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
7 - Crawfurd’s Burma as the Torpid ‘Land of Tyranny’
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 country was universally cultivated… [but] the impression left upon the mind of Dr Wallich and myself, regarding the extent of industry and the amount of inhabitants, was not, however, favourable. There was no bustle, no activity, but a stillness and tranquillity without animation.
– John Crawfurd, Journal of an Embassy to the Court of Ava (1829)Meddling with Burma: John Crawfurd and the East India Company's ‘War on Tyranny’
Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.
– Lysander Spooner, An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852)If Borneo had been imagined and represented as the ‘den of pirates’, a similar fate was in store for other parts of Southeast Asia. In the process of being continuously defined and redefined, these places would eventually be located in a number of ways – geographically on the map, but also discursively within the mental landscape of the European imaginary.
As we have seen in the previous chapters, this process of imagining Southeast Asia was not a uniform one: Various discursive strategies were employed by different actors and agents, creating a complex but interconnected patchwork of colonial imaginaries that conceived and saw the different parts of the region in many different ways. Raffles had consigned Java to the museum of empire, while Anderson had represented Sumatra as a market open for business. Keppel, Mundy and Marryat in turn had conflated Borneo with the trope of the Asiatic pirate, which went hand in hand with Brooke's own self-declared ‘war against piracy’. Another kingdom that would be radically reimagined by the outsider's arresting gaze was Burma – it would be equated with Asiatic tyranny and stupor – though at the beginning of the process of knowing the kingdom there was also the confounding question of where it was and where it should be located.
Though Burma/Myanmar today is seen as a Southeast Asian country, and has become a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), few may realise that up to World War I it was often equally regarded as an extension of the wider Indian world.
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- The Discursive Construction of Southeast Asia in 19th Century Colonial-Capitalist Discourse , pp. 157 - 186Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016