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
4 - Raffles’ Java as Museum
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 census, the map, and the museum: together, they profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion – the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry.
– Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983)Knowing Java and Preserving Java: Thomas Stamford Raffles’ Great Venture
I believe there is no one possessed of more information respecting Java than myself.
– Stamford Raffles, in a letter to Elton Hammond (1813)Proposition 18: ‘I know’ often means: I have the proper grounds for my statement. So if the other person is acquainted with the language-game, he would admit that I know.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (1969)Thomas Stamford Raffles’ work The History of Java was published in London in 1817. It was, at the time, the most outstanding work of its kind in the English language, far surpassing the earlier account of Java that had been published by John Stockdale in 1812 and the work on Sumatra by the great doyen of East Indian studies William Marsden Accompanied by a set of outstanding coloured plates of the natives of Java rendered by William Daniell, and an extraordinarily detailed map of Java by J. Walker, Raffles’ History of Java – standing proudly as a hefty two-volume set – was destined, as John Bastin notes, to be ‘one of the classics of Southeast Asian historiography’ – despite the fact that the term ‘Southeast Asia’ had not even been coined then.
The History of Java was written and published only after Britain's brief occupation of Java had come to an end. The circumstances that led to the invasion and occupation of Java – by the East India Company and British forces – were complex, and reveal how Southeast Asia was already by then drawn into the web of geopolitical rivalry that emanated from the power centres of Europe.
By 1811 – the year of the British invasion – the Dutch had been in Java for more than two centuries. The Dutch had arrived there in 1610, led by Governor Bolt; and by 1621 they had established their foothold in Jayakarta (Jakarta), which they subsequently renamed Batavia.
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- The Discursive Construction of Southeast Asia in 19th Century Colonial-Capitalist Discourse , pp. 65 - 98Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016