Raffles

by Victoria Glendinning

  The kraton at Yogyakarta was a compound three miles in circumference, containing the houses of the Sultan, his women and his extended family, guest-houses, open-sided reception halls, offices, barracks, and a water palace – a floating fantasy. John Crawfurd said that in his time as many as 10,000 people lived in the kraton – guards, servants, children, retainers, clients and pensioners. An eyewitness account of what happened there between 18 and 20 June 1812 appears in a Javanese tree-bark manuscript – the draft of a historical chronicle, or babad – by Bendara Pangeran Arya Panular, uncle and father-in-law of the Crown Prince.

  The troops, in their red coats and plumed helmets, clanked out from the Dutch-built Vredeburg Fort in Yogyakarta in the afternoon of 18 June, up the straight ceremonial road called Malioboro to the kraton, naked sabres in their hands. They bombarded the kraton with shells, ‘hard service’ raged both inside and outside the walls, and fires were set. Raffles and John Crawfurd remained in the Residency, directly opposite the Vredeburg Fort on the ceremonial road.

  Then came the looting. The spoils of war were legitimate perquisites, regulated by ‘Prize Agents’, who creamed off something for their trouble. But the British sacking of the kraton was of an extreme nature, never officially acknowledged. Colonel Gillespie in his report to Lieutenant-Governor Raffles praised his troops’ ‘steadiness and discipline’; in ‘the heat of the storm’ the Sultan’s person was respected, ‘his family was placed in security and protection, and no part of the property was either pillaged or molested.’

  The value of the loot was calculated at about 800,000 Spanish dollars. Royal family members were forced to hand over their personal jewels. Panular, while describing the ‘unbridled looting, burning and plundering’, did emphasise that there was no violation of the palace women. The only officer, Captain Hector Maclean, who attempted to ‘carry off’ a lady was stabbed by her in the neck and later died. The kris was confiscated from each gentlemen of the court. This was humiliating. A man’s kris was a sacred object, emblematic of his manhood and identity.

  Chests and boxes of treasure were carted down the road to the Vredeburg Fort. Precious books and manuscripts were taken to the Residency, where Raffles and Crawfurd pored over them. The Sultan surrendered on 20 June, and the Crown Prince was proclaimed once more Hamengkubuwana III in the throne room of the Residency. John Crawfurd humiliated the losers by making them kneel, forcing their heads down to pay obeisance to Lieutenant-Governor Raffles and the new Sultan – who, unwillingly, had to agree to the annexation of yet more of his lands and privileges.

  Considering the cultural treasures which he retained, it was a bit rich of Raffles to complain to Colonel Gillespie, as he did, about the unregulated share-out of prize money among the troops. Gillespie replied that on account of a severe wound in his upper left arm, he had been unable to oversee everything. ‘Upon maturely considering the distribution of the prize money, I clearly perceive that the subject should have been referred to your authority, before a measure of so much importance had taken place.’ This reply is courteous, if covertly ironic. Gillespie, the hero of Vellore and of Cornelis, did not like being ticked off by an inexperienced civilian.

  Raffles wrote to Minto from Samarang on 25 June that ‘Gillespie was himself’ in the assault, and ‘European power is for the first time paramount in Java.’ He did not complain publicly about Gillespie’s laxness over the prize money. But who would pay the costs of the military operation? The British Government would not want to, nor would the Company, since the attack was not ordered or authorised. Minto conveyed in a private letter – signed off ‘most truly and affectionately yours’ – his approval of Raffles’ actions at both Palembang and Yogyakarta. But he urged Raffles to send him quickly the necessary ‘materials’ which he needed in order to convey to the East India Company the justification for these operations on grounds of ‘justice and expediency’, which they would definitely expect.

  Captain Thomas Otto Travers recalled how Raffles, in the course of the seventy-two-hour sailing from Samarang back to Batavia, drew up ‘the Report on the capture of Djocjocarta, entering into a full and clear account of the circumstances which rendered this measure absolutely necessary for the presence of peace on the Island.’ Palembang was another matter; the required materials were never sent. Sophia Raffles in the Memoir wrote that ‘to this unavoidable omission may be attributed much of the trouble and difficulty in which Mr Raffles was afterwards involved.’

  The assault on the kraton at Yogyakarta was not an unprecedented outrage. Daendels too had attacked the kraton in December 1810 (when Raffles was in Malacca) with more than three thousand men – three times more than were involved in the British assault – and forced Hamengkubuwana II to stand down in favour of his son the Crown Prince. Huge amounts of prize money were carried away on that occasion too.

  The British assault was not remembered with any particular bitterness, and not only because the Sultan owed his restored position to Raffles. The Resident, John Crawfurd, was popular. All the references to him in Panular’s babad are so flattering that it could have been drafted for his eyes, though that is too cynical. Crawfurd was respected for his mastery of the Javanese language and his courtesy to the re-installed Sultan; and admiration for certain European qualities was not uncommon. A study of literary responses to Western culture and values (admittedly in Arabic texts, not Javanese) by Rasheed El-Enany finds a prevailing idealisation of the Western ‘other’, and a desire to strengthen the home culture by appropriating Western science and technology, and Western courage and prowess. Panular presented the defeat as a moral collapse in the face of the discipline and the bravery of the British.

  Politically, Daendels and Raffles between them changed the perspective with an idea of colonialism which did not limit itself to coastal settlements and treaties negotiated with local rulers. Raffles assumed sovereignty – never actually achieved – over the whole island. In a public letter about Gillespie’s ‘brilliant achievement’ in the Gazette, he described Yogyakarta as having long been ‘the bane of the European authority in Java, maintaining in a state of absolute independence the finest provinces of the Island’. ‘Absolute independence’ was not to be tolerated.

  A private death had taken place on the other side of the world. The burial of ‘Captain Raffles, of Trinity Ground’ (the almshouse), was registered at the church of St Nicholas, Deptford, on 23 November 1811. There is a constrained note from Raffles to his Uncle William, Cousin Thomas’s father, written from Buitenzorg in October 1812, after the news reached him: ‘My Mother informs me she is much indebted to you for your kind attention to her in the hour of trouble and at the time of my poor father’s death, and I should not do justice to my feelings did I not avail myself of the earliest opportunity to express my acknowledgments.’ To this he added a few sentences of family politesse and good wishes. There was nothing more to say.

  Chapter 6

  ‘Too Sensational’

  Java 1812–1814

  The first anniversary of victory in Java was celebrated with ‘the best Feast ever on the island,’ with Colonel Gillespie ‘the Hero of Cornelis’ presiding and his health drunk ‘in treble bumpers standing’. But in early 1813 Raffles heard that the Board of Control in London was making no decision about the future of Java until ‘a more full and satisfactory’ report had been received.

  Raffles had no job-security and he was, in himself, insecure in the job. He had been a back-office man, albeit a zealous and influential one. He was more than capable of rising to a challenge, and he did not lack bravado. What he lacked was support. In October 1812 he wrote to William Brown Ramsay: ‘I am here alone, without any advice, in a new country with a large native population of six or seven millions of people, a great proportion of foreign Europeans and a standing Army of not less than seven thousand men… I can hardly say what change has taken place in me since we parted. I feel I am somewhat older, and, in many points of a worldly nature, I am apt to view men and things in a somewha
t different light, but it is my belief that I am intrinsically the same.’

  Most people in his uncertain situation would have coasted, doing as much good as they could in the time that they had (to quote Lord Minto). Raffles did just the opposite. He held fast to his vision. He would make his mark, and he would convince the British Government of Java’s value, just as if the British were to be administering it for the foreseeable future.

  His most radical reforms were concerned with the currency crisis and the system of land tenure, and are central to an assessment of his administration – though some may warm to the irony of Miss Prism, the governess in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘Cecily, you will read your Political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational.’

  Lord Minto was emphatic that land-tenure reform was essential, but only after full investigation, not ‘suddenly and ignorantly attempted’. He advised the Secret Committee in London (3 October 1811) that ‘the whole system of property is vicious and adverse alike to the interests of Government and people,’ but warned Raffles before he left the island not to go too far or too fast.

  The system inherited by Raffles was dominated by the principal local chiefs, called ‘Regents’ by the Dutch. Java was a country of villages, and at the bottom of the economic pyramid were the village cultivators. Goods and services were provided gratis to the Regents through a chain of village headmen, officials and royal relatives, each taking his cut. Neither the Regents nor the Dutch had any direct connection with the cultivators. The Regents supplied the colonial Government by ‘forced deliveries’ (at fixed prices, under contract, though sometimes not paid for) and ‘contingents’ (free supplies of rice in exchange for supporting a Regent in his own conflicts). The Regents provided forced labour for roads and public works. The Chinese exercised their own forms of profiteering, hiring whole villages from the Regents.

  Raffles determined to improve the lives of the cultivators by contracting for goods and services, not with the Regents but with the cultivators themselves through their village headmen, and introducing a cash economy. Each village would be charged a fixed land-rent, and cultivators would be free to grow whatever crops they wanted. Revenue would be siphoned directly to Government without passing through the ‘grasping hands’ of the Regents, and ‘the spur given to industry and speculation,’ as he told Cousin Elton in October 1813, ‘will correct the balance of trade by increasing our exports.’

  This was not an original idea. An advocate of the village land-rent system was a liberal Dutchman, Dirk van Hogendorp, in Patna at the turn of the century. He advocated abolition of forced personal services and a cash economy. Raffles did not come to grips with Van Hogendorp’s Berigt – it was in Dutch – until he came to write his History of Java, but its ideas were widely known. Daendels had considered this village land-rent system too, but abandoned it because the Javanese had few needs and didn’t have any money anyway. He thought it better to check abuses rather than change the whole system.

  Raffles, the ‘intrepid innovator’ as John Crawfurd described him, determined not to fine-tune the existing system but to transform it. In keeping with Minto’s requirement for thorough investigation, in January 1812 he set up a four-man committee, consisting of Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Mackenzie (who already had the general survey of the island on his hands) and three Dutch officials, to collect information and agricultural statistics.

  Primarily concerned with the well-being of the people, Raffles instructed his committee that ‘Government should consider the inhabitants without reference to bare mercantile profits and to connect the sources of the revenue with the general prosperity of the Colony.’ But the relationship between the common good and the profit-making purpose of the Company, answerable to shareholders, was uncomfortable.

  His committee duly recommended that ‘all kinds of servitude should be abolished.’ There should be a capitation tax on all men able to work. Cultivators should grow whatever crops they wanted to. Any loss of revenue would be made good by increased production and savings in central warehousing. Salt-pans, saltpetre works, pearl reefs and bird’s nest rocks should remain Government property. Lands might profitably be sold off, preferably to Europeans rather than to the Chinese, who remitted their money back to China.

  Raffles had to compensate the Regents with expensive sweeteners; his committee reported that they might be happy to accept a permanent salary and the secure succession of their nearest relative, in lieu of controlling the system. One of his investigators had a worry: ‘I am convinced that once the Javanese has land in his possession and is left to himself without any restriction, he will not work for more than is absolutely necessary for himself and his family.’

  The creation of new wants would take time and effort. Karl Marx, to illustrate in Das Kapital (1867) how simple communities worked, quoted a passage about village continuity from Raffles’ History of Java: ‘The inhabitants give themselves no trouble about the breaking up and division of kingdoms; while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred or to what sovereign it devolves; its internal economy remains unchanged.’

  Muntinghe, on whom Raffles relied heavily, took the view that if the Javanese held property and saw the means of improving their lives, they would ‘naturally display the principles and faculties innate in every human being.’ While noting Raffles’ praiseworthy aim of improving the inhabitants’ lives at the expense of ‘bare mercantile profit’, he observed drily that the ‘safest principle’ to be adopted was that ‘every colony does or ought to exist for the benefit of the motherland.’

  Raffles was unresolved on this point. He squared the circle by believing that with more humane practices greater profits would accrue to the Company. He identified one immediate opportunity for the Company to create a market in Java for cheap printed cottons from England. ‘I am most sanguine in my expectations of success,’ he wrote to Secretary William Ramsay in London, ‘provided strict attention is paid to patterns and sizes.’ The Company sent out a consignment of cottons, but the experiment failed. Colours in the native batiks and tie-dyes might fade over time, but the dyes of the British goods were not fast, and the colours ran.

  Raffles’ village collection system was first tried out by John Crawfurd in the Transferred Districts – transferred, that is, from the defeated Sultan of Yogyakarta – where, as Raffles told William Marsden, ‘the whole of the uncertain revenues collected by the native princes has been reduced to a fixed land-rent, payable in money half-yearly.’ He informed the Secret Committee in London that he intended to extend the system throughout the island, making one compromise in deference to ‘popular sentiments and opinion’: part of the rent must be paid in money, but part could be paid in rice. That was because, as Daendels had found, the villagers had virtually no money.

  He was doggedly optimistic, as anyone had to be in order to force through such a change; though there was just possibly – not probably – some cousinly jocularity in his boast to Elton Hamond that, ‘You will thus see, that I have the happiness to release several millions of my fellow creatures from a state of bondage and arbitrary oppression.’

  By 1814 Raffles had moved on further, trying out ‘detailed settlements’: cultivators were to be assessed on their individual holdings and to pay taxes and land-rent individually, not to the village headmen but direct to Government. A cultivator – a ryot – was to be secure in his holding so long as he could pay up. He told Minto he was putting in place ‘the principles of the ryotwari settlement’ in India ‘without my knowing they had been adopted elsewhere.’ But what worked in India would not necessarily work in Java, and since it was almost certain that the island would be returned to the Dutch, the changes could never be seen through properly during Raffles’ administration. It was this very feeling that he was working against a deadline that made him over-zealous. If he made a success, whoever came after him would find his admirable system in operation.r />
  On resuming their administration of Java, the Dutch did indeed retain Raffles’ village collection system for upwards of fourteen years, correcting some anomalies. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with it. The ryotwari system was another matter. It remained incomplete and inconsistent, and in many districts never superseded the village collection system.

  The cultivators, unable to pay the taxes and land-rent required in cash, especially in years of drought, had recourse to Chinese moneylenders. They compounded their difficulties by forward-selling their next year’s crops. Under the ryotwari system the village headmen, most of them illiterate, remained responsible for providing each individual’s accounts for the Government collectors. Between the headmen, the cultivators, the collectors, and the native writers called in to set pen to paper, muddle and confusion resulted in insanely creative accounting.

  Even the principle of free cultivation was not strictly adhered to. Most villagers, left to themselves, would cultivate almost nothing but rice. In 1814 Raffles acquired from the Sultan of Bantam in West Java his pepper-growing highlands, in return for 10,000 Spanish dollars a year and the annulment of his debts. The cultivators’ rent agreements included a demand to plant thousands of new pepper vines for the export market. The teak forests too remained under the control of Government. This was not free cultivation. As John Bastin has written, in Bantam the ‘liberal principles’ of the ryotwari system ‘conflicted with reality.’

  ‘Farms’, too, were still auctioned by Government during Raffles’ time. These farms were not agricultural. They were arrangements by which sums of money were paid to Government by individuals, often Chinese, sometimes Company employees, in exchange for a monopoly of the collection of specified charges. The selling of some ordinary commodities such as fish and tobacco, and the bazaars themselves, were leased or ‘farmed’. (Raffles was in favour of farms for arack and opium, thinking the trade was better regulated and controlled thereby.) So the cultivators had to find yet more money that they did not have.