Race and British Colonialism in Southeast Asia, 1770-1870

Knapman, Gareth

doi:10.4324/9781315452173

Cited by 23 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…This tendency is obvious in one of the most influential accounts of the Malay Archipelago from the end of the eighteenth century, The History of Sumatra, first published in 1783 by the British historian and linguist William Marsden. The work, even more than Poivre's book, inaugurated a scholarly discourse in Europe, particularly in Great Britain, under the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment (Knapman 2016), on the Malay Archipelago and its people. The History of Sumatra quickly came to be seen as an authoritative account and continued to be regarded as such throughout the nineteenth century.…”

Section: The Rise Of the Notion Of The "Malay Pirate"mentioning

confidence: 98%

The Making of the “Malay Pirate” in Early Modern European Thought

Amirell

2020

Humanities

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This article traces the long historical background of the nineteenth-century European notion of the Malay as a human “race” with an inherent addiction to piracy. For most of the early modern period, European observers of the Malay Archipelago associated the Malays with the people and diaspora of the Sultanate of Melaka, who were seen as commercially and culturally accomplished. This image changed in the course of the eighteenth century. First, the European understanding of the Malay was expanded to encompass most of the indigenous population of maritime Southeast Asia. Second, more negative assessments gained influence after the mid-eighteenth century, and the Malays were increasingly associated with piracy, treachery, and rapaciousness. In part, the change was due to the rise in maritime raiding on the part of certain indigenous seafaring peoples of Southeast Asia combined with increasing European commercial interests in Southeast Asia, but it was also part of a generally more negative view in Europe of non-settled and non-agricultural populations. This development preceded the notion of the Malays as one of humanity’s principle races, which emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century. The idea that Malays were natural pirates also paved the way for several brutal colonial anti-piracy campaigns in the Malay Archipelago during the nineteenth century.

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Section: The Rise Of the Notion Of The "Malay Pirate"mentioning

confidence: 98%

The Making of the “Malay Pirate” in Early Modern European Thought

Amirell

2020

Humanities

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“…Upon his retirement, he removed to London as the agent of the Calcutta merchant community and then of Bengal Landholders Association. His credentials as radical and political economist, long-standing critic of the “old colonial system,” and authority on the commercial resources of the region aligned him with the commercial and manufacturing interests invested in ending trade monopolies and reforming the Indian administration (Knapman 2017; Taylor 2010). As a publicist and expert witness before parliamentary select committees, he was particularly active in the 1829–1833 campaign to abolish the Company’s remaining monopolies, wherein he found a platform for publicizing the cause for the British settlement of India 7 .…”

Section: Situating John Crawfurd: Political Economy Of Imperial Reformmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The unstable unity of these commitments, reflected as much in political, economic, and legal argumentation as in historical and ethnographic analysis, have supplied ample material for scholarly disagreement. Hagiographies of Crawfurd have credited his polygenism with an egalitarian-inclusive appreciation of human plurality, to which they attribute his “liberal” and “democratic” credentials as an imperial reformer (Knapman 2016; Knapman 2017, 74–92; Wong 2018). Skeptics, by contrast, have underscored his explicit somatization of social difference into racial “types” and his brash proclamations of European superiority as evidence of (at best) “soft racism” (Ellingson 2001, 309–20; Krishnan 2007; Quilty 1998; 2018).…”

Section: From Civilization and Savagery To Capitalist Racializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Deprovincializing Racial Capitalism: John Crawfurd and Settler Colonialism in India

Ince

2021

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Recent literature on racial capitalism has overwhelmingly focused on the Atlantic settler-slave formation, sidelining the history of European imperialism in Asia. This article addresses this blind spot by recovering the aborted project of British settler colonialism in India through the writings of its most prominent advocate, John Crawfurd. It is argued that Crawfurd’s vision of a liberal empire in India rejected slavery and indigenous dispossession yet remained deeply racialized in its conception of capital, labor, and value. Crawfurd elaborated a “capital theory of race,” which derived racial categories from a civilizational spectrum keyed to the capitalist organization of production. His proposals accordingly revamped the conventional terms of colonization by representing India as overstocked with labor but vacant of capital and skill that only European settlers could provide. The article concludes with the broader implications of a transimperial analytic framework for writing connected histories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism.

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“…Müller 2020). Trained as a medical doctor and later President of the Ethnological Society of London, race was an issue for him: he was an outspoken abolitionist and advocate of equal rights but also a polygenist, partly as a consequence of rejecting Biblical accounts of one cradle of Mankind (Knapman 2016(Knapman , 2017. The difference between various 'mother tongues', indeed, was supporting evidence for his polygenism.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expanding the comparative view

Solleveld

2020

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Summary Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java can be seen as the first comparative grammar of non-Indo-European languages. While Humboldt’s practice of collecting and re-assembling linguistic information has been documented extensively in the Berlin Academy edition of his Schriften zur Sprachwissenschaft, this article puts his work in perspective by tracing it back to its sources and treating it as part of a wider parallel process of expanding the comparative view. In three sections, this article discusses (1) the research agendas of the three British colonial scholars upon whose works Humboldt drew for Malayan languages; (2) to which extent his Polynesian language material was ‘rawer’ than these compendia; and (3) how he reworked this material into a comparative Malayo-Polynesian grammar. Finally, a comparison is drawn with the work of his assistant and continuator Eduard Buschmann, and with Horatio Hale’s slightly later survey of the languages of the Pacific.

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Race and British Colonialism in Southeast Asia, 1770-1870

Cited by 23 publications

References 0 publications

The Making of the “Malay Pirate” in Early Modern European Thought

The Making of the “Malay Pirate” in Early Modern European Thought

Deprovincializing Racial Capitalism: John Crawfurd and Settler Colonialism in India

Expanding the comparative view

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