Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- A Note on the Language, Spelling and Pagination of Quotations
- 1 Introduction: Booking Southeast Asia: The History of an Idea
- 2 Booking Southeast Asia: And So It Begins, with a Nightmare
- 3 The New Language-Game of Modern Colonial Capitalism
- 4 Raffles’ Java as Museum
- 5 Dressing the Cannibal: John Anderson’s Sumatra as Market
- 6 Brooke, Keppel, Mundy and Marryat’s Borneo as ‘The Den of Pirates’
- 7 Crawfurd’s Burma as the Torpid ‘Land of Tyranny’
- 8 Bricolage, Power and How a Region Was Discursively Constructed
- Appendix A The full Transcript of the Article by William Cobbett on the Subject of the British Invasion of Java
- Appendix B Keeping an eye on the Javanese: Raffles’ ‘Regulations of 1814 for the More Effectual Administration of Justice in the Provincial Courts of Java'
- Appendix C James Brooke’s Detractors in the British Parliament and the Aborigines’ Protection Society
- Appendix D The clash between the HMS Dido and the Ships of the Rajah of Riao: A Case of Mistaken Identity and Misappropriation of the Signifier ‘Pirate’
- Appendix E The Construction of the Native other in the Writings of Hugh Clifford, British Colonial Resident to Pahang
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction: Booking Southeast Asia: The History of an Idea
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- A Note on the Language, Spelling and Pagination of Quotations
- 1 Introduction: Booking Southeast Asia: The History of an Idea
- 2 Booking Southeast Asia: And So It Begins, with a Nightmare
- 3 The New Language-Game of Modern Colonial Capitalism
- 4 Raffles’ Java as Museum
- 5 Dressing the Cannibal: John Anderson’s Sumatra as Market
- 6 Brooke, Keppel, Mundy and Marryat’s Borneo as ‘The Den of Pirates’
- 7 Crawfurd’s Burma as the Torpid ‘Land of Tyranny’
- 8 Bricolage, Power and How a Region Was Discursively Constructed
- Appendix A The full Transcript of the Article by William Cobbett on the Subject of the British Invasion of Java
- Appendix B Keeping an eye on the Javanese: Raffles’ ‘Regulations of 1814 for the More Effectual Administration of Justice in the Provincial Courts of Java'
- Appendix C James Brooke’s Detractors in the British Parliament and the Aborigines’ Protection Society
- Appendix D The clash between the HMS Dido and the Ships of the Rajah of Riao: A Case of Mistaken Identity and Misappropriation of the Signifier ‘Pirate’
- Appendix E The Construction of the Native other in the Writings of Hugh Clifford, British Colonial Resident to Pahang
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Words in their primacy or immediate signification, stand for nothing, but the ideas in the mind of him who uses them. (3.2.ii)
– John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)A Book about Books, and Where to Find Southeast Asia
When we start to ascertain the thingness of a thing, we are immediately helpless in spite of our well-ordered question. Where should we grasp the thing? And besides, we nowhere find ‘the thing’, but only particular things.
– Martin Heidegger, ‘The Everyday and Scientific Experiences of the Thing: The Question Concerning Their Truth’This is a book about books; and specifically about the books that were written on the subject of Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century.
Before proceeding any further, I would like to make it clear that this is not a book about the historical development of the region that is commonly known as ‘Southeast Asia’ today: Scores of erudite scholars have already done sterling work in that regard, and names like Steinberg, Roff, Chandler and Taylor come to mind. Nor am I disputing the fact that the peoples of that region were already in constant contact with each other, and had formed networks of commercial and cultural exchange between themselves long before the term ‘Southeast Asia’ had been coined – a fact well researched and documented by Anthony Reid and K.N. Chaudhuri in particular.
Rather, I propose to look at how the idea of Southeast Asia – long before the term was current – was arrived at, developed and put to instrumental use by a succession of scholars, adventurers and merchants from 1800 to the end of the nineteenth century, focusing primarily on the writers who were themselves part of the colonial enterprise and the products of empire. It is thus a book about the idea of the place and the worldviews of those who had imagined a region that lay before them, ripe for colonisation and conquest. In its pace and progression I propose to take tiny Hobbit-steps rather than emulate the stride of giants, and the claims that I shall make are modest in nature, though not, I believe, entirely inconsequential.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Discursive Construction of Southeast Asia in 19th Century Colonial-Capitalist Discourse , pp. 13 - 22Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016