After Aden came under British rule (1839) its Jewishcommunity was reinforced by Jewish immigrants frominland Yemen and also from other Middle Easterncountries. Some of the Adeni Jews, most of themBritish subjects, entered the Indian-Britishcommercial network and expanded it to East Africa,mainly to Ethiopia, founding commercial strongholdsthere. From the late nineteenth century, Jews comingfrom Yemen joined the existing Adenisettlements.

This paper compares the reasons for the emigration toEthiopia of Adeni Jews and Yemeni Jews, and theireconomic and social status under Italian colonialregime (established in Eritrea in the 1880s). Itdiscusses relations between these Jews, which itargues, were determined by the position of eachgroup in the colonial hierarchy, and by thenecessity of sustaining religious-communal life.Thus, in spite of their shared Yemeni origin andattendance at the same communal institutions,ethnicity and religion proved weaker than social andeconomic considerations, and the two groupscultivated a separate identity.

When historians explain the end of empires, they oftenfollow a ‘decline and fall’ paradigm which owes itsfame to Edward Gibbon's great book on the RomanEmpire. Recent historians of Late Antiquity,however, have tended to doubt its validity. Thisarticle considers the reasons for the end of theMongol Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenthcenturies. It examines the division of the empireinto four khanates, the eventual collapse of each ofwhich is then studied. It suggests that the khanateswhich retained more of their original nomadic ethos– the Golden Horde in the Pontic steppes and theChaghatai Khanate in Central Asia – were able tosurvive longer than those – in the Ilkhanate inPersia and the Great Khanate in China and Mongolia –which had their centres in sedentary lands. Itconcludes that in all cases, ‘fall’ was the resultof internal factors, about which there was nothingthat was inevitable, and that there is littleevidence of a long ‘decline’. Hence the ‘decline andfall’ paradigm does not seem to provide an adequateexplanatory framework.

The Oeconomy of Human Life purports to be an Englishtranslation of an ancient Indian text found by aChinese scholar in Lhasa. Almost certainly writtenby Robert Dodsley (1704–1764), the book became aneighteenth-century bestseller. This articlediscusses its place in the varied lineage of westernimages of Asia, beginning with Alexander the Great'sencounter with a group of ‘naked philosophers’ inIndia. It argues that the key features of theOeconomy are representative of the Enlightenmentperiod, with at best tenuous links to Tibet, Indiaand China. However, it also belongs to a muchbroader literary tradition with deep roots andunexpected contemporary resonances.

This article applies a synthetic approach ofphilological, religious, philosophical, and culturalstudies to explore the original meaning of the termsdao 道 and de 德,two primary concepts in traditional Chineseintellectual history. Through an etymologicalanalysis of the characters dao andde, and supported by bothreceived and discovered texts and materials, thisarticle demonstrates that daooriginally represented the spirit of the PoleStar/High God and the movement of Heaven, andde, in relation todao, originally represented theimpartial virtue and power of Heaven. In terms ofthis new interpretation, the article furtherdiscusses the signification of daoand de in the Laozi to uncover themystic aspects of the text.

This article examines over 200 years (1761–1963) ofChina's relations with the Central Asian tribalstate of Hunza. Employing a territorial genealogicalapproach, this research explores how Hunza, notinitially recognised during the high Qing as aninner dependency or vassal, was graduallyre-conceptualised by the Qing court as a historicaltributary protectorate, and then in the Republicanand Nationalist eras became known as a ‘lostterritory’ ripe for restoration. It will also arguethat the tributary system is not a dynastic legacythat ceased to function after 1911; but rather, itwas an instrument of political expediency thatcontinued to be used in the post-imperial era. In asense, this research offers a new thinking about the‘tribute system’ which might really be a nineteenthand twentieth century reinterpretation of an olderform of symbolically asymmetric interstate relations(common in one form or another throughout many partsof Asia); this reinterpretation was stronglyinformed by English-language terminology andformulations, including ‘suzerainty’ and themistranslation of ‘gong’ as ‘tribute’ itself, andboth Britain and China manipulated the terminologyand claimed to further their respective territorial,diplomatic and strategic interests.

Fellows of the Society and guests. At each AnniversaryGeneral Meeting we commemorate the inauguration ofthe Society in 1823 and reaffirm our founders’commitment to the encouragement of research and thedissemination of learning in relation to Asia. Inhis address at the first meeting, Henry Colebrookedeclared that Britain owed a “debt of gratitude” toAsia and had a duty to repay its “obligation” by“promoting an interchange of benefits”. It was atime of vigorous British expansion in Asia; but itwas also a time of woeful indifference in Britain toAsian societies and cultures. In those daysuniversities did little to make good such neglect.Indeed, lamenting the ignorance of Asia in Britishpublic life, another founder-member of the Society,Sir George Staunton, would later emphasise itseducational function. It was, he said “the provinceof the Royal Asiatic Society . . . to bring togetherinto one focus those who are able to impart thisknowledge, and those who are desirous to receiveit”. Clearly the RAS was established to meet anational need, as were other learned societies ofthe same era, such as the Royal Astronomical Societyformed three years earlier, the Zoological Societyof London formed three years later and the RoyalGeographical Society which came into being in1830.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Fellows of the Society, I amhonoured to present the Annual Report for 2008.

The year was characterised by two majordevelopments.

The first of these relates to income from ongoingactivities. In 2008 we, in the Society, were largelysuccessful in developing our various sources ofincome and moving closer towards financialequilibrium from ongoing activities.