Books in the Era of Gunboat Epistemology

Today we live in a globalised world that has been brought together via the communicative architecture that connects every part of the world and which has collapsed time and space. Astounding though these advances may seem to some, they have also been accompanied by the less pleasant phenomenon of the bad tourist who really does not know how to travel; and who perhaps should never have left home in the first place. We see the likes of them everywhere these days, from spoilt children who complain that there are no french fries on the menu in Java to middle-aged travellers who eat, love and pray their way across Asia in search of its exotic essence – which they read about in their bathtubs back home.

This book has been about another sort of traveller, one who perhaps never really travelled at all. It has been a book about the imagining, configuring, mapping and defining of this thing and place called Southeast Asia by a generation of men who lived in, and were the products of, the nineteenth century. None of them were tourists, though for some of them their jaunt across Southeast Asia would prove adventurous, sometimes even violent. We have looked closely at their writings – the works of Raffles, Crawfurd, Brooke, Anderson, Snodgrass, Keppel, Mundy and Marryat, as well as de Bry, Raleigh and Nieuhof who wrote before them – and argued that in all these cases what we find is not a Southeast Asia that is discovered and represented through accurate mimesis, but rather an imagining of Southeast Asia that took off in the boardrooms of companies thousands of miles away, where the idea of Southeast Asia and its constituent polities was first concocted in that military-commercial laboratory where Southeast Asia – and Asia by extension – was forged by the combined wills of empire, colonialism and racialised capitalism, with all the attendant sciences and pseudo-sciences present.