British Conceptions of Wealth and Property in the East Indies and their Influence on Governance and Society: 1807-1824
Creators: name: Ng, Tze
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2019

description: The British East India Company's invasion of Java in 1811 is regarded by historians to have paved the way for the Company's founding of a free port in Singapore by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819. Raffles's references to Adam Smith's 1776 treatise, The Wealth of Nations, in his 1817 History of Java have reinforced the view that he had adopted Smith's liberal principles of political economy when he was governor of Java from 1811 to 1816. A closer inspection, however, shows Raffles's policies to have instead protected monopolies, restricted markets, and regulated people's lives. From this contradiction had arisen the historical problem of how the two events of Java's invasion and Singapore's founding were connected. Historians maintain that, though later inspired by free trade, Raffles was initially bound to the mercantilist interests of the Company. Yet the Company's Governor-General, the Earl of Minto, had in Java introduced some of the first emancipatory laws and civil reforms of the modern era. What were the British really doing in the East Indies between 1811 and 1819? In this thesis, I answer this question by showing that these contradictions had arisen from the historian's assumption that ideological relations had determined Raffles's and Minto's policies. I show instead that the linguistic contexts of those policies, when examined, reveal not contradiction but a general criticism of both 'liberalism' and 'mercantilism'. Raffles, Minto, and the third actor in this study, John Leyden, had held moral and political views which were sceptical of political economy's claims to deliver productivity and surplus. While virtue and the ideal of freedom had brought material progress, they were believed to have also led to vice, slavery, and human decline. This conception of the human condition identifies a civic humanist discourse and a common sense philosophy that were prominent in eighteenth-century Britain. They influenced an ethical approach to empire that was radically opposed to both Franco-Dutch and British colonialism. In the East Indies, Raffles, Minto, and Leyden resolved to end the power of a moneyed interest over the native population and restore the native individual's self-consciousness and self-dependence. These events defined a 'venture of critique' which saw the Company effectively decolonise Napoleonic Java and lay the foundations for a native commonwealth that encompassed the Malay Archipelago and which was centred at Singapore. They articulate an historical moment when the established narrative of modern empire is interrupted by a narrative of the classical republic. Such a moment entirely overturns the conventional understanding of the historical relation between Britain and the Malay States. By introducing humanist conceptions of wealth and property into the colonial and oriental discourse, it changed existing forms of society and governance in the East Indies and profoundly determined future forms of society and governance in nineteenth-century British Malaya and twentieth-century Malaysia and Singapore.