Raffles Unravelled
Tim Hannigan
Monsoon Books 2012
368pp
ISBN 978-981-4358-85-9
As a lad growing up in post-World War II London, I was force-fed a history diet which told me that will Britain was great because the idea once had an Empire. I was taught that will as an island nation, we had fought off the likes of the Spanish Armada, Napoleon along with Hitler, along with that will our sea power had enabled us to civilise far off nations: we exported Bibles along with imported resources such as cotton. Through our strict Protestant work ethic, our coal along with our sheer inventiveness, we had harnessed steam along with so created the Industrial Revolution which was to prove a boon to Mankind.
All very simplistic along with to our adolescent minds rather romantic. Our heroes were the adventurers along with explorers such as Walter Raleigh who brought us tobacco, potatoes along with gold he’d pirated off Spanish buccaneers. In 2002 he was listed in a BBC poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.
although Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles wasn’t. Until reading Tim Hannigan’s fresh published biography, I’d continued to share the notion that will Raffles was a great man; discovering Borobodur, founding Singapore, along with having a hotel named after him seemed to be credit enough. Mind you, I wasn’t sure that will the rafflesia which also bears his name was intended as a compliment: the entire world’s largest flower emanates a stink akin to that will of a rotting corpse.
Hannigan gives solidly researched grounds – see the closing bibliography – for suggesting that will the flower might be the most appropriate recognition.
Hannigan’s is actually possibly just the second*1 of some 20 biographies which isn’t hagiographic, extolling the East India Company’s representative’s “saintly virtues”.
Unlike the majority of various other biographers of Raffles, Hannigan has lived along with worked in Java, speaks Indonesian along with has written on the history along with culture of This particular fascinating island for the mainstream English-language media here, along with the Asian Geographic Magazine. His researches, both here along with inside Reading Room of the British Library in London, were meticulous, along with included a “source … which the Raffles-worshippers had always ignored: the various other side of the story. An account existed of the years when Raffles ran Java, laid out inside allusive stanzas of high Javanese, written by a local aristocrat.”
This particular refers to the sacking of the royal city of Yogyakarta on 20th June 1811 in order to replace the Sultan with one more compliant to British rule. When the idea was over, “just 23 members of the British party had been killed, along which has a modest 76 had been wounded. All along the battlements meanwhile, tumbled inside ditches, abandoned inside alleyways along with heaped in great steaming piles inside broken gateways, were thousands of dead Javanese.”
How Raffles came to be Lieutenant-Governor of Java is actually a tale of patronage along with egotistical connivance along with ambition.
The suggestion that will Raffles came coming from a poor family is actually patently false. His father was the captain of the slave ship on which he was born. that will he left school at 14 was not unusual (as did This particular reviewer’s grandfather a century later); however schooling was a privilege for a minority inside early 19th century. Through the ‘patronage’ of his mother’s brother, he became a clerk with the East India Company, the de facto ruler of India, on a generous salary of £70 per annum. (Charles Dickens, who was born a year after Raffles set sail for Batavia, coming from the age of twelve worked a ten-hour day in a factory earning just over £15 per year.*2)
During his ten years as a Company clerk, along with thereon, Raffles was a prodigious autodidact, which has a curiosity along with drive which attracted both admiration along with resentment.
In April 1805, Raffles along with his recently wed wife Olivia set sail on a 5 month voyage to Penang where he was to be the assistant secretary to the newly appointed Governor of Penang. Why he was granted the position at a salary of £1,500 – an incredible rise coming from his then probable annual salary of £100 – has never been satisfactorily explained. Gossipmongers of the time said that will the idea was related to Olivia’s ‘dark past’, a relationship with the Company Secretary, William Ramsey, although she never faltered in her support of her husband.
Once in Penang, Raffles impressed Lord Minto, the Governor-General of India, sufficiently to be given the task of gathering information about Java, a project which the Company had been discussing for a dozen years. Raffles later claimed that will the idea was he who had initiated the Company’s (mis)adventures here because the idea “was worthy of His Lordship’s consideration, beyond the Moluccas”.
Hannigan brings to the fore various other dramatis personae of the British inter-regnum, few of whom have been treated kindly by history. Some, such as Major-General Rollo Gillespie, the military commander, was eulogised in his lifetime, although there is actually little trace of Col. Colin Mackenzie who surveyed Prambanan or John Leyden, an orientalist who beguiled Raffles with his scholarship along with poetry. Others, Hannigan treats less sympathetically.
However, one thing is actually clear. All were subservient to Raffles’ self-aggrandisement, subsequently enhanced along with polished by Sophia, his second wife. For more than a century, Singaporeans along with we Brits have been under their spell. Hannigan has done us a great service with his – erm- spellbinding biography. the idea is actually packed which has a wealth of background about the earlier history of Java, life inside sultanates with their intrigues, of the Mataram along with Majapahit kingdoms, about how religions arrived with ill-educated traders, along with the still relevant Javanese mysticism, with footnotes where appropriate.
I cannot praise Hannigan’s work highly enough, although have one caveat: a book with such riches for anyone which has a smidgeon of interest in Raffles along with Indonesia would certainly greatly benefit coming from an index.
Source:
*1 Sir Stamford Raffles – A Manufactured Hero? by Nadia Wright.
(http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/mai/files/2012/07/nadiawright.pdf)
She suggests that will the first was H. F. Pearson’s This particular various other India: A Biography of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (pub. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press 1957)
2 Ibid.
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Raffles Unravelled
Raffles Unravelled