John Crawfurd

The Honourable John Crawfurd
2nd Resident of Singapore
In office 27 May 1823 – 15 August 1826
Monarch	George IV (1820–1830)
Preceded by	Major-Gen. William Farquhar
Succeeded by	Abolished
Personal details
Born	13 August 1783(1783-08-13) Islay, Scotland
Died	11 May 1868(1868-05-11) (aged 84) South Kensington, London, United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Profession	Colonial Administrator

For the Irish cricketer of the same name, see John Crawfurd (cricketer)

John Crawfurd (13 August 1783 – 11 May 1868) was a Scottish physician, colonial administrator and diplomat, and author. He is now best known for his work on Asian languages, his History of the Indian Archipelago, and his role in founding Singapore.

Early life

He was born in the island of Islay, Scotland. He followed his father's footsteps in the study of medicine and completed his medical course at Edinburgh in 1803, at the age of 20.

Crawfurd joined the East India Company, as a Company surgeon, and was posted to India's Northwestern Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) from 1803–1808. He saw service in the campaigns of Baron Lake.

In the East Indies

Crawfurd was sent in 1808 to Penang, where he applied himself to the study of the Malay language and culture. In Penang he met Stamford Raffles for the first time.

In 1811, Crawfurd accompanied Raffles on Lord Minto's Java Invasion against the Dutch. Raffles was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Java by Minto during the 45-day operation, and Crawfurd was appointed the post of Resident at the Court of Yogyakarta in November 1811. There he took a firm line against Sultan Hamengkubuwana II. The Sultan was encouraged by Pakubuwono IV of Surakarta to assume he had support in resisting the British; who sided with his opponents his son the Crown Prince and Pangeran Natsukusuma. The Sultan's palace, the Kraton Ngayogyakarta Hadiningrat, was beseiged and taken by British-led forces in June 1812.

The kraton in Yogyakarta, a gate in an photograph from the early 20th century. The palace was made up of pendopo surrounded by a whitewashed wall.

As Resident, Crawfurd also pursued the study of the Javanese language, and cultivated personal relationships with Javanese aristocrats and literati. He was impressed by Javanese music.

Javanese signs for the five days of the week, engraving by William Home Lizars from Crawfurd's History of the Indian Archipelago.

Crawfurd was sent on diplomatic missions to Bali and the Celebes (now Sulawesi). His knowledge of the local culture supported Raffles's government in Java. Raffles, however, wanted to introduce land reform in the Cheribon residency. Crawfurd, with his experience of India and the zamindari, was a supporter of the "village system" of revenue collection. He opposed Raffles's attempts to introduce individual (ryotwari) settlement into Java.

Diplomat

Java was returned to the Dutch in 1816, and Crawfurd went back to England that year, shortly becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society, and turning to writing. Within a few years he was recalled to South-East Asia, as a diplomat; his missions were of limited obvious success.

Siam mission

In 1821, Crawfurd's expertise was recognised by Governor-General Lord Hastings, who sent him on a mission as an envoy to the courts of Siam (now Thailand); and then to Cochin-China (now Vietnam). He was accompanied by George Finlayson as naturalist; and travelled with notes on Buddhism, as it was understood at the time, from Horace Hayman Wilson.

The mission to the court of King Rama II was nearly the first official visit to one of the most powerful nations in the region since the Siam–England war of 1687 with the previous Siamese Ayutthaya kingdom. Hastings was especially interested in learning more about Siamese policy with regard to the northern Malay states. The contact with Siam paved the way for closer relations with Britain, leading King Rama II to ally his kingdom with the British in the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826). It in turn helped Captain Henry Burney conclude the Treaty of Amity and Commerce (Siam–UK) in June 1826 in the reign of King Rama III.

Vietnamese mandarins, illustration from Crawfurd's Journal of an Embassy to the Courts of Siam and Cochin-China.

At Bangkok in May 1822 Crawfurd met Anouvong (Chao Anou), the future rebel and king in what is now Laos, a first diplomatic contact for the UK. This visit was despite the isolation into which the mission had fallen. A Vietnamese embassy had arrived not long before, and tensions were high. Since Crawford's brief opposed the interests of court figures including the Raja of Ligor and Nangklao, there was little prospect of success. By October relations were at a low ebb. Crawfurd moved on to Saigon, but Minh Mang refused to see him.

Resident of Singapore

Crawfurd was appointed British Resident of Singapore in March 1823. He was under orders to reduce the expenditure on the existing factory there, but instead responded to local commercial representations, and spent money on reclamation work on the river. He also concluded the final agreement between the East India Company, and Sultan Hussein Shah of Johor with the Temenggong, on the status of Singapore on 2 August 1824. It was the culmination of negotiations started by Raffles in 1819, and the agreement is now sometimes called the Crawfurd Treaty. He also had input into the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 dealing with spheres of influence in the East Indies.

Crawfurd was on familiar terms with Munshi Abdullah. He edited and contributed to the Singapore Chronicle of Francis James Bernard, the first local newspaper that initially appeared dated 1 January 1824. Crawford Street [sic] in Singapore is named after him.

Burma mission

Crawfurd was sent on another envoy mission to Burma in 1826, by Hastings's successor Lord Amherst, in the aftermath of the First Anglo-Burmese War. It was to be his last political service for the Company. The party included Adoniram Judson as interpreter and Nathaniel Wallich as botanist. Crawfurd's journey to Ava up the River Irrawaddy was by the steam-boat Diana (hired by the East India Company for the war, where it had seen action and travelled 400 miles up the Irrawaddy). There were five local boats, and soldiers making up a party of over 50.

Crawfurd at the court found Bagyidaw temporising despite a weak position with the British forces in Arakan and Tenasserim. The king conceded only a trade agreement, in return for a delay in indemnity payments; and sent his own mission to Calcutta.

The expedition fortuitously was delayed on the return journey for repairs. Crawfurd collected significant fossils, north of Magwe on the left bank of the river, in seven chests. Back in London, William Clift identified a new species of mastodon (more accurately Stegolophodon) from them; Hugh Falconer also worked on the collection. The finds, of fossil bones and wood, were discussed further in a paper by William Buckland, giving details; and they brought Crawfurd the friendship of Roderick Murchison, Foreign Secretary of the Geological Society. There were also collected 18,000 botanical specimens, many of which went to the Calcutta Botanic Garden.

Jaw collected by John Crawfurd near Yenangyaung in Burma, now a type specimen for Stegolophodon latidens. Plate 36 of the original paper by William Clift.

Later life

In the United Kingdom Crawfurd spent around 40 years in varied activities. He wrote as an orientalist, geographer and ethnologist. He tried parliamentary politics, without success; he agitated for free trade; and he was a publicist for colonisation schemes in line with his views. He also represented the interests of British traders based in Singapore and Calcutta.

Parliamentary candidate

Crawfurd made several unsuccessful attempts to enter the British Parliament in the 1830s. His campaign literature featured universal suffrage and the secret ballot, free trade and opposition to monopolies, public education and reduction of military spending, and opposition to regressive taxation and the taxation of Dissenters for a state church, with nationalisation of Church of England properties. He joined the Parliamentary Candidate Society, founded by Thomas Erskine Perry (his brother-in-law), to promote "fit and proper" Members of Parliament.

Crawfurd unsuccessfully contested, as an advanced radical, Glasgow in 1832, Paisley in 1834, Stirling Burghs in 1835, and Preston in 1837. At Glasgow he polled fourth (there were two MPs for the borough), with Sir Daniel Sandford third. In March 1834 it was Sandford who was elected at Paisley. Alexander's East India and Colonial Magazine struck a note of regret after his defeat at Stirling Burghs. In Preston in 1837 Crawfurd had the Liberal nomination in a three-cornered fight for two seats, as Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood was regarded as a waverer by the Conservatives who ran Robert Townley Parker against him; but he polled third.

Free trader

A lifelong advocate of free trade policies, in A View of the Present State and Future Prospects of the Free Trade and Colonization of India (1829), Crawfurd made an extended case against the East India Company's approach, in particular in excluding British entrepreneurs, and in failing to develop Indian cotton. He had had experience in Java of the export possibilities for cotton textiles. He then gave evidence in March 1830 to a parliamentary committee, on the East India Company's monopoly of trade with China. Robert Montgomery Martin critised Crawfurd, and the evidence of Robert Rickards, an ex-employee of the Company, for exaggerating the financial burden of the monopoly on tea. Crawfurd put out a pamphlet, Chinese Monopoly Examined. Ross Donnelly Mangles defended the East India Company in 1830, in an answer addressed to Rickards and Crawfurd. When the Company's charter came up for renewal in 1833, the China trade monopoly was broken. Crawfurd's part as parliamentary agent for interests in Calcutta had been paid (at £1500 per year); his publicity work had included facts for an Edinburgh Review article written by another author.

On 31 January 1834 Crawfurd supported Thomas Perronet Thompson in a meeting agitating against the Corn Laws.

Colonisation of Australia

In reviewing Edward Gibbon Wakefield's New British Province of South Australia, and subsequent writing in the Westminster Review, Crawfurd gave an opinion against systematic colonisation. He considered that abundant land and individual enterprise were the necessary elements.

In 1843 Crawfurd gave evidence to the Colonial Office on Port Essington, on the north coast of Australia, to the effect that its climate made it unsuitable for settlement. He returned to the topic in a debate in 1858 on settlements on the Victoria River, as had been suggested by Sir George Everest. He generally opposed Sir Roderick Murchison's promotion of European colonisation of Australia, as far as it applied to the north coast.

Lobbyist

When the Stamp Act 1827 was passed, meaning that all public documents in India would have to pay a stamp tax (including newspapers as well as legal documents), Crawfurd was hired as London agent for a group of British merchants in Calcutta opposing the legislation. Crawfurd involved Joseph Hume, and he obtained newspaper coverage for his cause, including in The Examiner where the precedents from America were cited. He also wrote pamphlets himself, in which he advocated an end to the East India Company monopoly, and European colonisation. These moves occurred in 1828–9; in 1830 Crawfurd approached William Huskisson directly.

In 1855 Crawfurd went with a delegation to the Board of Control of the East India Company, with representations on behalf of the Straits dollar as an independent currency. Crawfurd lobbied in both Houses of Parliament, with George Keppel, 6th Earl of Albemarle acting to bring a petition to the Lords, and William Ewart Gladstone putting the case in the Commons. Among the arguments put was that the dollar was a decimal currency, while the rupee used by traders, and legal tender in East India Company territories since it was coined in 1835, was not. In 1856 a Bill to change the status quo on coins minted and issued from India was defeated.

In 1868 Crawfurd with James Guthrie and William Paterson formed the Straits Settlements Association, to protect the colony's interests. Crawfurd was its first President.

Last years

He was elected President of the Ethnological Society in 1861. He died in South Kensington, London on 11 May 1868 at the age of 85.

Works

Crawfurd wrote prolificly. His views have been seen as inconsistent: a recent author wrote that "[...] Crawfurd seemed to embody a complex mixture of elements of coexisting but ultimately contradictory value systems".

Diplomat and traveller

In retirement after the Burmese mission, Crawfurd wrote books and papers on Eastern subjects. His envoy experiences from missions were written up in Journals in 1828 and 1829. This documentation was reprinted nearly 140 years later by Oxford University Press.

• Journal of an Embassy to the Court of Ava in 1827 (1829)
• Journal of an Embassy to the Courts of Siam and Cochin-China, exhibiting a view of the actual State of these Kingdoms (1830)
• Inquiry into the System of Taxation in India, Letters on the Interior of India, an attack on the newspaper stamp-tax and the duty on paper entitled Taxes on Knowledge (1836)
• Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands and Adjacent Countries (1856)

Historian

Engraving of the Rajah of Buleleng, from Crawfurd's History of the Indian Archipelago, vol. 3.

• History of the Indian Archipelago (1820), in three volumes. Crawfurd was a critic of much of what the European nations had done in the area of Asia he covered.

An Historical and Descriptive Account of China (1836) was a joint work in three volumes from the Edinburgh Cabinet Library, with Hugh Murray, Peter Gordon, Thomas Lynn, William Wallace, and Gilbert Thomas Burnett.

Orientalist

• Grammar and Dictionary of the Malay Language (1852)

Crawfurd and Colin Mackenzie collected manuscripts from the capture of Yogyakarta, and some of these are now in the British Library.

Crawfurd claimed Cham for the Austronesian languages. His suggestion met no favour at the time, but scholars from around 1950 onwards came to agree.

Economist

Crawfurd held strong views on what he saw as the backwardness of the economy of India of his time. He attributed it to the weakness of Indian financial institutions, compared to Europe. His opinions were in an anonymous pamphlet A Sketch of the Commercial Resources and Monetary and Mercantile System of British India (1837) now attributed to him. Like Robert Montgomery Martin, he saw India primarily as a source of raw materials, and advocated investment based on that direction. A harsh critic of the existing Calcutta agencies, he noted the absence of bill broking in India and suggested that an exchange bank should be set up.

His view that an economy dominated by agriculture was inevitably an absolute government was cited by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his On the Constitution of the Church and State.

Ethnologist

Ellingson has accused Crawfurd of distorting the idea of the noble savage. He points to a work of William Falconer, On the Influence of Climate [...] from 1781, with an attack on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as a possible source of Crawfurd's thinking. He also places Crawfurd in a group of those of his period whose anthropological views not only turned on race, but who also drew conclusions of superiority from those views, others being Luke Burke, James Hunt, Robert Knox, and Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie.

Crawford's attitudes were not, however, based on human skin colour; and he was an opponent of slavery, having written an article Sugar without Slavery with Thomas Perronet Thompson in 1833 in the Westminster Review. Charles Darwin identified Crawfurd's racial views as "Pallasian", i.e. the analogue for humankind of the theories of Peter Simon Pallas. Crawfurd used domestication frequently as a metaphor.

Ellingson argues that Crawfurd gave up his writing on the topic of the "savage" to pursue the implications of Darwin's thought on human evolution, which were unwelcome to him. With Robert Gordon Latham he also opposed strongly the ideas of Max Müller on an original Aryan race. In the view of Thomas Trautmann, in Crawfurd's attack on the Aryan theory there is a rejection of the "languages and nations" approach and a freeing of racial theory.

Crawfurd accordingly held polygenist views, based on multiple origins of human groups; and these earned him, according to Sir John Bowring, the nickname "the inventor of forty Adams". In The Descent of Man by Darwin, Crawfurd is cited as believing in 60 races. He expressed these views to the Ethnological Society of London (ESL), a traditional stronghold of monogenism (a unified origin of humankind) where he had come to hold office as President. He believed in different races as separate creations by God in specific regional zones, with separate origins for languages, and possibly as different species.

Crawford wrote in 1861 in the Transactions of the ESL a paper On the Conditions Which Favor, Retard, and Obstruct the Early Civilization of Man, in which he argued for deficiencies in the science and technology of Asia. In On the Numerals as Evidence of the Progress of Civilization (1863) he argued that the social condition of a people correlates with the numeral words of their language. His racist views on black people were laughed at, during the BAAS meeting at Birmingham in 1865. A paper by Crawfurd, On the Physical and Mental Characteristics of European and Asian Races of Man, given 13 February 1866, argued for the superiority of Europeans. It particularly laid emphasis on European military superiority as evidence. Its thesis was directly contradicted at a meeting of the Society some weeks later, by Dadabhai Naoroji. Right at the end of his life, in 1868, Crawfurd was using a "missing link" argument against Sir John Lubbock, in what Ellingson describes as a misrepresentation of a Darwinist viewpoint based on the idea that a precursor of humans must still be extant.

Family

Crawfurd married Horatia Ann, daughter of James Perry. The writer Oswald John Frederick Crawfurd was their son.

References

• Terry Jay Ellingson (2001), The Myth of the Noble Savage; Google Books.
• Ernest C. T. Chew (2002), 'Dr John Crawfurd (1783–1868): The Scotsman Who Made Singapore British', Raffles Town Club, vol. 8 (July–Sept). Singapore : Raffles Town Club.

External links

• Royal Geographical Society Obituary
• Obituary from the Sydney Herald
• Infopedia page

Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

Political offices
Preceded by Major-Gen. William Farquhar	Resident of Singapore 27 May 1823 – 15 August 1826	Succeeded by Robert Fullerton Governor of the Straits Settlements