Raffles, 1781-1826

Sir Reginald Coupland

• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787208513
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

First published in 1926, this is a scholarly work on Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, FRS (July 6, 1781 - July 5, 1826), a British statesman, Lieutenant-Governor of British Java (1811-1815) and Governor-General of Bencoolen (1817-1822), best known for his founding of Singapore. He was also heavily involved in the conquest of the Indonesian island of Java from Dutch and French military forces during the Napoleonic Wars and contributed to the expansion of the British Empire.

VI

THE young Governor first set himself to establish peaceful and friendly relations with the population he now ruled. The conciliation of the Dutch colonists proved easy enough. Lord Minto’s proclamation on landing had appealed to them to recognise the British as the true friends of their captive homeland. ‘England has in every period, sometimes in concert with other Powers, sometimes single and alone, been the champion and defender of Europe, the hope of those whose fate was not yet consummated, the refuge and consolation of the fallen.’ And in another proclamation, issued on September 11, the Dutch had been promised the same status before the law, the same trading facilities, the same eligibility for office under the new Government as Englishmen. To these wise overtures the Dutch at once responded. The sentiments of the colonial community as a whole, as has been noticed, had been severely strained by Daendels’ administration. ‘Il paraît certain’, wrote Janssens in a confidential report to his Government, ‘que tous, tant Européens qu’indigènes, ont desiré voir passer la colonie entre les mains de l’ennemi. On attributera cela à une détestable Anglomanie, tandis que ce n’était que le souhait ardent de voir finir une administration qui désolait tout le monde.’ An exaggeration, doubtless; but, probably, with a good deal of truth in it. For the Dutch, it must be remembered, all these years, were divided into two parties; and some, at least, of the minority, who had supported the House of Orange, if they were not positive Anglomaniacs, yet recognised in England the champion of that House and of their national freedom. Naturally, therefore, the Dutch colonists of this Orange faction had hoped that the East Indies would at least be able to maintain neutrality and had bitterly resented their being used as one more instrument for Napoleon’s world-ambitions. As to the Republican and pro-French party, the best of its ‘patriots’ could have no illusions as to the possibility of reversing the decision of Cornelis as long as the British command of the sea prevented the arrival of reinforcements from Europe. A far more practical, a far more immediate question was whether they were to be deserted to the dreaded vengeance of the natives. And, since the British were their only available protectors, since a British government was their only safeguard against revolt and massacre, they wanted, for the time being at any rate, to keep the British in Java, not to turn them out. They might hope, one day, at the end of the war perhaps, to see the Dutch flag flying again at Batavia; but in the meantime it would be plainly impolitic not to make friends with the newcomers, and well-nigh suicidal to plot and scheme against them. Social relations, therefore, were quickly established. Many of the Dutch attended a dinner and a ball given by Raffles to Janssens and two other Dutch generals shortly before Lord Minto’s departure. And Raffles was soon on the friendliest terms with the two Dutchmen, Mr. Muntinghe and Mr. Cranssen, on his Council. The concord, indeed, was almost universal—almost, but not quite. The gallant Colonel Gillespie, the military member of Council, was uneasy. He scented ‘conspiracies and plots’. But, as Raffles wrote to Lord Minto in January 1812, it was ‘all without reason’. ‘There is not among the Dutch the least symptom of dissension, and all classes of people have come most quietly under British rule....As soon as it was known that the oaths might be taken, the public offices were crowded from morning till night with the inhabitants....The late members of Council came forward in a body; and, after taking the oaths before me, I am sorry to add, got most jovially tipsy at my house in company with the new Councillors.’ The Dutch, in fact, were ‘perfectly content and happy’.

The conciliation of the Javanese was a far graver problem. Even the ‘Iron Marshal’ had not brought the whole of Java under Dutch control. Nearly half the island had never acknowledged the supremacy of the Dutch Government; and some of the native chiefs saw in the British conquest an opportunity of repudiating all foreign interference and authority. Swift and firm measures were needed to prevent the general unrest from growing into something like a general rebellion; and, at this first test, Raffles proved that the competent departmental official could also be a man of bold initiative and decisive action. He at once determined, in a manner which a not indiscriminating Dutch historian has applauded as ‘worthy of a statesman’, that the basis of peace and order in Java must be a universal acceptance of British sovereignty throughout the island; and, in the third month of his office, he set out for the central and eastern districts to negotiate in person to that end with the two most powerful native rulers, the Sosohunan or Emperor of Java at Solo and the Sultan of Mataram at Jokjokarta. The interview with the former was quite satisfactory. The Emperor willingly signed a treaty, in which he accepted the overlordship of the British Government in return for a guarantee of his crown, his territories, and his security. The Sultan was more formidable. Raffles was received with pomp and ceremony, and, as he drove through Jokjokarta, he observed that the roadway was crowded on either side by ‘about 10,000 armed men of various descriptions, mostly cavalry’. But he faced the Sultan coolly, obtained from him a promise to obey the new Government, and confirmed him in his office. It seemed as if at least the foundations of a good understanding had been laid. In the following May, however, the Sultan broke loose and set himself at the head of a league of princes to drive the British out of Java. Raffles again acted promptly. Most of the British troops were away on an expedition to Sumatra; but he gathered what force he could, about 1,200 men, marched on Jokjokarta, carried it by storm, seized and deposed the Sultan, and set his heir on the throne. All was over by mid-June. The league collapsed. The chiefs submitted. In a few weeks and with very little bloodshed British sovereignty had been established throughout the island. Thenceforward, during the whole of Raffles’ administration, the peace remained unbroken.

Meantime he had begun to organise his government. The supreme control was vested in ‘the Lieutenant-Governor-in-Council’, though, under the terms of his Commission, the Governor could act, if he thought fit, without the consent and even without the knowledge of his Council. But Raffles had little difficulty in securing the co-operation of his colleagues. There was friction at times and in the end a serious difference of opinion between him and Colonel Gillespie. But he found in his successor, General Nightingall, a devoted friend and ally. The two Dutch members were as loyal as they were hardworking.

In five of the twenty-one districts into which the island was divided there was no established native ruler. These districts, therefore, were directly controlled by the Governor-in-Council through subordinate British officials. In each of the remaining districts, the principal chief, after taking an oath of allegiance to the British Crown and obedience to the Governor, was recognised as ‘Regent’ holding the supreme executive authority in all local affairs but advised by a British official stationed as Resident at his court. To provide these Residents as well as the staff required in the other districts and at headquarters Raffles had to improvise a civil service partly from the best of the old Dutch officials, but mainly from such Englishmen as he could find in Java or could collect at short notice from elsewhere. On the Residents, out at their lonely posts, rested the chief burden of the day-to-day government of the country. Raffles provided them with carefully drafted instructions, but at every turn they had to act on their own initiative and their own resources. In one of the most masterly of all his official papers, the Minute of February 11, 1814, Raffles paid a fine tribute to their work. ‘Placed in situations which, but a few years ago, were considered only as affording a fortune to the individual...and so uncertain in their tenure that every blast that blew was expected to bring news of a change which would remove them from the island, they have, without an exception, felt the honour and character of the British nation prompt them above every selfish consideration, and in the short space of six months enabled me to effect a revolution which two centuries of the Dutch administration could scarcely dream of....I might challenge a better illustration of the British character to be afforded.’

As regards the legal system Raffles decided to follow the example set in British India. Justice between native and native was to be administered as far as possible in accordance with native law. In its final form Raffles’ system left minor cases wholly to the native courts. Major cases and nearly all criminal cases were tried before a circuit-judge who visited each district once in three months. The facts were determined by a native jury of five. No pleaders were allowed. The law was expounded by the chief priests and native fiscals, and the opinion of the circuit-judge was given. If all these agreed, sentence was pronounced and executed. If not, the decision was referred to the Governor. Punishment by torture or mutilation, hitherto customary, was explicitly and universally abolished. For cases in which Europeans were concerned, courts were established at the three chief commercial centres, Batavia, Samarang, and Sourabaya. For civil cases the Roman-Dutch law was continued in force. In criminal cases, for the most part, the milder English law was prescribed. The only other innovation was ‘trial by jury’.

There was one further question of law in which Raffles’ sympathies were engaged. Slavery, in some degree, had probably existed in Java from early times, but it had not been very prevalent. Some of the Javanese owned slaves, it appears, but not many. Nine-tenths of the 30,000 slaves in Java at the time of the British conquest, so Raffles declared, had been imported by the Dutch mainly for domestic service. The Javanese themselves had never been enslaved, but the supply was maintained by a vigorous slave-trade among the neighbouring islands. To abolish slavery at a stroke was at least as impossible in Java as it had been for Lord Wellesley in British India in 1805. Raffles could not thus destroy, by mere right of conquest, the private property of colonists or chiefs. But he promptly doubled the duty on the importation of slaves and prohibited the trade in children under fourteen; and, as soon as the British Statute constituting the trade as felony was promulgated, he re-enacted it as a colonial law. The sources of supply were thus dried up. Further, Raffles decreed that all slaves must be registered on the West Indian plan, so as to prevent any illicit increase in their number. Finally, he proposed to amend the colonial law so as to give slaves personal rights which could be vindicated in the courts and to allow them to possess property with which, after seven years, they might buy their freedom. These last proposals, however, had not been approved by the Government of India before Raffles’ administration came to an end; and, meantime, the Court of Directors had sharply censured him for ‘disposing prematurely of property that might belong to the Company’! Raffles, however, could console himself with the fait accompli. The slave trade abolished, slavery could not long survive. Many of the Dutch colonists, moreover, shared their new Governor’s philanthropic sentiments; and, before he left Java, a Benevolent Society was founded, in which several Dutchmen took part, on the model of the African Institution in England and with the object of promoting the welfare of the slaves and providing for those who obtained their freedom.

The establishment of law and order was Raffles’ first duty; but behind it, behind all his government, lay the basic question of finance; and his hardest task was to make this bankrupt dependency pay its way. He knew well enough that the Merchant Company he served would reassert its original policy of withdrawal unless it could be reassured on this cardinal point. And one of his first acts was to make a survey of the financial situation and draft a sanguine report—too sanguine, as the event was to prove—for the Directors. In 1812–13, he promised, the colony would yield a substantial surplus. Then he set to work to raise his revenue. The Dutch had raised theirs from their monopoly of trade and the system of forced contingents and forced labour. As to trade, Raffles soon made up his mind against continuing the monopoly. ‘Java cannot be held’, he wrote, ‘on the same footing as Ceylon. It is by extending its trade, and not by confining it, that the interests of its local government can alone be secured.’ Moreover, the days of the Company’s exclusive rights in the East were now numbered. The Charter Act of 1813 limited its monopoly to the trade with China. Raffles, therefore, threw the trade in Java open; and in place of the monopoly he imposed a duty of 3% on the principal exports and a duty of 6% on imports. The system of farming out the collection of duties was abolished and official customs-houses established at the three chief ports.

But there was little to be expected from the proceeds of external trade. The Dutch monopoly had cramped it. The British blockade during the war had paralysed it. It was on the internal revenue that Raffles built his hopes. The island, he saw, was exceedingly fertile. Cultivation rioted in the valleys and had climbed far up into the hills. And the cultivators? Were they as thriftless and lazy as was commonly said? Was it impossible with such a population for Java to yield anything but a negligible fraction of its potential wealth? Raffles did not think so—not if the whole economic system could be reorganised on right principles. And to Raffles these principles were obvious. First, the cultivators must be freed—freed from the manifold obligations and compulsions, the almost servile conditions, of the old régime. His primary aim, indeed, in Java was to use ‘the opportunity of bestowing on a whole nation the freedom which is everywhere the boast of British subjects’. Secondly, the cultivators must be able to feel that their labour on the land was not mere serfs’ labour for their lords and masters but in their own interest and for their own profit and the means by which they might raise and civilise their standard of life. ‘They are neither sunk in barbarism, nor worn out by effeminacy: they have been both mistaken and misrepresented: they are neither so indolent as to refuse to labour when they feel that the fruits of it are their own, nor so ignorant as to be indifferent to the comforts and luxuries of civilised society.’ But to apply these principles meant an economic and social revolution; and in his most impetuous mood Raffles knew well enough that such a revolution could not be effected in a day. Detailed information, for one thing, was required; and so he began by appointing a Commission of three experienced Dutch residents with Colonel Colin Mackenzie as chairman to examine the whole question of the revenue system and land tenure. Raffles, meantime, by constant conversation with the colonists and still more with the natives and by frequent and prolonged excursions in the interior of the island, was acquainting himself at first hand with the ways and customs of Javanese life. And gradually, as his knowledge grew, he built up his new system, till, at the end of two or three years, not indeed without effort but with astonishingly little friction, the great revolution was as complete as administrative machinery could make it.

The first stage was the stage of enfranchisement. All compulsory cultivation of coffee or other crops was abolished. Forced labour was likewise abolished except for public works, and for those a fair wage was paid. The ‘contingents’ or forced sales of produce to the Government were temporarily continued; but they were reduced to a minimum, and finally, it seems, dropped altogether. Lastly, restrictions on native trading were as far as possible removed. The cultivator was free to sell his produce anywhere to anyone. The second stage, the harder and the longer, was the transformation of the old semi-feudal system of land-tenure with all its obligations into a system of individual lease-hold and systematic taxation. The abolition of vassalage was proclaimed. The native princes or Regents were no longer permitted to control the land on which the cultivator worked or to command a share of its produce. They were compensated for this loss of income by the allotment of defined estates, free of rent, and a liberal salary from Government. Their social degradation was more than made good by the new importance and security of their political status. For, as has been seen, they were recognised as the supreme rulers, under the British Crown, of their districts; they carried out all the main executive functions, including the control of police, on the Government’s behalf; and their authority was backed by the Government’s power and prestige. Instead of semi-independent rival princelings they had become fellow-officers of State. The lands thus withdrawn from feudal control were leased as far as possible to their actual occupants for relatively short terms and in large or small areas according to local circumstances. The rent for these lands was to constitute the one form of agrarian taxation in lieu of all the varied obligations of the old system. It was assessed at the outset at the value of two-fifths of the rice-crop. Once that share had gone to the Government, the rest of the yield of field or orchard or garden would be left, to quote Raffles, ‘free from assessment, the cultivators free from personal taxes, and the inland trade unrestricted and untaxed’. For purposes of local organisation Raffles revived the old Hindu village system. To begin with, the lands were to be leased and the rents assessed through the village headmen who were to be ‘held responsible for the proper management of such portions of the country as may be placed under their superintendence and authority’. But it would have been unwise to leave the headmen unwatched and unsupported; and at a later stage Raffles assigned the ‘immediate superintendence of the lands’ to Government and appointed British officials, whom he called ‘Collectors’, for the purpose. ‘It is not enough,’ he wrote, ‘that the Government lay down the principles of a benevolent system....It is with the Collectors that the application of those principles is entrusted, and to their temper, assiduity, judgment, and integrity that the people have to look for the enjoyment of the blessings which it is intended to bestow on them.’

Such, in briefest outline, was Raffles’ system. It was no unique invention. Within the last twenty years, as it happened, a closely similar system, known as the ryotwari system, had been introduced in parts of Madras by Read and Munro; and the function allotted to Raffles’ ‘Collectors’ in Java was very much the same as those of the ‘Collectors’ in the Company’s Indian Civil Service. Doubtless, in principle at any rate, Raffles had discussed his plans in his intimate talks with Lord Minto; but, as he wrote to his chief at Calcutta at the beginning of 1814, he had already completed the scheme and drafted the last regulations when, in a copy of a Report of a Parliamentary Committee, he discovered what had been done in Madras. ‘The principles of the ryotwari settlement’, he wrote; ‘had suggested themselves without my knowing that they had been, adopted elsewhere; and although I may not easily gain credit for the original design, the promoters and supporters of that settlement will, no doubt, find a strong argument in its favour from the circumstance of its having been so early and so easily adopted in a foreign and distant colony.’ But, in any case, Raffles was not destined to enjoy much credit for his revolution. There is no reason to doubt that it would have proved a complete success. Elsewhere the principles of freedom and self-interest for the cultivator were to be vindicated beyond question—in India and, in recent years and with singular clarity, in British West Africa. But in Java a final proof of complete success was not forthcoming for the simple reason that there was not time for it. Some of the old scandals died hard. It was difficult, in two or three years’ time, to teach every native chief not to go behind the new scheme and grasp again at his old privileges. It was impossible to prevent the headmen who rented out land from exacting the feudal services which were so deeply rooted in the traditions of Javanese life. It was impossible to abolish all the customary local imposts on the transit of trade in the interior. No social revolution has ever made a perfectly clean cut with the past. Here and there, in some shape or other, vestiges of the old abuses have always survived, at least for a time. But, if a complete, a perfect execution of Raffles’ scheme could only be attained on paper, he could fairly boast of what was, in so short a space of time, an astonishing measure of real achievement. Over most of the island the new system was actually in operation. Everywhere in form, and nearly everywhere in fact, the exploiters of the old régime had submitted to the new. As to the exploited, they had quickly realised, with wonder and gratitude, the change that had come upon their life. The new system, records Mr. Muntinghe, was ‘received not only with submission, but also with joy and acclamation among a large number of the Javanese population—village chiefs, magistrates, and district chiefs included. The people were satisfied and content’. And again: ‘The British Government have attached themselves to the whole population of Java. They have taken under their protection the old native institutions and revised their customs and the old village administration of their choice, and set bounds to the tyranny of princes and regents’. And Mr. Muntinghe is a trustworthy witness. He might have been tempted to glorify the reforms in which he himself had taken part; but he might equally have been tempted to minimise, as some other Dutchmen did, the value of the work accomplished during the British interregnum in Java.

But what of the financial aspect of the revolution? That, after all, was the crux. That was what Raffles’ ultimate masters at India House would be chiefly concerned with. And on that point, unhappily, it was difficult, at such a distance, to convince men who disliked innovations, took short views, demanded quick returns, and had from the first discountenanced and only reluctantly acquiesced in the experiment of trying to govern Java at all. Yet, even on the financial issue and even after only two years, Raffles could make a strong case. He could show that the revenue had steadily risen till it exceeded a million and a half rupees and that the debt to Bengal, incurred to give his Government a start, had been steadily reduced. And he could show that nearly half of the whole revenue was already produced by the rents of land under the new system. But had not Raffles, at the outset, raised still higher hopes? He had—and they might have been fulfilled if his treasury had not had to meet two heavy ‘extraordinary’ calls. In the first place, the previous Dutch Government, in desperate need of money, had sold certain provinces to Chinese speculators. The results had been—they were bound to be—disastrous to the inhabitants. Ruthlessly exploited, unable at last to tolerate their servile life, some thousands of them had already left their homes to seek a better fate in some other part of the island when the Dutch Government fell; and one of its successor’s first troubles had been a little rebellion in that area. Raffles, therefore, was clearly right in deciding that this ill must be undone....

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• VII
• VIII
• IX
• X
• XI
• XII
• XIII
• XIV
• XV
• AUTHORITIES
• MAP OF THE MALAY PENINSULA
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER