Stabbing at the Heart of their Dominions: John Crawfurd's Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-General of India to the Court of Ava

To say that John Crawfurd (1783-1868) – the East India Company-man and later servant to Lord Hastings and the Anglo-Indian colonial government – had a low opinion of the Burmese people would be an understatement. The fear and distrust of the Asian Other which Bayly (1996) has so vividly described in the workings of British data-collecting and surveillance in India was also evident in the work of Crawfurd, and may have been the result of his own experience in India before he turned to Southeast Asia. The Scottish surgeon-turned-Company functionary had served in India at the start of his career, before moving on to Southeast Asia where he took part in Lord Minto's invasion of Java (and served as the British Resident at the Court of Jogjakarta after the Javanese kingdom had been defeated and its capital ransacked). In 1821 he was sent to Siam and Cochinchina by the colonial authorities in India, and between 1823 to 1826 he was stationed in Singapore, where he helped to build the commercial colony that Raffles had claimed to have founded. Crawfurd would leave Singapore in 1826, and soon after his departure he would be sent off again by the Anglo-Indian government on a mission to the court of Ava in Burma, to negotiate the settlement of the Treaty of Yandabo (see Appendix C) that was signed after Burma's ignominious defeat at the hands of the British forces during the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824-1826.