William Irvine

William Irvine (4 July 1840 – 3 November 1911) was an administrator of the Indian Civil Service and historian, known for works on the Moghul Empire. He was in British India from 1863 to 1889. Life Born in Aberdeen, Scotland in July 1840, he was the only son of William Irvine, an Aberdeen advocate, by his wife Margaret Garden. On the death of his father when he was a child, Irvine's mother, of an Aberdeen family but a Londoner by birth, brought him to London. He owed most of his education to his mother and grandmother. Leaving a private school before he was fifteen, he served a short apprenticeship in business, and after spending some years as a clerk in the admiralty passed for the Indian Civil Service. He landed in Calcutta late in 1863 and was posted to the North-Western Provinces. He served there as a magistrate and collector until he retired and left India in 1889. He was employed for eight years in revising the rent and revenue settlement records of the Ghazipur district. In 1908, the Asiatic Society of Bengal made Irvine an honorary member. He was a vice-president and member of the council of the Royal Asiatic Society; he served also on the council of the Central Asian and other learned societies. He died at his house in Castelnau, Barnes, after a long illness, on 3 November 1911, and was buried in the Old Barnes cemetery. Works Irvine's major work of scholarship was a 1907 translation and edition of a chronicle of the Venetian traveller Niccolao Manucci. After François Bernier, Manucci was the main contemporary European authority for the history of India during the reign of Aurangzeb (1658–1707). Manucci's work was known at the end of the 19th century only in a garbled French version. Over eight years, Irvine discovered a Berlin codex that gives a part of the text, and a Venice manuscript that supplies its entirety. Manucci had dictated his work in Latin, French, Italian, and Portuguese.