Elbow Room for Empire: Britain's Expansion into the Malay Kingdoms

The 1857 disturbances in Sarawak were in some ways a prelude to more violence. By the second half of the 19th century the race for Empire was on, and Southeast Asia would soon bear the brunt of renewed campaigns by the Western powers to expand their sphere of influence even further; and there would be new imperial actors on the scene that included Japan and the United States of America (Noor, 2018). Empire rested upon its global economy, and by the late 1870s Europe and the United States supplied threequarters of the world's trade goods and consumed 77 percent of imports that were circulating worldwide. Along with trade came the expansion of territory, and as Darwin (2008) has noted, by the last quarter of the 19th century France's overseas empire ‘grew by more than twelve times from 350,000 square miles to 4.6 million’, while the French Empire's population grew to 50 million.

Britain's colonial possessions in Southeast Asia in the mid-19th century were still relatively small, though destined to grow. Burma had yet to be defeated and conquered for good, while Britain's territories in the Malayan Peninsula were confined to Penang, Malacca and Singapore – later brought together as the Straits Settlements. Sarawak was under the rule of a quixotic Englishman who had declared himself Rajah.