Chapter Three - Inadvertent imperialists: country traders and British officials

Summary

In the sense that colonies promote the trade of the mother country, it is often said that “Trade follows the Flag”. However, in respect of British penetration into Southeast Asia in the second half of the eighteenth century, while the nautical surveys of officials Alexander Dalrymple and John McCluer were critical, it was more often the traders who chartered the seas, made the initial contacts, adopted local customs and accumulated the practical knowledge that made it possible for EIC servants subsequently to establish colonies and raise the Union Jack. This chapter does not go over the strategic and policy issues of British expansion into Southeast Asia, which have been discussed in depth by others. It rather attempts to provide examples of the crucial, albeit sometimes unintended and on occasion, even reluctant role of individual British country traders in British imperial expansion, and to show the dependence British officials placed upon the activities of the country traders. While the country traders were keen to establish trading posts and purchase goods from under the noses of the Dutch, a distinction should be drawn between their endeavours and the imperialistic ambitions of the likes of Alexander Dalrymple, Robert Townsend Farquhar, William Farquhar and Thomas Stamford Raffles.

We may consider the groundwork of what Harlow calls “the Second British Empire” in Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth century as being marked by the following stages: the brief establishment of the outpost at Balambangan in 1773–5, the capture of Padang on Sumatra's west coast from the Dutch in 1781, the founding of Penang (1786), the occupation of Malacca in 1795 and that of Amboyna and Banda between 1796 and 1803. A post at Balambangan was again established briefly in 1803, the Moluccas were occupied once more in 1810 and Lord Minto’s Java expedition in 1811 set up the English administration there until 1816. These various forays and expeditions into the Malay Archipelago may be seen as culminating in the founding of Singapore in 1819.