In his classic study of the transmission of Arabic science into Latin, which contributed so much to our knowledge of the “Renaissance” of the 12th century, Charles Homer Haskins was the first scholar to bring into clear focus the morass of bibliographical information given by Wüstenfeld and Steinschneider, and he was able to define, on the basis of fresh investigation of the manuscript material, the activity and personalities of individual translators. The bulk of his evidence rested on the translators' prefaces, which give some or all of the following information: the title and author of the Arabic original, the Latin translator, the dedicatee, and other works by the same translator, whether contemplated or already finished. Such information provides a very useful framework for assessing the œuvre of a particular translator. However, the edition and investigation of the texts themselves have yielded a certain amount of new information and, although Haskins's work has by no means been superseded, we are now in a position to clarify certain points and add to his conclusions.

The history of learning among the Arabs in the great age, i.e. from about a.d. 700 to 950 or about 80 to 340 of the Hijrah, is not so well known that we can afford to neglect any source which promises to throw light on it.

[No questions of greater practical importance, perhaps, have ever occupied the attention of the British government in India, than those of the allodial rights of the inhabitants, and the amount and species of revenue which it might be justified in claiming from them. There are certainly none, among the vast number of peculiar and delicate cases connected with the government of our possessions in that country, which have elicited so much conflicting opinion, which have been more ably argued by men of the highest talent and information, or which have appeared more difficult of solution.

Isaac Burkill, the scholar whose birth-centenary we are commemorating, has excellently surveyed the history of botanical activities in India. His Chapters on the history of botany in India originally appeared as separate articles in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society from December 1953 onwards. More recently, the Botanical Survey of India responded to a general wish by publishing these articles in book form, revised by Burkill himself, his revision being completed in the 93rd year of his long and fruitful life.

Among the popular misconceptions which still linger in the minds of many people who are interested in the study of different religious systems, who are personally involved in one of the growing Hindu- or Buddhist-based modern religious movements, or who even do academic research in the field of the history of religions, is the rather simplistic view that Hinduism teaches the existence of a transmigrating individual soul, but that Buddhism denies it. At the same time it is well known that Buddhism, like Hinduism, teaches the rebirth of the individual in successive lives, in combination with the doctrine of moral retribution for his deeds in this or the next life or in subsequent lives according to the laws of karma, whose operation can be summed up rather well by the use of the biblical saying: “as you have sown so you will reap”.

In attempting to write a religious and political history of Ḥaḍramawt in the Middle Ages one inevitably encounters a number of methodological and historiographical problems some of which will be addressed in the present article. The first arises from the overall scarcity of historical documentation on the period in question. More importantly, the sources that are available are riddled with underlying agendas and biases, which often hinge on considerations of genealogy and clannish honour. These genealogical or clannish agendas and biases are evident in the sources dealing with practically every aspect of Ḥaḍrami history. However, they are especially conspicuous in the historical texts which describe the spread of the Shāfi'ī school of law in Ḥaḍramawt, the cult of local saints and the origins of local religious and educational institutions. In my recent study of Ḥaḍramī shrines and seasonal pilgrimages, I have brought out the genealogical underpinnings of the theological polemic around the cult of local holy men and women - a polemic that grew especially intense in the first decades of our century and flared up with a vengeance during the recent civil war between the Northern and Southern parts of unified Yemen. In this paper I will demonstrate how these hidden agendas have manifested themselves in the historical accounts of Ḥaḍramī Islam with special reference to the rise of the Shāfi'ī madhhab and the dissemination of Ṣūfism.

The vicissitudes of a Jewish secretary, whom his master, an Emir in Damascus, compelled to adopt Islām and to accompany him on his pilgrimage to Medinah and Mekkah, are described in a number of skilfully wrought Hebrew poems printed here for the first time. They are extant in two manuscripts, Oxford MS. Heb. f. 3 and 4 (see Neubauer-Cowley's Catalogue of Hebrew MSS. at the Bodleian, vol. ii, Nos. 27262–4 and 2766). They are designated as Ḳaraite hymns (so on the backs of the binding), but have really no connexion whatever with this sect. The handwriting seems to be of the fourteenth century, but furnishes no conclusive evidence.

This article provides new perspectives in interpreting the sartorial codes present in Orientalist portraits of European subjects. Art historians have traditionally implicated these works in the European imperialist project of appropriating, manipulating, and gaining mastery over the Orient. More recently, as part of a wider effort to challenge conventional portrayals of colonial encounters in purely confrontational, monolithic terms, portraits of Europeans in exotic dress have been seen as visual proof that certain Europeans may have ‘crossed-over’ or ‘gone-native’. This article advances a third perspective. Analysing several portraits of Europeans with Indian connections during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it demonstrates the importance of analysing portraiture as an act of public performance. It shows that, in many cases, the performance of both artist and sitter alike were not intended for the colonial population, but for the spectators of colonialism situated ‘back home’ in Europe. Applying this new analytical approach to such an important and extensive genre of sources has far reaching implications both within the field of art history as well as within the broader domains of colonial history and contemporary East–West cultural studies. The interpretation of Western portrayals of the Orient – both visual and literary, both historical and contemporary – as active participants in an imperialist ideology must not eclipse the other, potentially less-charged, varied, and complex motivations of their participants.

In the spring of 1980, the author was asked to prepare a catalogue of the Persian manuscripts preserved in the library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. During preliminary stages of this work a remarkable manuscript came to light which is the subject of the present article. This is the personal horoscope of Iskandar Sultan, the grandson of Tīmūr (d. 807/1405). Iskandar ruled in Fars, South West Iran, for five years from 1409 to 1414. He is best known for his interest in the arts and sciences and for his patronage of manuscript production.

This article establishes that the first museum in China was not the Zhendan Museum in Shanghai, founded by the French Jesuit Pierre Marie Heude (1836–1902) in 1868, but the “British Museum in China”, founded in 1829 by three supercargoes of the English East India Company, in Macao, a Portuguese enclave in the Pearl River Delta since c.1577. My research, based on Portuguese, British and American sources, allows us to better understand the context in which the founders of the museum interacted and lived in Macao, how their research and field-work was important for academic British institutions such as the British Museum in London and how the British Museum of Macao was founded and became the first (western-styled) museum in China.

Buddhism, first officially adopted by Tibetan royalty in the seventh century, remained confined to court circles and was not widely accepted during the reign of the Tibetan kings between the seventh and ninth centuries. After a dark period of persecution during the late imperial period, the so-called “Second Diffusion” of Buddhism in Tibet began towards the end of the tenth century.

This article analyses long-term population dynamics—growth, decline, sex- and age-composition—in Chaghadaid-era Central Asia in the context of the ‘Late-medieval Crisis’. It is based on a unique dataset of 630 epitaphs from two East Syriac (‘Nestorian') graveyards in the Semirech'ye region (Northwest Tian Shan, North Kyrgyzstan), boosted by archaeological and osteological evidence from the same graveyards. This epigraphic corpus is truly unique in the sense that this is the only surviving data that allow the undertaking of such a quantitative reconstruction of pre-modern Central Asian demography. A close analysis of the corpus, based on the ‘excess mortality’ method, reveals rapid demographic growth between circa 1270 and 1330, despite frequent short-term mortality crises, caused, most likely, by a combination of environmental and political factors. The population growth came to a sudden halt because of a major plague outbreak in 1338–1339, killing about three-quarters of the local population, and initiating what was known as the Black Death of 1347–1353 in West Eurasia and North Africa. The analysis of sex and age ratios indicates that the local population regime was heavily male-dominated. The plague of 1338–1339 targeted primarily younger women, most likely due to pregnancy-related hazards; conversely, in other crisis years, adult males were more susceptible. The findings of the article are wrapped into the wider context of the ‘Late-medieval Crisis’.

The alphabet (rōmaji) has never been considered a serious contender for the national script in Japan, although at several points since the country's modern period began in 1868 supporters have made a case for its adoption on varying grounds, most notably those of education, democracy and office automation. Although such advocates have included influential scholars and bureaucrats, their combined intellectual gravitas has never been sufficient to allow their arguments for romanisation to outweigh the strong cultural traditions and ideologies of writing centred on the existing three-script writing system. Even today, in the face of pressures imposed by modern keyboard technology, discussion of the issue is not on the national agenda. This article considers the place of romanisation in Japan today and offers a short history of the rōmaji movement since the late nineteenth century.

In 1908 and 1911 the late Lieut.-Colonel D. C. Phillott published in the Bibliotheca Indica two Persian works which he described on the title-pages as The Qawānīnu 'ṣ-Ṣayyad [sic, for 'ṣ-Ṣayyād] of Khudā Yār Khān 'Abbāsī and The Faras-nāma of Zabardast Khān. Curiously enough the person named on each title-page is not the author but the author's father. Colonel Phillott was evidently unfamiliar with what may be called the Ibn i Fulān Fulān formula [cf. PL. I, p. 21618] and so he misunderstood Dā'ūd ibn Yār- Muḥammad 'Abbāsī when he called himself Ibn i Yār-Muḥammad faqīr Dā'ūd (p. ix) and Ibn i Yār-Muḥammad 'urf Khudā-yār Khān Dā'ūd 'Abbāsī (p. xxi).

The Land-revenue system described in the Āīn-i-Akbari differs widely from that which British administrators took over in the eighteenth century, and students of history or economics require to know when and how the changes took place. I cannot find any literature dealing with this subject, and I attempt in this paper to estimate the changes which took place during the reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan.

In this article I suggest that, although many Jews perished during the wars between the Mamluks and the Franks during the thirteenth century's second half, and others migrated to different Jewish communities in the Middle East and Europe, some Jews migrated to Safed, Jerusalem, and perhaps to Gaza as well. A significant number of the Jews who lived in Safed and Jerusalem during the early decades of the fourteenth century were of a Western European origin but were not newcomers from Europe. I suggest that some of these were Jews who previously lived in Acre and Tyre and migrated to Safed and Jerusalem either shortly before the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem got its coup de grâce, or afterwards.

This article seeks to trace the profile of the governors (mutasaddis) of the main port-cities (especially Surat and, to a lesser extent, Cambay) of the Mughal province of Gujarat in the first half of the seventeenth century. My research on the careers of individual mutasaddis – based mainly (but not exclusively) on existent Portuguese materials – allows us to better understand the social world of those occupying key positions in the ‘waterfront’ of the Mughal Empire and its dealings extensively with the European powers (Portuguese, Dutch and English). Hence, the analysis of the professional and personal trajectories of the Indian Muslim doctor Muqarrab Khan and the Persian Mir Musa Mu'izzul Mulk presented here demonstrate how far business, politics and cultural patronage were often entangled in the career of a Mughal mutasaddi of Gujarat.

Up until the British departure from India, in 1947, hundreds of Indian princely states succeeded in maintaining a semi-autonomous existence beneath the wide umbrella of British paramount power. These states, which were scattered over the whole subcontinent, ranged from large and imposing to tiny and insignificant, and were dominated by Hindu, Muslim and Sikh ruling elites.