We want to know you better: Data-collecting in the service of Empire

From the late-19th to the mid-20th centuries, the European colonial powers continued to build their respective colonies in Southeast Asia for the sake of expanding the power of their respective countries and to address the growing demands of their own populations back home. Governor Sir Andrew Clarke's claim that the Malay Peninsula was the perfect place to send Britain's failures – a kind of second home for dullards – was in some ways correct, for it doesn't require that much intelligence to run the machinery of Empire – though building an Empire does. Empire-building was not solely related to questions of prestige and standing in the Western world, for as Pankaj Mishra (2017) – via Arendt – has argued, ‘this debasing hierarchy of races was established (overseas) because the promise of equality and liberty at home (in Europe) required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled. We tend to forget that imperialism, with its promise of land, food and raw materials, was widely seen in the late 19th century as crucial to national progress and prosperity. Racism was – and is – more than an ugly prejudice. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change’. In the face of rapid socio-political change and growing public unease both at home and in the colonies, the need to know more about colonial society in order to manage and police it better was paramount.

The building of the all-seeing and all-knowing colonial apparatus has been the subject of this book, and in the previous chapters I have looked at the writings of colonial functionaries like Raffles, Crawfurd, St. John, Low, Daly, Clifford, as well as their supervisors and subordinates, who were the architects of this system of data-gathering, mapping and framing of the colonised Other. Their efforts did require intelligence, and the outcome was more (economic, political, strategic and military) intelligence that served the ends of empire-building.