ABSTRACT
The School of Oriental and African Studies, as I first knew it, was a place of extraordinary privilege and exciting promise. It was founded in 1917 “to give instruction in the Languages of Eastern and African peoples, Ancient and Modern, and in the Literature, History, Religion and Customs of those peoples, especially with a view to the needs of persons about to proceed to the East or to Africa for the pursuit of study or research, commerce or a profession.” Its promoters and its pioneer teachers had mostly belonged to the small minority of British officials and educators who had concerned themselves deeply with the languages and cultures of the Indian empire. The First World War, with the breakup of the Ottoman empire, had seen an expansion of British interests in the Middle East and had underlined the need for Orientalist skills concerning that region also. The case for an academic centre of Oriental studies had thus been made, but the constituency of active supporters was small, and the founders had had to struggle through the 1920s and 1930s on a shoestring budget to build up a staff of about thirty teachers, many of them employed on a part-time basis. The Second World War, however, spreading across so much of Southeast Asia and the Far East and employing troops drawn from almost every part of Africa, brought to the cause a wholly new appreciation of the scale and urgency of what was required. It was beginning to be understood that the postwar world would demand a fairly speedy end to formal empires and that future relations between Europe and the Third World would need to be conducted on the basis of much more knowledge and respect for Asian and African civilisations and cultures.
