SOAS University of London
SOAS was founded in 1916, with the Foreign Office's encouragement, to train administrators and missionaries in the languages of the empire's eastern and African holdings. A century later the institution has turned its archives inward on themselves: the same collections that once served the Colonial Office now underwrite the critical study of empire's afterlives.
The library is the national research collection for its field — 1.5 million volumes in over 400 languages, from Amharic manuscripts to colonial-era censuses — and the Brunei Gallery stages exhibitions from its holdings. The student body is among the most international in Britain; the common room, it is often said, needs no Erasmus programme.
Field notes
- The library's Chinese collection is reckoned the largest in Europe outside Russia.
- Aung San Suu Kyi wrote her PhD here — on literature and politics in Burma, under a pen name.
- The Japanese-style roof garden on the fifth floor is one of Bloomsbury's quietest secrets.
Notable connections
In brief — from the field guide
The School of Oriental and African Studies — founded to train the empire's administrators, now the West's leading centre for Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Its library holds over 1.5 million items in more than 400 languages.
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