Honouring Professor Tony Stockwell, and RAS Collections Evening 2025

Next week, on Thursday 13 March, the Society will host a lecture in honour of Professor Tony Stockwell, a three-time President of the RAS and leading historian of the late British Empire and decolonisation period in Malaysia. Titled ‘The decolonisation of Malaysia and Singapore: a maritime perspective’, the lecture will be given by Nick White, Professor of Imperial and Commonwealth History at Liverpool John Moores University and Co-Director of Liverpool’s Centre for Port and Maritime History. Prof White studied under Tony Stockwell at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and in honouring Tony’s work, his lecture will combine Prof White’s current research interests in the decolonisation of Southeast Asia and ocean-going shipping. He will show how the best laid imperial plans – in this case, commercial rather than official – were scuppered by the twists and turns of local politics at the end of empire.

We hope many of you will be able to join us in honouring Tony’s long service to the Society and wider contributions to Asian studies, as well as to enjoy a lecture that is sure to be fascinating in its own right.

This year, the Society’s annual Collections Evening will take place on Thursday 10 April, at 6.30pm. Each year, these events highlight ongoing work with the Society’s collections. On this occasion, we are particularly pleased to welcome several leading experts in their respective fields: Dr Barbara Brend (Royal Asiatic Society), Dr Annabel Teh Gallop (British Library), and Dr Alexandra Green and Thaw Zin Latt (British Museum). Each will discuss the Society’s manuscript collections, turning a spotlight on Burmese and Persian manuscripts as well as manuscripts from maritime South East Asia. These presentations draw on important new research into the Society’s collection that was inspired by our recent bicentenary in 2023, and which we hope will soon be featured in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Please see below for a preview of the talks.

Burmese manuscripts at the RAS: a reassessment

Alexandra Green and Thaw Zin Latt

After its foundation in 1823, the Royal Asiatic Society rapidly found itself receiving gifts, bequests, and deposits of objects from coins and sculpture to manuscripts and textiles, as well as animal and vegetal specimens. Among some of the earliest arrivals were items from Burma, and although the interests and attention of the society have changed during its 200-year history, it has housed Burmese material continuously. Today, the society holds an important collection of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Burmese manuscripts and manuscript fragments. This talk explores the range of Burmese manuscripts in the RAS collection, looking at collecting histories and the importance of the pieces for our understanding of Burmese Buddhism and its practices over time.

The Raffles Collection of Malay and Javanese manuscripts reconsidered

Annabel Teh Gallop

The Royal Asiatic Society currently holds over 250 manuscripts in the languages of maritime Southeast Asia, mostly donated by British officials who had served in the Malay archipelago. The most significant gift received by the Society was the 80 Malay and 46 Javanese manuscripts belonging to Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, presented by his widow in 1830. Although Raffles is best known for The History of Java, published in London in 1817, a close examination of his collection suggests that Raffles was more interested in his Malay manuscripts than his Javanese ones.

A Choice of Paintings in Manuscripts in the Persian Language from the RAS Collection

Barbara Brend

In 1998, B. W. Robinson catalogued paintings in Persian manuscripts in the Society’s collection, employing twenty-nine reproductions in colour and more in black and white. A quarter century after Robinson’s work, and in celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the Society, we are presenting new colour images of paintings characteristic of each work, as well as examples from manuscripts from the Mughal world.

Edward Weech, 7 March 2025