Gareth Knapman

The assumption in much of the heritage literature is that there were few protections for cultural heritage until the twentieth century. Contrary to this assumption, this article will demonstrate that British colonialism was obsessed with property, and that plunder was a highly regulated activity. The Law of Prize prescribed what could, and could not, be taken lawfully in the context of British colonial military operations in the nineteenth century. Prize Law dictated that it was illegal for soldiers to take objects; but they had the right to purchase them from the colonial government at an auction. This article examines the history, and rules and regulations of Prize Law in the context of the East India Company during the British occupation of Java under Thomas Stamford Raffles between 1811 and 1816. We focus on the plunder of the palace of the Sultan of Hamengkubuwono II (1750-1828) in Yogyakarta in 1812 and consider the consequences for the legality of objects collected by Raffles during his time in Java.

The idea of "race" played an increasing role in nineteenth-century British colonial thought. For most of the nineteenth century, John Crawfurd towered over British colonial policy in South-East Asia, being not only a colonial administrator, journalist and professional lobbyist, but also one of the key racial theorists in the British Empire. He approached colonialism as a radical liberal, proposing universal voting for all races in British colonies and believing all races should have equal legal rights. Yet at the same time, he also believed that races represented distinct species of people, who were unrelated. This book charts the development of Crawfurd’s ideas, from the brief but dramatic period of British rule in Java, to his political campaigns against James Brooke and British rule in Borneo. Central to Crawfurd’s political battles were the debates he had with his contemporaries, such as Stamford Raffles and William Marsden, over the importance of race and his broader challenge to universal ideas of history, which questioned the racial unity of humanity. The book taps into little explored manuscripts, newspapers and writings to uncover the complexity of a leading nineteenth-century political and racial thinker whose actions and ideas provide a new view of British liberal, colonial and racial thought.

This article proposes that Singapore should be considered as a settler colony during its first years of settlement. The first Residents, William Farquhar, Thomas Stamford Raffles and John Crawfurd all attempted to build Singapore as a settler colony, similar to those in Australia and North America. The difference was, however, that they looked to attract Chinese, Malay and Indian settlers as well as Europeans. By viewing Singapore as a settler colony, this article reinterprets our understanding of who constitutes a settler within settler colonial frameworks. It concludes that settler colonialism was not directly about moving indigenous people off the land, but rather establishing a new system of sovereignty in which individuals (regardless of race) were allowed to own land and become settlers. Nevertheless, the actions of the settlers and the British authorities created violent tensions with the original Malay inhabitants that were only resolved by the transfer of sovereignty from Sultan Hussein to the East India Company.

During the 53 years from the founding of Singapore in 1819 to the British exerting direct control over the native states in the Malay Peninsula in 1872, British involvement in Southeast Asia represented a liberal security experiment. This experiment was marked by the liberal principles of recognising native sovereignty, a belief and commitment to non-intervention in the native states, and the use of free trade as a norm to mitigate war and conflict.

This book is about a revolutionary idea-liberalism-and the response of British colonial officers to that idea. The intellectual complex we call liberalism had an extraordinary effect on a small group of men who wrote about and administered the British colonies in what we now call Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. The