C. W. Hobley (1867 1947) was a colonial administrator who was stationed in Kenya between 1894 and 1921. Following the implementation of Indirect Rule in Kenya, indigenous law and custom were followed in political and judicial proceedings, with the colonial administration requiring a working knowledge of traditional customs. This book contains information collected by C. W. Hobley during his tenure as administrator of Nyanza Province and was first published in 1910 as part of the Cambridge Archaeological and Ethnological Series. This detailed ethnography was the first systematic survey of the...

N. W. Thomas (1868 1936) was one of the first government anthropologists of the colonial era and published one of the first studies of central African languages. This book, written in the early stages of his career, is a study of kinship structures in indigenous Australian peoples, and was first published as part of the Cambridge Archaeological and Ethnological Series in 1906. Thomas develops and defines fundamental anthropological concepts used today such as consanguinity as a distinct term affecting descent, status and duties in a society and emphasises the importance of seeing kinship...

W. Rickmer Rickmers (1873 1965) was a German explorer and mountaineer who visited and explored central Asia five times between 1894 and 1906. This book provides an account of his travels in the area he calls Turkestan, which incorporates modern Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and south-west Kazakhstan, and was first published in 1913. The region, which contains the ancient cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, had not been previously described in so much detail by a western European traveller. Rickmers includes accounts of both these historic cities as well as describing the social life of the indigenous...

John Roscoe (1861 1932) was an ordained Christian missionary who was elected a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society in 1912 for his contributions to the ethnographic record of Uganda. John Roscoe joined the Uganda mission in 1891 and upon returning to England in 1909 he began to publish the results of his investigations into the lives of the indigenous people in Uganda. This edition contains an ethnographic survey of six different indigenous Bantu speaking groups living near Lake Victoria, and was first published as part of the Cambridge Archaeological and Ethnological Series in 1912....

H. A. MacMichael (1882 1969) was a member of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan government between 1905 and 1933 and was the deputy Inspector of Kordofan province in Sudan between 1906 and 1912. After combining his administrative duties with ethnographic research, he published this volume as part of the Cambridge Archaeological and Ethnographic Series in 1912: it was the first major ethnographic work on the Sudan. The book combines the history of the province with genealogical information based on interviews MacMichael conducted with local people during his long tenure in Kordofan. The ethnography's...

Dr C. G. Seligmann (1873 1940) was a renowned anthropologist who was President of the Royal Anthropological Institute between 1923 and 1925. After joining the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait in Melanesia in 1898, he changed his career from medicine to anthropology and began his career as a distinguished field anthropologist. This book contains his pioneering ethnology of the indigenous Vedda people of Sri Lanka. The social, political, religious and economic life of the Veddas is systematically examined in this detailed study, first published as part of the Cambridge...

H. R. Davies (1865 1950) was an English army officer and member of the British intelligence service. Between 1894 and 1900 he was asked by the British government to lead survey expeditions into the modern Chinese province of Yunnan to discover possible routes for a railway connecting British-occupied Burma with the upper Yangtze river and through to Sichuan. This book contains an account of his travels though Yunnan province, written as a travelogue and first published in 1909. The region had been little explored by westerners before Davies' expeditions, and this is the first detailed...

This journal, kept by a soldier in the Light Dragoons of the voyage to 'China and Tartary' in the years 1792 1793, was published in 1798. Holmes kept his diary during the attempt by Lord Macartney to establish an embassy in China. Macartney returned to Britain unsuccessful, heightening western curiosity about this secluded and mysterious nation, and so this account by a soldier assigned to Lord Macartney's guard remains an important historical source on Europeans in China during this period. While, as the editor's preface admits, the text is not of great literary significance ('written by a...

Isabella Bird's fascinating observational anecdotes of nineteenth-century Japan. Volume 1 recounts first impressions and native ways of life.

Unbeaten Tracks contains fascinating observational anecdotes of nineteenth-century Japan. This volume continues the journey, including experiences of tribal living.