description: RAFFLES OF SINGAPORE EMILY HAHJNT ncraoore 1946 GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY COMPANY, INC. With much affection to GEORGE AND KATHARINE SANSOM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks are due the Ex plorers Club of New York for their generosity in allowing a free use of their excellent library during the preparation of this text. The same is true of the British Library of Informa tion in New York, with special reference to the kindness of Mrs. Mary Bujke of that organization. The writer also wishes to express her gratitude for the practical help given her by Dr. James Chapin of the American Museum of Natural His tory, Dr. Bartholomew Landheer, of the Netherlands Informa tion Bureau in New York, was kind enough, during the writers absence in England, to check the book in proof for the spelling of the many Dutch names which occur in the text, a tedious job and one which she sincerely appreciates his having done, LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Facing page A Javanese Renggeng 78 A Javanese in Court Dress 79 A Madurese Petty Noble no Elephant Sent by Raffles to the Shogun of Japan in 1813 111 A Hollander and His Javanese Slave 111 Male Informal Attire 334 Eurasian Woman . 334 Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles 335 Map of the Island of Singapore 366 Plan of the Town of Singapore 367 APOLOGIA The volume is too cursory for the specialist and too detailed for others. . . From R. O. Winstedts review of Vlekkes Nusantara in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1944. Cruel words which, though they were not inspired by this book, might well have been. The author of Raffles of Singa pore hereby offers a brief apology for her unorthodox treat ment of an exceedingly conventional subject, knowing that biography and history used customarily to be written in a special style, dry and pedantic. That, in her opinion, was a fault. She feels that her own generation while growing up was frightened away from history by this stupid tradition, which masked Clios beauty and drowned the music of her voice in dull, pedestrian language. The old fashion was deliberately to steal from the story of men and nations all excitement and even interest. History we understood to be a dreary list of wars and coronations, appended to a catalogue of dates, If in following the new fashion the writer exaggerates, lean ing too far in the other direction, she hopes that her facts at least are fundamentally sound and that she has avoided slop piness in recounting them. Her hope and purpose in producing this book are not to contribute to our knowledge of Raffles for excepting that she had access to Dutch sources which are not commonly known to English readers, she has nothing new to offer. She meant it rather for the ordinary person who like herself, was cheated at school by bad teaching and never learned of historys true deep pleasures until he was able to dispel his early false impres sions. Those readers who are already well grounded in the period are asked to refer to the Bibliography before reading the book. They may then feel that the writer has at any rate tried to avoid being included in the category of those so scathingly condemned by Lord Curzon as either not having read what has been written by better men before, or reading it only in order to plagiarize and reproduce it as their own, . . mis understand, misspell, and misinterpret everywhere as they go. The desire to avoid this pitfall for the hack writer turned historian also explains why the author has refrained from the temptation to paraphrase or modernize the older writers whose works she has consulted. The interest we all feel today in Indonesia as well as the general topic of imperialism appears to her to lead as a matter of course to England and, particularly, to Raffless period. What is happening today in Java has a definite relationship with the past in which he played so large a part...
language: English
title: Raffles of Singapore: A Biography
titlecomplete: Raffles of Singapore: A Biography
ratings_count: 6
publisher: University of Malaya Press