Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles (5 July 1781 – 5 July 1826) was a British colonial official who served as the governor of the Dutch East Indies between 1811 and 1816 and lieutenant-governor of Bencoolen between 1818 and 1824. Raffles was involved in the capture of the Indonesian island of Java from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars. It was returned under the Anglo–Dutch Treaty of 1824. He also wrote The History of Java in 1817, describing the history of the island from ancient times. The Rafflesia flowers were named after him.
Raffles also played a role in further establishing the British Empire's reach in East and Southeast Asia. He secured control over the strategically located Singapore from local rulers in 1819 to secure British access along the Strait of Singapore and the nearby seas in the region, particularly the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. His actions were initially not endorsed by the British government and led to tensions between the British and the Dutch. The Anglo–Dutch Treaty of 1824 established their respective spheres of influence, the Dutch relinquishing their claims to Singapore while the British ceded Bencoolen to them. A transshipment port was subsequently established in Singapore for maritime trade between Europe and Asia.
While Raffles was largely credited for the founding of contemporary Singapore, the early running of day-to-day operations was mostly done by William Farquhar, who served as the first Resident of Singapore from 1819 to 1823. Raffles returned to England in 1824 and died on his 45th birthday in 1826. In Singapore, his legacy is commemorated by the Raffles's Landing Site and the use of his name for numerous national institutions. However, his historical role has become a subject of public debate, with critics characterising him as an imperialist. These perspectives argue that celebratory narratives of colonialism can overlook the history of the population that predated his arrival.
Career Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles was born on on board the ship Ann, off the coast of Port Morant, Jamaica, to Captain Benjamin Raffles and Anne Raffles (née Lyde). Benjamin served as a ship master for various ships engaged in the direct trade between England and the West Indies. Although some biographers have suggested that Benjamin was involved in the slave trade, modern historians have refuted such claims. When Benjamin ended his involvement in the West India trade in 1800, it caused his family considerable hardship. He was a Free Mason. The little money the family had went into sending the young Raffles to the Mansion House Academy, Hammersmith, a moderately priced boarding school, offering Latin, Greek, French, arithmetic, bookkeeping and geography, that specialised in preparing boys for clerkships or the army. In 1795, at the age of 14, Raffles started working in London as a clerk for the East India Company. Nine years later, in 1804, the 23-year-old Raffles married Olivia Mariamne Devenish, a widow 10 years his senior, who was formerly married to Jacob Cassivelaun Fancourt, an assistant surgeon in Madras, who had died in 1800.
In 1805, he was sent to Penang Island in British Malaya, starting his long association with Southeast Asia. He started as assistant secretary, under Philip Dundas, the new governor of Penang. At this time, he also made the acquaintance of Thomas Otho Travers, who would accompany him for the next 20 years.
Java Island British invasion of Java His knowledge of the Malay language, as well as his wit and ability, gained him favour with Lord Minto, the then governor-general of India, and he was sent to Malacca.
In 1811, after the annexation of the Kingdom of Holland by France during the Napoleonic Wars, Raffles had no choice but to leave the country. He mounted a military expedition against the Dutch and French in Java, in the Dutch East Indies. The war was swiftly conducted by Admiral Robert Stopford, General Frederick Augustus Wetherall, and Colonel Robert Rollo Gillespie, who led a well-organised army against an opposing army of mostly French conscripts with little proper leadership.
The previous Dutch governor, Herman Willem Daendels, had built a well-defended fortification at Meester Cornelis, now Jatinegara. His successor, Governor Jan Willem Janssens, who coincidentally had surrendered to the British five years earlier at the Cape Colony, mounted a brave but ultimately futile defence at the fortress. The British, led by Colonel Gillespie, stormed the fort and captured it within three hours. Governor Janssens attempted to escape inland but was captured.
The British invasion of Java took a total of 45 days, during which Raffles was appointed the lieutenant-governor of the Dutch East Indies by Lord Minto before hostilities formally ceased. He took his residence at Buitenzorg, and despite having a small group of Britons as his senior staff, kept many of the Dutch civil servants in the governmental structure.
Rule
During the relatively brief period of British rule in Java, Raffles negotiated several peace treaties along with ordering several military expeditions against local rulers. Rumours of plans by the Yogyakarta Sultanate to launch an attack against the British led to uneasiness among Britons in Java. On 20 June 1812, Raffles led a 1,200-strong British force to capture the Royal Palace of Yogyakarta. Yogyakarta forces, surprised by the attack, were easily defeated; the palace fell in one day, and was subsequently sacked and burnt. Raffles ordered much of the palace's archives to be removed, taking them back with him. The attack was unprecedented in Javanese history, as it was the first time an indigenous palace had been captured by a European army, humiliating the Yogyakarta Sultanate.
Although peace returned to Central Java in the immediate aftermath of the attack, it may have fuelled the deep-seated instability and hostility to European involvement in the region that ultimately gave rise to the Java War during the 1820s. Raffles also ordered an expedition to Palembang, Sumatra to depose local sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II. The expedition was also ordered to occupy the nearby Bangka Island in order to establish a permanent British presence in the area, in case Java returned to Dutch rule after the end of the War of the Sixth Coalition in Europe.
During his lieutenant-governorship, Raffles placed some restrictions on the local slave trade in line with wider British policy across its Asian territories, although slavery remained widespread and Raffles himself was served by a large retinue of slaves at his official residences in Java. Raffles also attempted a replacement of the Dutch system of forced agricultural deliveries-in-kind with a cash-based land tenure system of land management, probably influenced by the earlier anti-feudal critiques of Dirk van Hogendorp. He was advised by a holdover from the previous Dutch regime on Java, the president of the High Court of Java, Herman Warner Muntinghe, especially in the matter of the reform of the public finances of the colony, and its system of taxation.
Under Raffles's aegis, a large number of ancient monuments in Java were systematically catalogued for the first time. The first detailed English-language account of Prambanan was prepared by Colin Mackenzie, while the Buddhist temple of Borobudur was surveyed and cleared of vegetation by H. C. Cornelius.
When his wife, Olivia, died on 26 November 1814, Raffles was devastated. In 1815, he left again for England shortly before the island of Java was returned to control of the Netherlands following the Napoleonic Wars, under the terms of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814. Raffles had been removed from his post by the East India Company ahead of the handover, and officially replaced by John Fendall Jr. on account of the poor financial performance of the colony during his administration, and allegations of financial impropriety on his own part. He sailed to England in early 1816 to clear his name and, en route, visited Napoleon, who was in exile at St. Helena, but found him unpleasant and unimpressive.
Interlude in England In 1817, Raffles wrote and published The History of Java, describing the history of the island from ancient times as well as its geography, flora, and fauna.
In 1817, Raffles was created a Knight Bachelor by the Prince Regent George IV, whose daughter, Princess Charlotte, was particularly close to him. At the publication of the book, he also stopped using the name 'Thomas', preferring to use his middle name, 'Stamford', possibly to avoid confusion amongst his associates with Sir Thomas Sevestre, or his cousin, Thomas Raffles, who both bore the same first name.
On 22 February, he married his second wife, Sophia Hull, and later set sail to Bencoolen (present-day Bengkulu in Indonesia) to take up his new post with his new wife.
Bencoolen and Malaya
Raffles arrived in Bencoolen on Sumatra on 19 March 1818, where he was appointed as the lieutenant-governor of Bencoolen on 22 March 1818. Despite the prestige connected with the title of Lieutenant-Governor, Bencoolen was a colonial backwater, whose only real export was pepper, and only the murder of a previous Resident, Thomas Parr, gained it any attention back home in Britain. Raffles found the place wrecked, and set about reforms immediately, mostly similar to what he had done on Java; abolishing slavery and limiting cockfighting and such games. To replace the slaves, he used a contingent of convicts, already sent to him from India.
It was at this point that he realised the importance of a British presence that both challenged the Dutch hegemony in the area, and could remain consistently profitable, unlike Bencoolen or Batavia. However, the strategic importance of poorly maintained but well-positioned British possessions, such as Penang or Bencoolen, made it impossible for the British to abandon the unprofitable colonies in such proximity to the Dutch in Java.
The competition in the area, between Raffles and the aggressive Dutch commissioner-general, Cornelis Theodorus Elout, and later Raffles' former advisor on Java, Muntinghe, now a member of the new High Government of the Dutch East Indies, who Elout had put in power, certainly led at least in part to the later Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824. Raffles looked into alternatives in the area; namely Bangka, which had been ceded to the Dutch after its conquest by the British during its occupation of Java. Bintan was also under consideration. Despite the fact that Francis Light overlooked the island before settling upon Penang in 1786, the Riau Archipelago was an attractive choice just to the south of the Malay Peninsula, for its proximity to Malacca.
In his correspondences with Calcutta, Raffles also emphasised the need to establish a certain amount of influence with the native chiefs, which had greatly waned since the return of the Dutch. Raffles sent Thomas Travers as an ambassador to the Dutch, to possibly negotiate an expansion of British economic interests. When this failed, and when Raffles's own expeditions into his new dominion found only treacherous terrain and few exportable goods, his desire to establish a better British presence was cemented.
However, the Anglo-Dutch Convention of 1814 was not completely clear, especially on the issue of certain possessions such as Padang. The Convention of 1814 only returned Dutch territory that was held before 1803, which did not include Padang. Raffles asserted the British claim personally, leading a small expedition to the Kingdom of Pagaruyung. Yet, as Raffles confirmed with the sultan regarding the absolute British influence of the area, he realised that the local rulers had only limited power over the well-cultivated and civilised country, and the treaty was largely symbolic, and had little actual force.
Founding of modern Singapore