Teachers of Arabic in Britain, 1870–1939

Abstract Histories of Arabic studies in Europe have focussed to date on formal educational institutions such as universities, in part because of the close connections between academic Orientalism and European politics and imperialism, but also because of the availability of primary sources. This article instead examines what we can discover about private teachers of Arabic in Britain from the Victorian period to the Second World War. As well as shedding light on a hitherto under-investigated group of Arabic teachers and learners, this allows us to look at the teaching of spoken, dialectal Arabic in contrast to the written, Classical language more commonly taught in universities. It uses Census documents and newspapers from the period to identify individual teachers and learners of Arabic, and attempts to reconstruct their wider lives and career trajectories.