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
6 - Brooke, Keppel, Mundy and Marryat’s Borneo as ‘The Den of Pirates’
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
Malaya, land of the pirate and the amok, your secrets have been well guarded, but the enemy has at last passed your gate, and soon the irresistible juggernaut of Progress will have penetrated to your remotest fastness, ‘civilised’ your people, and stamped them with the seal of a higher morality.
– Frank Swettenham, Malay Sketches (1895)There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
– Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (1955)Colonialism and the Necessity of the Pirate
[James Brooke] became convinced that Borneo and the Eastern isles afforded an open field for enterprise and research. To carry to the Malay races, so long the terror of the European merchant-vessel, the blessings of civilisation.
– Henry Keppel, The Expedition to Borneo of the HMS Dido (1846)Raffles’ account of Java had romanticised the island and consigned it to the museum of empire, while Anderson's account of Sumatra had squeezed the island dry of any traces of the exotic while bringing it within the ambit of the East India Company's commercial concerns. In both cases, the works produced by the two men who belonged to the company had reconfigured the places they wrote about in no uncertain terms, rendering them known but also imbuing their identity with traits and features that were not necessarily there to begin with. Their writings were instances of cultural perspectivism made manifest, and yet despite the subjective bias that can be clearly read off the pages of their respective works, these were nonetheless accounts of Southeast Asia that gradually contributed to the idea of the place itself, making it up as they went along.
Here would be a timely juncture to raise again Said's notion of instrumental fictions, and how such fictions can and have indeed been of instrumental use in the past. Said's point – relevant today as it is for the past – is that fictions in themselves are not necessarily to be faulted if their epistemic claims fall off the mark: For what is equally important is how such fictions could have practical utility as well.
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- The Discursive Construction of Southeast Asia in 19th Century Colonial-Capitalist Discourse , pp. 121 - 156Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016