Oriental and African Studies in Great Britain
N O WESTERN country has had longer, more intimate, and more extended connections with the peoples and countries of the East than have the English. Generation after generation, Englishmen in great numbers have gone out to the East from their island home as soldiers and sailors, as engineers and lawyers and administrators and, above all, as traders. For the world-wide commerce of Great Britain, upon which the life of her people depends, has been built in no small measure upon her trade with the countries of Asia and Africa. Nor has it been a one-way traffic. Commerce must of course be a mutual affair, and an ever increasing number of Asiatics have come to this country to stay among us for longer or shorter periods. In particular the universities of Great Britain have during the past hundred years welcomed within their walls a growing number of students from Asia and Africa. In I939 the number of students who had come from Asiatic or African countries reached a total of I23. Yet through it all the English people as a whole have remained strangely incurious about the languages, the literatures, the history, the philosophies, the religions, and the art of all these peoples with whom they had such i timate and close connection. A great majority even of those who spent their whole lives in the East were content to acquire just so much of the everyday language of the people among whom they worked as would enable them to conduct their business. Of the great literatures, ancient as well as modern, of the culture, of the whole foundation upon which the civilization of these peoples was built, they remained for the most part completely ignorant. Even in the universities, in whose courses profound study of the classical literatures of Europe, together with the history, the philosophy, and the art which they enshrined had for long formed a dominant part even in the universities of Great Britain, the study of the civilizations of the Orient was pursued to a far less extent than in those of other western countries. Yet what a wealth of human experience would have been open to their students in the literatures of Islam, of Persia, of India, of China, of Japan. To this general apathy there have been notable exceptions. To mention only four of the greatest: there was Sir William Jones, the second centenarv of whose birth was celebrated