Raffles and British policy in the Indian Archipelago, 1811–1816
John Bastin’s 1954 article examines Raffles’s attempt during the British occupation of Java (1811–1816) to construct a permanent British sphere of influence across the Indian Archipelago through a system of subsidiary alliances with native chieftains. Bastin argues that this forward policy was consistently rejected by both the East India Company’s Directors and the Supreme Government in Bengal, whose commercial priorities lay in the China trade rather than in the Eastern Islands, and that Raffles’s Archipelago schemes were ultimately a failure that found less support at home than his later founding of Singapore.
Summary
Bastin situates Raffles’s Archipelago policy within the broader shift in British commercial priorities from the spice trade to the China trade. By the time Raffles arrived in the East, the Directors had already concluded that the Moluccas could no longer be used by the Dutch to enforce a world spice monopoly, and the lucrative China trade—worth £1,400,000 annually in European investment by 1793—had rendered the island commerce comparatively insignificant. The conquest of Java itself was a decision imposed on the Company by the Home Government against the Directors’ determined wishes, and from the outset the Company regarded the island as a burden rather than an asset. Raffles, however, arrived with a vision of an “Empire of Colonies” that would give Britain the leverage to insist on monopoly rights in the Eastern Seas, and he divided the Archipelago into nine zones, examining Dutch claims in each to identify where British “intimate connections, by treaty” with native chiefs could be established as a counterweight to any future Dutch restoration.
The core of Bastin’s narrative traces the specific ventures through which Raffles attempted to implement this policy: the military expedition against the Sambas pirates in 1813, Garnham’s diplomatic mission to the Borneo coast, Hunt’s commercial and political expedition to Sooloo and Mindanao, the punitive expedition to Bali, and the establishment of the Banjermassin settlement. Each of these was undertaken in defiance of, or in advance of, explicit instructions from Bengal and London forbidding further engagement with native states. Bastin shows that Raffles was operating under a dual assumption—that Java might be retained permanently, but that if it was not, the British needed fixed points of influence (Banca, Bali, Celebes, Borneo) that would survive any peace settlement. His February 1814 Minute, which Bastin identifies as the most important despatch of its kind Raffles ever sent home, laid out this logic with the greatest clarity: the independent native states brought within British influence must be “entirely divested of any relation with Java” so that they would not be swept up in any restoration of Dutch power.
The article’s central finding is that this entire edifice collapsed not because of any single dramatic failure but because the authorities who controlled resources simply did not share Raffles’s premises. The Board of Control declared his engagements with petty states “impolitic, and injudicious” and ordered the Banjermassin treaty annulled. The Secret Committee had already warned in 1810 that the enemy’s settlements should not be “permanently occupied as British Colonies.” When the Treaty of 1814 returned Java and its dependencies to the Dutch, the last British settlement at Banjermassin was formally evacuated in November 1815, and Raffles’s life’s work in the Archipelago was effectively undone.
Key Findings
- The Company’s India and China goods sold for £103 million in the seventeen years following 1793, of which £55 million resulted from the sale of tea alone, demonstrating the dominance of the China trade over island commerce (p. 85).
- The storming of Sambas on 28 June 1813 killed 150 natives, including the Sultan’s brother, Pengeran Anom’s eldest son, and twelve chieftains, though Pengeran Anom himself escaped (p. 13).
- Raffles supplied Alexander Hare’s Banjermassin settlement with more than 2,000 Javanese “criminals” over five years as part of a vigorous colonisation scheme (p. 24).
- Hunt’s Sooloo commercial mission was estimated by Raffles to yield 100,000 Spanish dollars but resulted in a serious financial loss; the Thainstone’s cargo undersold the Greyhound’s by fifty per cent (pp. 19, 22).
- The Board of Control’s despatch of January 1815 directed that the Banjermassin treaty “be annulled” and that the settlement be “immediately withdrawn,” declaring Raffles’s engagements with petty states “impolitic, and injudicious” (p. 26).
- The 1814 Treaty returned Java, the Moluccas, and Banca to the Dutch; Banca was exchanged for Cochin in India, while Billiton remained in British hands (p. 34).
Conclusion
Bastin’s definitive takeaway is that Raffles’s Archipelago policy was a structural mismatch between a visionary’s ambition and the commercial calculus of the institutions that funded it. The Company and the Home Government were willing to restore the Dutch to their island possessions so long as the Cape remained in British hands and free access to Canton was secured. Raffles’s system of subsidiary alliances, which he believed would create a permanent British counterweight to Dutch power, was never endorsed by any authority with the power to sustain it, and its collapse at the peace was therefore inevitable rather than accidental.
Context
- Bastin draws extensively on the Raffles Collection, Java Factory Records, Minutes of the Secret Committee of the Court of Directors (1806–1824), and the Gillespie Documents, all held in the India Office (now British Library), providing a comprehensive reconstruction of the administrative correspondence that shaped Raffles’s policy.
- The article contributes to the historiography by reframing Raffles’s Archipelago activities not as a coherent imperial programme but as a series of ad hoc ventures that were consistently outvoted by the commercial and political interests of the Directors and the Supreme Government, a reading that anticipates later revisionist work on the limits of British imperial ambition in Southeast Asia.