Colonial Discourse in Perspective: The Malay Peninsula in John Crawfurd's Ideas on Ethnology and World History

Abstract

This chapter examines how the Malay Peninsula shaped the ethnological and historical writings of the nineteenth-century British scholar-administrator of Southeast Asia, John Crawfurd (1783-1868), who served as the second British Resident of Singapore (1823-6). By analysing the manner in which he collected his information and made sense of the inhabitants of the region and their history, this paper also offers a closer glimpse on the workings of British, and European, intellectual discourse on foreign places during the colonial period, and invites us to think beyond the simplistic framework of knowledge as a tool of Western imperial domination. This research paper is originally commissioned by the National Library Board, Singapore during the Author's tenure as a Lee Kong Chian Research Fellow attached to the National Library, Singapore during 2016.

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