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Raffles and the Golden Opportunity by Victoria Glendinning - review
Bernard Porter enjoys a life of the right-thinking founder of Singapore
The Guardian, Wednesday 5 December 2012 06.00 GMT
Raffles seems a decent sort. This is one of the reasons why he was considered such a failure, by and large, by other imperialists before his Singapore coup (1819).
The East India Company, whose servant he was, wanted him only to squeeze profits out of the stations of which he was put in charge. (It was a capitalist company, after all.) But all of them ended up in debt.
Raffles wanted to do good for their inhabitants, and couldn't see how that could be done without investment. He insisted that this would pay dividends eventually – happy populations would produce more – but the company's shareholders didn't do "long term".
So he was sacked from his posts in Java and Sumatra, and criticised for exceeding his orders – for example by abolishing slavery there off his own bat. When he retired through ill health, and lost almost everything in a shipwreck on his way home, he received no compensation and no pension, and was required to pay back some of his salary. Most canny 19th-century imperialists did better for themselves than that. (But then most of them – every one of Raffles's colleagues, according to Victoria Glendinning – were Scots.)
Raffles was a poor Londoner – though he was born at sea – with almost no formal education, who at 14 got a job as a clerk in East India House, and then went on, and up, from there. He succeeded mainly through his own charm and ability, although he had some influential connections, which he had had to cultivate – and luck.
There's an interesting general point to be made here: many of the leading lights of the British empire in the 19th century are not easily categorised as upper or middle or lower class, but came from the interstices between the classes: men and women uncomfortable with the social positions they were in. This often gave them more independent views than those who were more conventionally one thing or the other.
Raffles's views were certainly in this category. As well as being anti-slavery (not so rare then), he also opposed cock-fighting, gambling and the death penalty – except for murders "by Amok" (in the course of riot). That might seem to place him among evangelical Christians at that time; but in fact he was hardly at all religious, and was set against missionary proselytism. "I am a good deal more inclined than you are," he wrote to his vicar cousin Thomas, "to let people go to heaven in their own way." He was for free trade, but against large-scale capitalist exploitation in agriculture: "When I see every man cultivating his own field, I cannot but think him happier far than when he is cultivating the field of another."
His main virtue, and the reason for any success he had in the East Indies, was his interest and genuine empathy for other cultures than his own. He learned the local languages, for example, and got along on terms of perfect equality with the people. It was this, together with an omnivorous curiosity, that lay behind his great collection of Javanese natural specimens and cultural artefacts, which – minus those lost in the shipwreck – can now be found in the British Museum. He brought them back, he said, to prove to the people of England "that the Javanese are not savages". (He also brought back some instruments of torture used by Java's former – and later – colonial masters, to show that the Dutch were.)
One of his reasons for picking on Singapore Island for the East India Company's great new entrepôt between India and China was that it had once, 600 years before, been the great "Lion City" of the original – pre-Muslim - Malayan civilisation. When he took it over (by treaty) it had declined to just a few fishing villages; so he was hardly expropriating a going concern. Within three years it had 10,000 inhabitants. Today it has 5 million.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/05/raffles-victoria-glendinning-review
Bernard Porter enjoys a life of the right-thinking founder of Singapore
The Guardian, Wednesday 5 December 2012 06.00 GMT
Raffles seems a decent sort. This is one of the reasons why he was considered such a failure, by and large, by other imperialists before his Singapore coup (1819).
The East India Company, whose servant he was, wanted him only to squeeze profits out of the stations of which he was put in charge. (It was a capitalist company, after all.) But all of them ended up in debt.
Raffles wanted to do good for their inhabitants, and couldn't see how that could be done without investment. He insisted that this would pay dividends eventually – happy populations would produce more – but the company's shareholders didn't do "long term".
So he was sacked from his posts in Java and Sumatra, and criticised for exceeding his orders – for example by abolishing slavery there off his own bat. When he retired through ill health, and lost almost everything in a shipwreck on his way home, he received no compensation and no pension, and was required to pay back some of his salary. Most canny 19th-century imperialists did better for themselves than that. (But then most of them – every one of Raffles's colleagues, according to Victoria Glendinning – were Scots.)
Raffles was a poor Londoner – though he was born at sea – with almost no formal education, who at 14 got a job as a clerk in East India House, and then went on, and up, from there. He succeeded mainly through his own charm and ability, although he had some influential connections, which he had had to cultivate – and luck.
There's an interesting general point to be made here: many of the leading lights of the British empire in the 19th century are not easily categorised as upper or middle or lower class, but came from the interstices between the classes: men and women uncomfortable with the social positions they were in. This often gave them more independent views than those who were more conventionally one thing or the other.
Raffles's views were certainly in this category. As well as being anti-slavery (not so rare then), he also opposed cock-fighting, gambling and the death penalty – except for murders "by Amok" (in the course of riot). That might seem to place him among evangelical Christians at that time; but in fact he was hardly at all religious, and was set against missionary proselytism. "I am a good deal more inclined than you are," he wrote to his vicar cousin Thomas, "to let people go to heaven in their own way." He was for free trade, but against large-scale capitalist exploitation in agriculture: "When I see every man cultivating his own field, I cannot but think him happier far than when he is cultivating the field of another."
His main virtue, and the reason for any success he had in the East Indies, was his interest and genuine empathy for other cultures than his own. He learned the local languages, for example, and got along on terms of perfect equality with the people. It was this, together with an omnivorous curiosity, that lay behind his great collection of Javanese natural specimens and cultural artefacts, which – minus those lost in the shipwreck – can now be found in the British Museum. He brought them back, he said, to prove to the people of England "that the Javanese are not savages". (He also brought back some instruments of torture used by Java's former – and later – colonial masters, to show that the Dutch were.)
One of his reasons for picking on Singapore Island for the East India Company's great new entrepôt between India and China was that it had once, 600 years before, been the great "Lion City" of the original – pre-Muslim - Malayan civilisation. When he took it over (by treaty) it had declined to just a few fishing villages; so he was hardly expropriating a going concern. Within three years it had 10,000 inhabitants. Today it has 5 million.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/05/raffles-victoria-glendinning-review
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