, or her husband Robert Turbett, A Dublin merchant.. He sailed on the Anna from Bombay in 1792 with a cargo of cotton for China reaching Macao in April 1793 and returning with a "cargo of soft sugar, sugar candy, tea, silk, camphire, allum paint, nankeens, beads and toothinague". He continued to work on board vessels and teaching himself French, Mathematics and Navigation. On a journey to "Cochinchina" in 1804 they were shipwrecked and had to travel overland through Hainan to reach Canton. He was Captain of the William Petrie in 1812 but had to give up command because of bad health. He spent time in "Malacca" which seemed to improve his health. He seems to have remained in Asia until around 1822. He retired to Ireland but later moved to England and married Eleanor Masters Woodman in 1842 when she was about 26 years old. he died in 1846.. Information for this biography was obtained from From Indian Waters: Some Old Letters by G.C. Duggan, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1958), pp. 1-7, which also gives details of the letters no longer in the collection. Further information was provided by Robert Grant in 2022.

Mary Rowlatt was born in Cairo in 1908. She represented the fifth generation of her family to make its home in Egypt. Her father, Sir Frederick Rowlatt, aged four, was present at the opening of the Suez Canal, and later became a governor and director of the National Bank of Egypt.

The Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland was founded in 1871 from the merger between the Ethnological Society and the Anthropological Society. Permission to add the word 'Royal' was granted in 1907. The RAI exists to promote the public understanding of anthropology, as well as the contribution anthropology can make to public affairs and social issues. It includes within its constituency not only academic anthropologists, but also those with a general interest in the subject, and those trained in anthropology who work in other fields.