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This pair of elegant, slip-cased volumes are devoted to Raffles' second wife, Sophia (1786-1858), who wrote the first published account of her husband's life and achievements, and his lesser-known but equally, if not more intriguing, first wife, Olivia (1771-1814).
When Raffles sets sail from the cold, damp confines of Georgian London to make his name and fortune in the tropics, he takes with him his new wife, Olivia, a raffish beauty with a scandalous past. She infatuates both his closest friend, a poet, and one of his bitterest rivals, a soldier. Raffles sees what is going on, but he turns a blind eye – or so hopes Olivia. After Olivia’s death, and back on leave in London, Raffles, a man once again in need of a wife, makes a practical marriage. Sophia, no beauty, but curious and intelligent, embraces the opportunity of an exciting life abroad. Marriage brings her great joy but also great sadness. Her life with Raffles becomes a catalogue of loss: of their children, of their possessions, of their savings. And all the while, Raffles, driven and talented, manoeuvres at the centre of global networks of power, trade, politics and diplomacy. His scheming culminates, to his eventual glory, with the founding of a new trading post: Singapore.
In 1819 Sir Stamford Raffles, without authority from London, raised the British flag on a small jungle-covered island and founded a settlement which would become the city state of Singapore. It was the crowning moment in an extraordinary career in South-East Asia, which saw Raffles shake off his humble beginnings to become Lieutenant-Governor of Java. But his success in the tropics was overshadowed by professional conflict and personal tragedy. Acclaimed biographer Victoria Glendinning charts the extraordinary life of an English adventurer, disobedient employee of the East India Company, utopian imperialist, linguist, naturalist, collector and troublesome visionary. If Raffles' own end was tragic, the mark he left on the world is indelible. His name and fame are undimmed today and, as he hoped, Singapore has become his lasting monument.
Wives, Slaves, and Concubines argues that Dutch colonial practices and law created a new set of social and economic divisions in Batavia-Jakarta, modern-day Indonesia, to deal with difficult realities in Southeast Asia. Jones uses compelling stories from ordinary Asian women to explore the profound structural changes occurring at the end of the early colonial period—changes that helped birth the modern world order. Based on previously untapped criminal proceedings and testimonies by women who appeared before the Dutch East India Company's Court of Alderman, this fascinating study details the ways in which demographic and economic realities transformed the social and legal landscape of eighteenth-century Batavia-Jakarta. Southeast Asian women played an inordinately important role in the functioning of the early modern Asia Trade and in the short- and long-term operations of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Southeast Asia was a place where most individuals operated within an intricate web of multiple, fluid, situational, and reciprocal social relationships ranging from dependence to bondedness to slavery. The eighteenth century represents an important turning point: the relatively open and autonomous Asia Trade that prompted Columbus to set sail had begun to give way to an age of high imperialism and European economic hegemony. How did these changes affect life for ordinary women in early modern Dutch Asia, and how did the transformations wrought by Dutch colonialism alter their lives? The VOC created a legal division that favored members of mixed VOC families, those in which Asian women married men employed by the VOC. Thus, employment—not race—became the path to legal preference, a factor that disadvantaged the rest of the Asian women. In short, colonialism created a new underclass in Asia, one that had a particularly female cast. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, an increasingly operational dichotomy of slave and free supplanted an otherwise fluid system of reciprocal bondedness. The inherent divisions of this new system engendered social friction, especially as the emergent early modern economic order demanded new, tractable forms of labor. Dutch domestic law gave power to female elites in Dutch Asia, but it left the majority of women vulnerable to the more privileged on both sides of this legal divide. Slaves fled and violence erupted when traditional expectations of social mobility collided with new demands from the masters and the state.
The "Gentleman's magazine" section is a digest of selections from the weekly press; the "(Trader's) monthly intelligencer" section consists of news (foreign and domestic), vital statistics, a register of the month's new publications, and a calendar of forthcoming trade fairs.
One hundred and sixty years ago a young Englishman founded a private raj on the coast of Borneo. The world he created eventually took in a territory the size of England, its expansion campaigns paid for in human heads. Here, polite Victorian conventions coexisted tenuously with one of the most violent cultures on earth, often with startling results: pockets of tenderness and extreme brutality appearing where least expected. Into this world flowed a small tribe of adventurers, fugitives, criminals, and saints-- the madly talented and simply mad. And the women followed: wives and would-be wives, spinster nursemaids and heartless schemers, the rigidly virtuous and the virtually desperate. And always, the children, innocents too often the victims of an elemental nature both lush and deadly. Kalimantaan is the story of this world, these people. But the deeper story resides in the realm of the heart. It is about love in absurd conditions, the tenacity of it as well as our ability to miss it repeatedly and with perverse genius.