Abstract
It is tempting to begin with a chronological mapping of the region. A general survey might register the Indian influence beginning around the fifth century; subsequent Chinese influence; the impact of Islam from the ninth century; and contact with Europe from around 1500 marked by successive attempts by various European countries to dominate the spice trade.’ A more detailed map would then mark a Portuguese period beginning, perhaps, with d’Albuquerque’s visit to Sumatra in 1510 and his capture of Malacca in 1511.2 It would register the early rivalry between the Portuguese and the Spanish: Magellan’s 1519 expedition established a Spanish-controlled trade-route to Malacca from the east to avoid the Portuguese gunships in the Indian Ocean that protected the Portuguese sea-route from the west.3 Although this eastward route was too dangerous and too expensive to be practical, it did have political consequences: by the treaty of Saragossa, in an analogue of the Tordesillas Line that divided South America, the region was shared between Spain and Portugal, with the Moluccas, the source of nutmeg and clove, located within the Spanish sphere.4 By the end of the sixteenth century the Spanish had developed an entrepôt at Manila. The Portuguese, meanwhile, had established a commercial empire, based on Homuz, Goa and Malacca: they were encouraging the cultivation of pepper in Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, and were attempting to assert a spice monopoly.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
J. D. Legge, ‘The Writing of Southeast Asian History’ in N. Tarling (ed.), The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol.1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1ff.
Vasco da Gama’s 1498 voyage around the Cape of Good Hope had established a sea-route to the East. This immediately replaced the overland route with its heavy duties. This led to a fall in the price of spice in Europe; it cut out the Venetian merchants; and it produced Portuguese domination of the European pepper trade. See Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods (Macmillan, 1996), 288–301.
As Jardine notes, Spain and Portugal came to Saragossa with rival maps and rival cartographers. In the end, Pedro Reinel’s map of the region was rejected and Dogo Ribeiro’s was attached to the settlement. In Jardine’s words: ‘Charles V’s cartographers at Saragossa spuriously established that the Moluccas Islands lay within the Spanish sphere of influence on the map’ (WG, 288). For a detailed discussion of the Moluccas, see Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 119–50.
The Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), described by Benedict Anderson as ‘the greatest “transnational” corporation’ of the first half of the seventeenth century, was liquidated, in bankruptcy, in 1799; the colony of the Netherlands Indies dates from 1815, when the independence of the Netherlands was restored, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1996), 166, 180.
Penang, for example, came into existence as a freeport through the activities of a ‘country trader’, Francis Light, acting for the East India Company. See: H. P. Clodd, Malaya’s First British Pioneer: the Life of Francis Light (London, 1948). The East India Company needed a naval base in Malaya or Siam to improve its control over the Bay of Bengal. In 1770 Sultan Muhammad of Keddah sought assistance against Siam and the Bugis. The Company’s intervention in Keddah led to the establishment of an English base on the island of Penang. Francis Light formally took possession of Penang in August 1786.
N. Tarling, ‘British Policy in the Malay Peninsula and Archipelago 1824–1871’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xxx, pt.1 (October 1957), 10; cited hereafter as Tarling (1957). The journal will be cited hereafter as JMBRAS.
Paul Wheatley, Impressions of the Malay Peninsula in Ancient Times (Singapore: Eastern University Press, 1964).
Tarling is referring specifically to Brunei, but the observation can be generalised, as the later part of this chapter will show. The Sejarah Melayu, the earliest written account of the history of peninsular Malaya, which recounts events from legendary times to the arrival of the Portuguese, includes, in one chapter, genealogies from Sri Maharaja, the Bandahara of Johore, down to Mansur Shah, Sultan Muda of Perak, clearly designed to legitimate the Perak Sultans through displaying their descent from the Bandaharas. See R. O. Winstedt (ed.), The Malay Annals or Sejarah Melayu, JMBRAS, XVI. iii (1938).
See Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Routledge, 1990), 45–7.
J. C. van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society (The Hague: Van Hoeve, 1955), 261.
D. G. E. Hall’s A History of South-East Asia (London: Macmillan, 1955) prompted an extended debate on Eurocentric history. For ‘studying Malaya from within, looking outwards’, see the preface to
K. G. Tregonning (ed.), Papers in Malayan History (Singapore: University of Malaya Press, 1962).
For this model, and for information in this paragraph, I am indebted to N. Tarling, A Concise History of Southeast Asia (New York/London: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966).
The traditional silk and spice routes overland, over which Marco Polo had travelled to China in the thirteenth century, had become insecure. At the same time, the expansion of Siam posed a growing threat. China looked to Malacca in order to establish an alternative route to Arabia and to form an alliance against Siam. See Wang Gungwu, ‘The Opening of Relations Between China and Malacca, 1403–5’ in J. Bastin (ed.), Malayan and Indonesian Studies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 87–104.
Quoted in Lady Sophia Raffles, Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles FRS etc (London: John Murray, 1830). See Hugh Clifford, Further India, 53; hereafter cited as FI. Raffles’s collection of manuscripts included a copy of the Sejarah Melayu, which offers a different account of the capture of Malacca. This was translated by his friend John Leyden and published in Malay Annals (London: 1821).
Compare Richard Price, First-Time: the Historical Vision of an Afro-American People (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Price handles the problem of conflicting Dutch written sources and local oral tradition, where both are clearly interested accounts, by dividing his page horizontally and offering parallel, alternative narratives. One of the dangers for non-Malay speakers in attempting to use Malay sources is made evident in
Syed Hussein Alatas, Thomas Stamford Raffles 1781–1826: Schemer or Reformer (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1971). Alatas’s account of Raffles’s responsibility for the massacre of 24 Dutch and 63 Javanese at Palembang in 1811 (7–12) hinges on the translation of the phrase ‘buang habiskan sekali-kali’ in Raffles’s letter, sent in Malay, to Mahmud Badruddin, the Sultan of Palembang. Alatas makes short work of Wurtzburg’s attempted defence of Raffles despite his ignorance of either Dutch or Malay and his consequent dangerous reliance on translations.
Lloyd Fernando, Scorpion Orchid (Singapore/Kuala Lumpur: Times Books International, 1992), 144; hereafter cited as SO.
Clifford Geertz, Negara: the Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
Hildred Geertz and Clifford Geertz, Kinship in Bali (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 23; hereafter cited as Kinship.
Milner, Kerajaan: Malay Political Culture on the Eve of Colonial Rule (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982), viii. He develops this work further in The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Raffles to the Supreme Government, 7 June 1823; quoted in Charles Buckley, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore (Singapore: Fraser and Neave, 1902), 120–1.
Carl Trocki, Prince of Pirates: The Temenggongs and the Development of Johor and Singapore, 1784–1885 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1979), 51.
N. Tarling, Sulu and Sabah (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1978), 8. Similarly, the Bajow, the ‘Sea-Dyaks’ or ‘Sea-gypsies’, were an entirely nomadic, sea-going people, without any sense of homeland beyond their ships.
N. Tarling, Piracy and Politics in the Malay World: a Study of British Imperialism in Nineteenth-century South-east Asia, (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1963), 113; hereafter cited in the text as PP.
D. K. Bassett, ‘British Commercial and Strategic Interests in the Malay Peninsula during the Late Eighteenth Century’, in J. Bastin and R. Roolvink (eds), Malaysian and Indonesian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
Quoted by Tarling (PP, 114). Dalton’s papers are published in J. H. Moor (ed.), Notices of the Indian Archipelago and Adjacent Countries (London: Cass, 1967). Pappas has examined in detail the trope of ‘piracy’ in nineteenth-century writings about Malaya. See P. A. Pappas, ‘The Hallucination of the Malay Archipelago: Critical Contexts for Joseph Conrad’s Asian Fiction’, Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Essex, 1997.
Warren draws attention to a sarcastic letter by William Lingard to the Makassarsch Handelsblad (4 January 1876), in which he criticises Dutch ‘laxness’ towards piracy, by citing the trading activities of his own ships. See James Francis Warren, ‘Joseph Conrad’s Fiction as Southeast Asian History: Trade and Politics in East Borneo in the Late Nineteenth Century,’ The Brunei Museum Journal (1977), 21–34, 27.
James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone 1768–1898: the Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1981).
C. A. Majul makes the point that the Sultanate of Sulu did not fit the model of ‘Oriental despotism’: the pyramidic structure of sultan, panglimas and datus with the sultan as the highest political authority, the panglimas as his representatives on the various islands of the sultanate, and the datus as the local chiefs was more complicated in practice. The panglimas could not perform their official duties without the cooperation of the datus, and the richest and most powerful datus advised the sultan in his council. See C. A. Majul, ‘Political and Historical Notes on the old Sulu Sultanate’, JMBRAS, XXXVIII, 1 (July 1965).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2000 Robert Hampson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hampson, R. (2000). Problems of Historiography. In: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598003_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598003_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-40319-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59800-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)