Annual General Meeting 7th May 2009, President's Address

Extract

Fellows of the Society and guests. At each Anniversary General Meeting we commemorate the inauguration of the Society in 1823 and reaffirm our founders’ commitment to the encouragement of research and the dissemination of learning in relation to Asia. In his address at the first meeting, Henry Colebrooke declared that Britain owed a “debt of gratitude” to Asia and had a duty to repay its “obligation” by “promoting an interchange of benefits”. It was a time of vigorous British expansion in Asia; but it was also a time of woeful indifference in Britain to Asian societies and cultures. In those days universities did little to make good such neglect. Indeed, lamenting the ignorance of Asia in British public life, another founder-member of the Society, Sir George Staunton, would later emphasise its educational function. It was, he said “the province of the Royal Asiatic Society . . . to bring together into one focus those who are able to impart this knowledge, and those who are desirous to receive it”. Clearly the RAS was established to meet a national need, as were other learned societies of the same era, such as the Royal Astronomical Society formed three years earlier, the Zoological Society of London formed three years later and the Royal Geographical Society which came into being in 1830.