This account of the founding of Singapore is based largely on Raffles’s unpublished private letters to the Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief in India, Francis, 1st Marquess of Hastings, preserved in the Bute Collection at Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, Scotland. The letters are to be distinguished from Raffles’s official despatches to the Supreme Government in Bengal, his private letters to Charlotte Seymour, Duchess of Somerset, and other documents in the British Library, as well as letters to his agent, John Tayler, and Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne, in the National Library Singapore.
The part played by Hastings in the founding of Singapore and his relationship with Raffles are essential themes of the book. The text follows the chronological sequence of Raffles’s letters to him, but in order to provide an explanation of their contents there is a brief introductory account of Raffles’s attempts to extend British political influence in Sumatra since it was the rejection of these plans by Lord Hastings, and the adoption of an alternative policy of securing British power in the Straits of Melaka, which led to the founding of Singapore.
The book contains a good deal of original documentation, but it does not pretend to offer a comprehensive account of the founding of Singapore since it omits all reference to the correspondence between Lord Hastings and the Governor-General of the Netherlands India, Baron G.A.G.P. van der Capellen, as well as details of the protracted negotiations between the British and Netherlands governments which led to the Treaty of London in 1824 and the recognition of Singapore as a British possession. These subjects have been examined by the Dutch scholar P.H. van der Kemp in his numerous publications, and by Harry J. Marks in his monograph, The First Contest for Singapore 1819–1824 (The Hague, 1959).
I wish to thank John, Marquess of Bute, for granting me permission to publish Raffles’s private letters to the Marquess of Hastings in the Bute Collection at Mount Stuart, and Mr. Andrew McLean, former Head of Collections at Mount Stuart, and Miss Lynsey Nairn, Collections Assistant, for their help. I also wish to express my gratitude to the British Library for permission to quote from Raffles’s letters to Charlotte Seymour, Duchess of Somerset, and the National Library Singapore for permission to publish Raffles’s letters to Lord Lansdowne and John Tayler.
John Bastin