Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- A Note on the Language, Spelling and Pagination of Quotations
- 1 Introduction: Booking Southeast Asia: The History of an Idea
- 2 Booking Southeast Asia: And So It Begins, with a Nightmare
- 3 The New Language-Game of Modern Colonial Capitalism
- 4 Raffles’ Java as Museum
- 5 Dressing the Cannibal: John Anderson’s Sumatra as Market
- 6 Brooke, Keppel, Mundy and Marryat’s Borneo as ‘The Den of Pirates’
- 7 Crawfurd’s Burma as the Torpid ‘Land of Tyranny’
- 8 Bricolage, Power and How a Region Was Discursively Constructed
- Appendix A The full Transcript of the Article by William Cobbett on the Subject of the British Invasion of Java
- Appendix B Keeping an eye on the Javanese: Raffles’ ‘Regulations of 1814 for the More Effectual Administration of Justice in the Provincial Courts of Java'
- Appendix C James Brooke’s Detractors in the British Parliament and the Aborigines’ Protection Society
- Appendix D The clash between the HMS Dido and the Ships of the Rajah of Riao: A Case of Mistaken Identity and Misappropriation of the Signifier ‘Pirate’
- Appendix E The Construction of the Native other in the Writings of Hugh Clifford, British Colonial Resident to Pahang
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Dressing the Cannibal: John Anderson’s Sumatra as Market
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- A Note on the Language, Spelling and Pagination of Quotations
- 1 Introduction: Booking Southeast Asia: The History of an Idea
- 2 Booking Southeast Asia: And So It Begins, with a Nightmare
- 3 The New Language-Game of Modern Colonial Capitalism
- 4 Raffles’ Java as Museum
- 5 Dressing the Cannibal: John Anderson’s Sumatra as Market
- 6 Brooke, Keppel, Mundy and Marryat’s Borneo as ‘The Den of Pirates’
- 7 Crawfurd’s Burma as the Torpid ‘Land of Tyranny’
- 8 Bricolage, Power and How a Region Was Discursively Constructed
- Appendix A The full Transcript of the Article by William Cobbett on the Subject of the British Invasion of Java
- Appendix B Keeping an eye on the Javanese: Raffles’ ‘Regulations of 1814 for the More Effectual Administration of Justice in the Provincial Courts of Java'
- Appendix C James Brooke’s Detractors in the British Parliament and the Aborigines’ Protection Society
- Appendix D The clash between the HMS Dido and the Ships of the Rajah of Riao: A Case of Mistaken Identity and Misappropriation of the Signifier ‘Pirate’
- Appendix E The Construction of the Native other in the Writings of Hugh Clifford, British Colonial Resident to Pahang
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The British may not have created the longest-lived empire in history, but it was certainly one of the most data-intensive.
– Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and Fantasy of the Empire (1993)Pleasing the Company: John Anderson's Search for Sumatran Clients
The idea of travel as a means of gathering and recording information is commonly found in societies that exercise a high degree of political power. The traveller begins his journey with the strength of an empire sustaining him – albeit from a distance – militarily, economically, intellectually; he feels compelled to note down his observations in the awareness of a particular audience: his fellow country-men.
– Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe's Myths of the Orient (1988)As we have seen in the previous chapter, Stamford Raffles’ History of Java was in many respects a self-serving piece of work. The fact that Raffles did not spare the Dutch any of his criticism tells us something about who he was writing for: The History of Java was dedicated to the Prince Regent, and it sought to ingratiate Raffles and elevate him in the eyes of the members of the East India Company and British society in general. The work was not written to please the Dutch, or to enlighten the Javanese; it was meant to please the company that employed the author and to impress the society he sprung from.
That Raffles wrote for a specific public was not astonishing either: The language-game of nineteenth century racialised colonial-capitalism was a language-game that was confined to a particular community of language-users; and those who used that language understood its rules and how the language-game was meant to be played. The rules of that language-game remained relatively fixed throughout the nineteenth century, and its workings were predictable, as rules are wont to be. Thus it comes as no surprise that even after the failure of the Java expedition, and after Raffles had been despatched to Bencoolen as penance for his misdeeds (in the eyes of the company and his rivals), the proponents of colonial-capitalism continued to present him in a positive light: The January 1819 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine recounted Raffles’ return to the East Indies in glowing terms, depicting the man as active and energetic and eager to discover as much as he could about the island of Sumatra for the greater glory of England and the East India Company.
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- The Discursive Construction of Southeast Asia in 19th Century Colonial-Capitalist Discourse , pp. 99 - 120Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016