I explore the role of identity documents, including forgeries, in this chapter. I analyze the gendered social meanings attributed to passports, as well as the strategies of underage female migrants – the primary targets of the anti-trafficking crusade – in response to state surveillance. Young women were savvy actors in procuring and using forged papers. They stole or borrowed the birth certificates of older sisters, friends, and acquaintances to apply for passports, and they lied, often convincingly, to border control agents about their identity, profession, and final destination. This chapter also shows how the gendered identity of migrants and class-based notions of sexual respectability determined access to the passport, and how age- and gender-based restrictions on mobility prompted some women to resort to forgeries.

Political intelligence was vital to the Company’s subsidiary alliance system; to enforce it, Residents needed to be able to identify when its conditions were being breached. Yet, the Residents’ papers indicate that the problem was not so much collecting intelligence as determining how to use it. Fraud, or the possibility of fraud, was an important consideration; Residents devised elaborate strategies for identifying forgeries as well as for managing the composition and transmission of letters at court. News passed by word of mouth proved even more ungovernable. Residents were prone to distrust rumour, viewing it as either idle gossip or as insidious disinformation propagated by enemies. Still, they sometimes had no choice but to engage with rumour, particularly when allegations of Company brutality circulated in the streets. Mistrust might have been a common feature at royal capitals, but it also permeated the Residents’ relationship with his superiors in the Company. Residents sometimes misrepresented their activities as a means of shoring up their authority, but they also relied on keeping lines of communication open; frequently, it was Calcutta that remained frustratingly silent. In sum, though gathering and disseminating intelligence was one of the Residencies’ primary functions, fulfilling this responsibility was never simple.

Mid-century public libraries legislation in Britain was directed mostly at the use of modern books, but some of the larger libraries also built up substantial collections of early books. Specialefforts were made by some to collect local literature of all kinds, as awareness grew also of the importance of the mass of published ephemera that underpinned social activity.

The thousands of bullae and other objects impressed with seals found in the Hittite capital Hattusa have thus far been interpreted, almost exclusively, as related to wooden tablets. The seal impressions contain the names and very often also the titles of kings and high-ranking officials allegedly witnessing royal decisions recorded on the wooden tablets that were lost in fires that destroyed the buildings where they were kept. Such buildings would have housed the state archives of the Hittite kingdom. This theory leaves a lot of essential questions unanswered. Instead, using Neo-Assyrian and later parallels, it is proposed that these collections of sealings were used as reference collections to check the authenticity of a seal and to detect forgeries. Seal forgeries were common in the ancient Near East and checking earlier impressions from the same persons was the only way to verify the authenticity of incoming sealed documents and goods.

This chapter presents the reader with the Tārīkh al-fattāsh, an indispensable source for understanding the Middle Niger in the nineteenth century. It first introduces its author, Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir, and his writings. Then, it exposes Nuḥ b. al-Ṭāhir’s skillfulness in embedding new pieces of writing into an older chronicle, the seventeenth-century “Chronicle of Ibn al-Mukhtār,” to produce a masterful work in support of his patron, Aḥmad Lobbo. The latter is portrayed as sultan, the authoritative ruler of West Africa and the last of a long line of legitimate rulers modelled on Askiyà Muḥammad, the foremost Askiyà emperor of the Songhay; as the twelfth of the caliphs under whom the Islamic community would thrive, according to a ḥadīth ascribed to the Prophet; and as “renewer” of Islam, who, according to another Prophetic tradition, is sent every one hundred years by God to prevent the Muslim community from going astray.

This chapter addresses crucial historiographical, philological, and historical questions concerning the nature of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh, a widely circulated yet misinterpreted primary source for West African history. By reviewing a hundred years of scholarship on the topic and exploring West African manuscript libraries, the chapter demonstrates that the current understanding and uses of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh are radically impaired by scholars’ dependence on a defective colonial confection that passes as a critical edition produced by Houdas and Delafosse in 1913. This flawed edition and translation in fact conflates two different works: the seventeenth-century “Chronicle of the son of al-Mukhtār” and the nineteenth-century Tārīkh al-fattāsh written by the Fulani scholar Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir from the entourage of Aḥmad Lobbo, the funding leader of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi.

This chapter explores the early history of scientific instrument collecting through an assessment of the practices of two key collectors working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: Lewis Evans and Robert Whipple. The chapter focusses, in particular, on the presence of fake scientific instruments in the early trade in antique instruments. By using a data-driven analysis of the buying and selling of antique scientific instruments in the early years of the trade, a general picture of the preferences exhibited by different buyers and the features that added value to antique scientific instruments is presented. These factors and how they may have influenced the types of forgery that emerged are then considered. It is shown that fake scientific instruments were being sold at public auction as early as the 1890s, with at least one collector actively taking measures to spot them and avoid buying them.

The mid-1950s saw the unmasking of two scientific forgeries: the well-known Piltdown skull was shown to be a fake by J. S. Weiner, and Derek Price, a researcher in the newly opened Whipple Museum, demonstrated that a number of ‘early’ scientific instruments were in fact no more than half a century old. When Price announced his findings, he invoked the Piltdown story, urging historians to be as careful as their scientific colleagues. In this paper I use the Piltdown case and Derek Price’s work identifying five forgeries in the Whipple Museum’s collection to argue that the detection of forgeries was as much a matter of the changing nature of collections as it was a result of new scientific techniques or a more discerning eye. I characterize the change in attitudes towards the Piltdown skull as a move from visibility to legibility, and show that the same holds for Price’s own research into antique scientific instruments, which moved from the collector’s cabinet to the museum card-catalogue and, again, from visibility to legibility.