Kuwaiti families' documents and their importance in documenting the history of Kuwait and the Arabian Gulf in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century

Abstract

The history of Kuwait and the Arab Gulf states in the early period of modern history depends on several official sources, the most prominent of which are: British and Ottoman documents and official correspondence between the rulers of the region and foreign powers. However, these documents express the viewpoint of their writers and the orientations of their countries. A dilemma represented in the absence of mechanisms for preserving documents, and this led to a gap in the documentation of the history of the Gulf, especially the economic, social and cultural history. To fill this gap, the cultural institutions in Kuwait began collecting and organizing Kuwaiti families' documents, most notably: the maritime calendars, which are notebooks and books in which Kuwaiti sailors used to record their notes and observations during the sailing ships’ voyages, and the accounts and correspondence books of commercial families, especially since the commercial families in Kuwait They had established trade centers in India and East Africa, and they corresponded with each other to learn about the movement of buying and selling, and the conditions in the Arab Gulf at all levels, and then this study will address the importance of these documents in documenting the history of Kuwait and the Arabian Gulf in the nineteenth century and the first half of Twentieth century. The study will be divided into three axes: The first axis will deal with the maritime calendars, their types and their usefulness, the most famous sailors’ notebooks, and the information they contain about the history of Kuwait and the Arabian Gulf. Correspondence and notebooks, and the third axis will present the role of Kuwaiti cultural institutions in preserving civil documents, the Kuwaiti Research and Studies Center as exemplar