Sir Robert Lambert Playfair

A first edition copy of Playfair's A History of Arabia Felix or Yemen.

• Sir Robert Lambert Playfair (English).
• A History of Arabia Felix or Yemen, From the Commencement of the Christian Era to the Present Time: Including an Account of the British Settlement of Aden.
• Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1859.
• Octavo.
• 193 pages.
• Includes a folding map, colored in outline.
• Bound in original plum cloth.

The first major history of Yemen by an British author, and one of the earliest accounts of Aden under British occupation. The work covers some 2,000 years of Yemeni history including the Portuguese presence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, through an overview of Richard Burton’s trip to the Somali coast in 1855, right up to Playfair’s firsthand experience of the British in Aden.

J. G. Taylor (armorial bookplate), Vice Consul at Basra, 1851-58 and Consul-General for Kurdistan.