John Crawfurd (13 August 1783 – 11 May 1868) was a Scottish physician, British colonial administrator, diplomat and writer who served as the second and last resident of Singapore.
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Early life
Crawfurd was born on Islay, in Argyll, Scotland, the son of Samuel Crawfurd, a physician, and Margaret Campbell; and was educated at the school in Bowmore. He followed his father's footsteps in the study of medicine and completed his medical course at the University of 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), working in the area around Delhi and Agra from 1803 to 1808. He saw service in the campaigns of Baron Lake.
Career
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, which overcame the Dutch. Raffles was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Java by Minto during the 45-day operation, and Crawfurd was appointed the post of Resident Governor 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 besieged and taken by British-led forces in June 1812.
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.
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.
In 1821, the then Governor-General of India, Lord Hastings, sent Crawfurd to the courts of Siam (now Thailand) and Cochinchina (now Vietnam). Lord Hastings was especially interested in learning more about Siamese policy with regard to the northern Malay states, and Cochinchina's policy with regard to French efforts to establish a presence in Asia.
Crawfurd travelled with notes from Horace Hayman Wilson on Buddhism, as it was understood at the time.
Captain Dangerfield of the Indian army, a skilful astronomer, surveyor and geologist, served as assistant; Lieutenant Rutherford commanded thirty Sepoys; noted naturalist George Finlayson served as medical officer. Mrs. Crawfurd accompanied the Mission.
On 21 November 1821, the mission embarked on the John Adam for the complicated and difficult navigation of the Hoogly River, taking seven days to sail the 140 miles (225 km) from Calcutta to open water. Crawfurd writes that, with the assistance of a steam-boat, ships might be towed down in two days without difficulty; then adds in a footnote: "The first steam-vessel used in India, was built about three years after this passage was written...."
The John Adam proceeded on what would be the first official visit to Siam since the resurgence of Siam following the 1767 Fall of Ayutthaya. Crawfurd soon found the court of King Rama II still embroiled in the aftermath of the Burmese–Siamese War of 1809–1812. On 8 December 1821, near Papra Strait (modern Pak Prah Strait north of Thalang District) Crawfurd finds fishermen "in a state of perpetual distrust and insecurity" due to territorial disputes between hostile Burmans and Siamese. On 11 December, after entering the Straits of Malacca and arrival at Penang Island, he finds the settlements of Penang and Queda in a state of alarm. Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin Halim Shah II of Kedah, had fled the Rajah of Ligor (modern Nakhon Si Thammarat) to claim right of asylum at Prince of Wales's Island (modern Penang) British claims to the island was based upon payment of a quit-rent accordant with European feudal law, which Crawfurd feared the Siamese would challenge.
Political career
Returning to 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 and against colonisation schemes, in line with his views. He also represented the interests of British traders based in Singapore and Calcutta.
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. He also joined the Radical Club, a breakaway from the National Political Union founded in 1833 by William Wallis.
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.
On 31 January 1834 Crawfurd supported Thomas Perronet Thompson in a meeting agitating against the Corn Laws. Thomas Carlyle alluded, in notes on one of Jane Welsh Carlyle's letters, to Crawfurd speaking at a radical meeting at the London Tavern set up by Charles Buller on 21 November 1834; in which he showed much more originality than John Arthur Roebuck, but lost his thread.
In Preston in the 1837 general election 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. He also supported John Temple Leader's candidacy at Westminster against Sir Francis Burdett, being deputy chairman on his election committee (with Thomas Prout, chairman Sir Ronald Craufurd Ferguson). Crawfurd spoke with George Grote at a meeting for Leader at the Belgrave Hotel.
Works
Crawfurd wrote prolifically. 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". A comment about "hasty general opinions from a few instances", by George Bennett on the topic of Papuan people, has been taken to be aimed at Crawfurd.
His 1822 work "Malay of Champa" contains a vocabulary of the Cham language.
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)
Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands and Adjacent Countries (1856)
Crawfurd, John (1830). Journal of an embassy from the governor-general of India to the courts of Siam and Cochin China: exhibiting a view of the actual state of those kingdoms. H. Colburn and R. Bentley.
Historian
According to Jane Rendall's concept of "Scottish orientalism", Crawfurd is a historian of the second generation. His History of the Indian Archipelago (1820), in three volumes, was his major work. 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
While Crawfurd produced work that was ethnological in nature over a period of half a century, the term "ethnology" had not even been coined when he began to write. Attention has been drawn to his latest work, from the 1860s, which was copious, much criticised at the time, and which has also been scrutinised in the 21st century, as detailed below.
Crawfurd 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 Charles 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 (belief in a unified origin of humankind) where he had come in 1861 to hold office as President.
Crawfurd believed in different races as separate creations by God in specific regional zones, with separate origins for languages, and possibly as different species. With Robert Gordon Latham of the ESL, he also opposed strongly the ideas of Max Müller on an original Aryan race.
Crawfurd wrote in 1861 in the Transactions of the ESL a paper On the Conditions Which Favour, 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. Crawfurd used domestication frequently as a metaphor. His racist views on black people were laughed at, during the British Association 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 dominance as evidence. Its thesis was directly contradicted at a meeting of the Society some weeks later, by Dadabhai Naoroji.
Analyses since the 1990s have sought to clarify Crawfurd's agenda in his writings on race at this time, when he had become prominent in a young and still fluid field and discipline. Ellingson demonstrates Crawfurd's role in promoting the idea of the noble savage in service of racial ideology. Trosper has taken Ellingson's analysis a step further, attributing to Crawfurd a conscious "spin" put on the idea of primitive culture, a rhetorically sophisticated use of a "straw man" fallacy, achieved by bringing in, irrelevantly but for the sake of incongruity, the figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Personal life
Crawfurd married Horatia Ann, daughter of James Perry. From 1821 to 1822, Mrs. Crawfurd had accompanied the Mission to Siam and Cochin China aboard the John Adam. As the ship made way from Bangkok to Hué, Mrs. Crawfurd went ashore on an island in the Gulf of Siam, where she made a considerable impression upon the natives. The writer Oswald John Frederick Crawfurd, born in 1834, was their son.
Crawfurd was elected President of the Ethnological Society in 1861.
Crawfurd died at his home in Elvaston Place, South Kensington, London on 11 May 1868 at the age of 85.
