Books in the Cambridge Library Collection - Perspectives from the Royal Asiatic Society series

Published in 1820, this acclaimed three-volume work by the administrator and ethnologist John Crawfurd (1783-1868) offers insight into the peoples and cultures of the Indonesian islands, principally Java. Volume 1 examines the character and manners of the islanders as well as their arts, sciences, medicine, and agricultural techniques.

As a nobleman of the court of Aurangzeb (1618-1707), Iradat Khan (c.1649-1716) witnessed the decline of the Mughal empire. First published in 1786, these are his memoirs, translated by Jonathan Scott (1754-1829), an East India Company captain who wanted to educate the British about India's history.

Little is known of Captain Alexander Hamilton (b. before 1688, d. around 1733) other than what he tells us in this lively and compelling travelogue. First published in 1727, his invaluable historical and geographical picture of south-east Asia between 1688 and 1723 is spiced with tales of piracy and poisoning.

Arab scholar Abd-Allatif (1162-1231) wrote this thorough account of Egypt when the country was rarely visited by Europeans. It covers matters ranging from natural history and medicine to culture and domestic economy. Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838) translated and edited this version, first published in French in 1810.

Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859) was a respected and enlightened administrator in India. This two-volume history, based on a range of Indian sources and first published in 1841, is infused with his lifelong understanding of Indian culture. It was the most popular work of its kind among the early Victorian public.

This Malay-English dictionary was published in 1801, and is largely the same in content as the first one produced 100 years earlier by Thomas Bowrey. It is a compendium of working Malay, representing early attempts to make a dictionary to serve the new colonial interests in the Malay Peninsula.

This 1826 Burmese-English dictionary was compiled from the manuscripts of American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson (1788-1850) and his colleagues Felix Carey and James Coleman. It was a pioneering work, born of firm belief in the evangelising power of the written word, and providing the basis for Judson's later great bilingual dictionary.

First published in 1806, this is a comprehensive grammar of the Indo-Aryan language Sanskrit. Reissued here in a two-volume set, Volume 1 contains Books 1-3 of the work, covering characters, pronouns and verbs. Carey's reference works on Marathi and Bengali are also reissued in this series.

This 1829 translation of what is now known to be a flawed account of incidents from the first fifteen years of the reign of the Mughal emperor Jahangir (1569-1627) offers a colourful, if not always factually accurate, description of the ruler's character, politics and actions.

This 1791 four-volume English translation of a key text of Islamic law was undertaken by Charles Hamilton (c.1752-92), an orientalist working for the East India Company. It is an important work in the administrative history of British India, reflecting the development of the Anglo-Islamic legal system.