James Fraser. The history of Nadir Shah, formerly called Thamas Kuli Khan, the present Emperor of Persia (1742)

Title:	The history of Nadir Shah, formerly called Thamas Kuli Khan, the present Emperor of Persia. To which is prefix’d a short history of the Moghol Emperors. At the end is inserted, a catalogue of about two hundred manuscripts in the Persic and other oriental languages. Collected in the East. 2nd edition
Author:	James Fraser
Translator:
Editor:
Language:	English
Series:
Place:	London
Publisher:	Printed for A[ndrew]. Millar
Year:	MDCCXLII [1742]
Pages:	VI, 240, 40
ISBN:
File:	PDF, 22.9 MB
Download:	Click here

Second edition, same year as the first. Appointed a writer to the Bombay presidency in 1730, Fraser (b. 1713 – d.1754) spent some ten years at the company’s trading posts at Mocha in the Yemen and at Cambay and Surat, in western India. He had a great aptitude for languages and “not only mastered the vernacular languages used around the Arabian Sea, but took lessons in literary ones as well, in Avestan from Parsis, Sanskrit from Brahmans, and Persian from learned Muslims. He made a large collection of manuscripts, coins, and miniatures” (ODNB). Around 1740 he returned to England and worked up some of his material into the present book. “It was the first book in English treating of the Persian ruler Nadir Shah, ‘the scourge of God’, who had invaded India in 1737-8. It is important not only for a first-hand account of contemporary events probably written by William Cockill, who had served in Persia, but also for historical texts and original documents translated from Persian by Fraser”, and includes as an appendix a catalogue of some of Fraser’s collection of manuscripts. After his death in 1754 this collection was purchased from his widow by the Radcliffe Library in Oxford, transferring to the Bodleian in 1782.