Liberalism and the British Empire in Southeast Asia

Gareth Knapman, Anthony Milner, Mary Quilty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138082052
• eBook ISBN: 9781351622769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This collection of essays collects the leading scholars on British colonial thought in Southeast Asia to consider the question: what was the relationship between liberalism and the British Empire in Southeast Asia? The empire builders in Southeast Asia: Lord Minto, William Farquhar, John Leyden, Thomas Stamford Raffles, and John Crawfurd - to name a few - were fervent believers in a liberal free trade order in Southeast Asia.

Many recent studies of British imperialism, and European imperialism more generally, have addressed how the anti-imperialist tradition of Eighteenth century liberalism was increasingly intertwined with the discourses of empire, freedom, race and economics in the nineteenth century. This collection extends those studies to look at the impact of liberalism on. British colonialism in Southeast Asia and early nineteenth century Southeast Asia we see some of the first attempts at developing multicultural democracies within the colonies, experiments in free trade and attempts to use free trade to prevent war and colonisation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• 1 Mapping liberalism and empire in Southeast Asia
• 2 Before liberalism: William Marsden’s late Enlightenment imperial critique
• 3 Pragmatism at play: Farquhar, Raffles and the founding of Singapore
• 4 The ideological origins of the founding of Singapore
• 5 Rice and potato-eaters: Labour, wages and race in the political economy of British colonial administrators in Southeast Asia
• 6 The gaze of a liberal imperialist: Observing and interpreting oriental despotism in John Crawfurd’s work
• 7 John Crawfurd’s 1829 pamphlet on free trade and colonisation and his liberal campaign for British imperial reforms in India and Southeast Asia
• 8 Protector of aborigines or war criminal: Two opposing liberal views of James Brooke
• 9 The liberal security experiment in Southeast Asia
• 10 The liberalism narrative in Southeast Asia, and Australia
• Bibliography
• Index