Ruffles

**Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles Kt., LL.D., FRS (6, July, 1781 - 5, July, 1826)**was a British colonial administrator, author, botanist, conservationist and zoologist. During his career, he served as fortieth Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies & first Lieutenant-Governor of the Presidency of Java, between 1811 and 1816, and as the first Lieutenant-Governor of the Residency of Bengkulu, between 1818 and 1824. He was the architect and founder of the Residency of Singapore and the Malay Federation.

Raffles' regime extended the territorial holdings of the British East India Company in southeast Asia, undertook an infrastructural development scheme in Singapore known as the 'Raffles Plan,' and implemented major legislative reforms in Bengkulu, Java & Singapore: elementary through tertiary educational programmes were made available to the native populations, the traffic of opium and slaves was prohibited and the criminal code of the Residencies were standardised and enshrined.

## Biography

### Childhood

Thomas Raffles was born on the 6th of July in 1781 to Benjamin Raffles and Anne Lyde aboard the merchant vessel *Ann* near the island of Jamaica in the Caribbean Sea. His father was a merchant sailor engaged in trade throughout the North Atlantic.

The Raffles' are believed to have suffered financial hardship at the time, likely due to political volatility in Europe and North America, while conflicts such as the American and French revolutions unfolded. Nonetheless, Raffles received a private education in the United Kingdom, an asset which was inaccessible to many of his peers.

### Career

Raffles began his career in 1795, at the age of fourteen, as a mercantile clerk at the principal administrative office of the British East India Company in London; achieving several senior administrative positions within the company in the duration of his career, he would serve them for the remainder of his life.

In 1805, following a decade of service, Raffles relocated to the island of Pinang in the Strait of Melaka, following an appointment as secretary to Lieutenant-Governor Philip Dundas of the Colony of Pinang, by the Earl of Minto, then Governor-General of India, before being again relocated to the Dutch Colony of Melaka, presumably as a diplomatic liaison.

#### Occupation of the Dutch East Indies

In 1811, following the annexation of the Netherlands by the French Empire, Raffles was expelled from Melaka and retreated to Kolkata in the Presidency of Bengal, where he convened with the Lord Minto and suggested armed intervention and occupation of the Dutch East Indies: the suggestion was well received by his superiors and a strategy for the invasion of the islands was hastily prepared.

The expedition of three naval squadrons and three army divisions landed at Cilincing on the island of Java, 12 miles east of the colonial capital of Batavia, at 14:00 on the 4th of August: Batavia was captured within two days and the remainder of the Netherlands' southeast Asian possessions within forty-five. Although they fielded numerically inferior forces, the British troops inflicted twice as many losses as they suffered and repelled the Franco-Dutch soldiers. Raffles received an appointment as the Lieutenant-Governor of Java, assuming all the privileges and responsibilities of the Governors-General of the Dutch East Indies, as a reward for the scheme's success.

#### Lieutenant-Governor of Java

During his tenure as governor of the Netherlands' former colonial possessions, Raffles undertook civic reforms hitherto unprecedented; the ownership and trade of slaves was prohibited, punitive measures were imposed on opium traffickers and land tenure regulations were liberalised to encourage agricultural production and provide greater opportunities for self-sufficiency to the locals. His government promoted archaeological efforts, surveying ancient monuments throughout the island, including the Pucangan Stone, Stone of Sanggurah and the Rara Jonggrang temple.

In the wake of persistent agitation for war against the new administration in the Sultanate of Yogyakarta, the most powerful native polity on the island, fears of an uprising arose among the civil service and Raffles devised a military expedition intended to subjugate the Sultan and impress fear upon all Javanese Princes who would oppose him. He led an army of 1,200 Britons and Sepoys to the Kraton Ngayogyakarta Hadiningrat, the palace of Sultan Mangkubumi Hamengkubuwono, defended by an army of 11,000 and on the 20th of July, 1812, Raffles' army began laying siege to the city; within three hours, the Sultan's army was bested, his defences were destroyed and his palace lay in ruin.

The Sultan was imprisoned and the Crown Prince was placed upon his throne as Raffles' personal puppet and both he and the Lieutenant-Governor were seated side-by-side and enthroned in a hurried ceremony overseen by Dr. John Crawfurd, a colleague and friend of Raffles who had been selected as Resident Minister of the newly conquered Sultanate. When the Sultan's courtiers arose to joyously greet their new Sultan in celebration, Dr. Crawfurd is alleged to have forced each of the Javanese lords to their knees, one by one, to kiss the feet of the Lieutenant-Governor.

After three years of service, Raffles was deprived of his position following the bilateral enshrining of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814, which restored the Netherlands' territories to Dutch rule, and returned to the United Kingdom in 1816. The following year, he authored an anthropological and botanical compendium titled *The History of Java*, detailing the country's wildlife and the history of it's people; for this contribution to the sciences, Raffles was knighted the same year by His Royal Highness, Prince George of Wales, then Prince-Regent of the United Kingdom.

#### Lieutenant-Governor of Bengkulu

On the 22nd of March, 1818, Sir Thomas was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of the Residency of Bengkulu, where his administration implemented reforms reflecting his policies in Java four years prior. Additional measures were taken to complete the cessation of slave trading in the region, prohibiting the docking of Dutch ships transporting slaves in the Residency. Finding the country in a detestable condition, Raffles committed to improving economic conditions in Bengkulu and, believing the best means by which to do so involved uprooting the Dutch, commissioned surveys of nearby islands which might provide the British East India Company with a monopoly on maritime trade in the region. The island of Singapore, though nominally under the rule of the Sultan of Johor, was largely unoccupied and free of Dutch control and thus was selected as the ideal candidate for the new outpost.

By the 29th of January in the following year, Raffles and his surveying party had successfully established an outpost on Singapore and, to cement the legitimacy of their government, lent their support to the heir to the throne of Johor, Hussein Shah. Conversely, the Dutch had aligned themselves with Hussein's cousin, a usurper who had assumed the throne during the heir's departure from the island for his wedding ceremony. Raffles, acting as a representative of the Crown, granted official international recognition to the Hussein Shah in an attempt to intimidate the Dutch.

#### Founding of Singapore

On the 6th of February, 1819, Hussein Shah and Sir Thomas signed the Anglo-Bangsa Jahor Treaty and the former was proclaimed Sultan of Johor and Singapore in a grand ceremony during which the terms of the treaty were read aloud in Chinese, Dutch, English, Malay and Tamil by Raffles to the burgeoning population of the new settlement. Major-General William Farquhar was appointed Resident-Minister of the Residency of Singapore and given command over the city's garrison.

Raffles returned to Bengkulu on the 28th of June to oversee the Presidency, dedicating himself to recording regional religious customs among the natives and financing the establishment and protection of vast nature reservations, engendering ire from his superiors in Kolkata due to the related expenses. When he next made voyage for Singapore in 1822, he was disappointed with the administration of Resident-Minister Farquhar and took direct control of the government.

In 1823, the Lieutenant-Governor, in cooperation with Royal Navy engineer Lieutenant Philip Jackson, developed a plan for the infrastructural layout and settlement of the Residency, involving the establishment of racially segregated neighbourhoods, free trade ports, schools offering elementary through tertiary educational programmes to all residents, Christian & Islamic religious sites and grid-pattern roads with parallel telegraphy systems.

Among the earliest developments of the plan was the Raffles Institute of Singapore; The institute, to which the British East India Company donated £4,000 (£425,000) and Raffles personally donated £2,000 (£226,000,) would become a gender-segregated secondary school providing free education in the classical arts, sciences and the Chinese, English and Malay languages to any resident of Singapore.

The Raffles-Jackson Plan also served as a constitutional legal body and additionally codified the preservation of the system envisioned in the plan, ensuring the preservation of the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural character of Singapore, discouraging inter-ethnic relations and upholding a policy of racial segregation while simultaneously guaranteeing the rights of the islands various religious sects. Within months the population increased ten-fold.

Following years of tension and military posturing by the Dutch against Singapore, the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 finally resolved the territorial disputes of the two empires; the British ceded their territorial possessions on the island of Sumatra in exchange for the Dutch possessions on the Malay Peninsula and formal recognition of British sovereignty over the island of Singapore. In September of 1824, Raffles departed from southeast Asia for the United Kingdom with his family for the final time.

#### The Zoological Society of London

Upon his return to Great Britain, Raffles devoted himself to his scientific interests, founding the Zoological Society of London in 1826, a conservationist organisation funding and promoting the protection of indigenous species and natural reservations throughout the British Empire, and the Regent's Zoo of London in 1828, a captivity centre under the management of the society, for the exhibition and study of exotic species from throughout the world.

### Later Life & Family

In 1804, Thomas Raffles married Olivia Devenish, a thirty-three year old widow. A fruitless and brief marriage, no children were produced from the union and she died on the 26th of November in 1814. He funded the construction of a rotunda in the Bogor Botanical Gardens near the Palace of Buitenzborg, where the couple lived during Raffles' service as Lieutenant-Governor of Java, dedicated in her memory.

On the 22nd of February in 1817, Raffles remarried to Sophia Hull, with whom he had five children; Charlotte, in 1818, Leopold, in 1819, Stamford, in 1820, Ella, in 1821 and Flora in 1823. All but one succumbed to tropical diseases as children and Lady Raffles outlived all of her children, the last surviving, Ella, falling ill in 1840 and dying at the age of 19, and died in 1852 at the age of 72.

Raffles died on the 5th of July in 1826, suffering a stroke in his home in London at the age of 44, one day before his birthday. His estate was inherited by the British East India Company to compensate for debts accrued during his governance of Bengkulu, Java and Singapore.

## Notes

* Raffles was bilingual and fluent in English and Malay.