There are quite a lot of books I want to write and I’m not very good at doing just one thing at a time. As a result, when a colleague recently asked me to teach a one-off session for a postgraduate course, I jumped at a chance to try out an idea for one that I expect will gestate for a few more years.
As it does, I’ll share more about it here, so here is my chance to introduce it. For the moment, the working title is Straits Branch! An Adventurers’ Journal and the Knowledge of the British Empire.
It all began about eight years ago. In another piece of work, I wanted to make a point about a change that I was pretty sure happened during the nineteenth century. It seemed to me from my reading of old articles that, in the earlier 1800s, research into the history, cultures and societies of Asia was done mostly by European men based in Asia, often on colonial service or working as missionaries. By the later 1800s, it was mostly done by university-based scholars, mostly in Europe and the US.
Before I could make that point though, I needed to be sure that I could back up my hunch. Over the course of an enjoyable weekend, I started a spreadsheet and then went looking for:
journals in English
available to me online (mainly via the journal database, Jstor)
with any or all of the following terms in their titles: Asiatic (or, Asiatick), Orient, Oriental
published between 1800 and 1950.
In my spreadsheet I recorded the name of every author who had written or contributed to an article and any information provided about them, including letters after their name, military ranks or institutional affiliations. It wasn’t comprehensive, but I figured it would give me some sort of quantifiable clue that I was on the right track.
I was. At the start of the 19th century the majority of articles in these journals were written by people whose main job was not scholar/researcher but who were either in or had been in Asia (or sometimes Africa, since northern and eastern Africa are often included under the heading ‘Oriental’), doing something else. By the late 19th century, people in European and US universities, employed as specialists in Asia/the Orient, dominated by a roughly similar margin.
I’d done more than prove my point though. I had found something…
Specifically, I had found a simultaneously horrible and deeply engaging mini-article in a weird backwater of relevant 19th-century publications, and I was hooked.
The story went like this:
In June 1882, in volume 9 of the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Dr Nicholas Belfield Dennys submitted a short piece to a collection of ‘Natural History Notes’. He was writing to alert readers to research done by one Captain Douglas of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, Resident in Selangor (in modern Malaysia), on the subject of whether snakes can be poisoned by their own venom. (General consensus, or at least, popular folk wisdom in Europe at the time was that they could not.)
Belfield Dennys reported that Captain Douglas,
‘recently irritated a cobra until, in striking at the stick with which he was touching it, the snake inflicted a well-marked wound on its own back.’
Triumphant italics declare that
‘[i]n ten minutes it was dead’.
Apparently, the world of natural sciences has now established that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all rule for snakes and their own venom: some species (and even individual snakes!) are immune or partially immune, others aren’t. Obviously, this one was not. I’m not writing a book about snakes though.
Its unpleasantness to the snake aside, this short note seemed to open a window for me and what was on the other side was a fascination with how people thought, studied, collected knowledge and tried to understand Asia during the 19th-century high watermark of European colonisation.
What fascinated me was not just Captain Douglas, writing to Dr Belfield Dennys, who then wrote a paper for a journal. It was the journal itself: the official publication of the ‘Straits Branch’ of the Royal Asiatic Society.
The straits in question are the Straits of Malacca, in modern Malaysia. These straits were, by 1882, important in the management of global sea lanes. That’s why the British had a Resident in Selangkor (near modern Kuala Lumpur) to look out for their affairs. They also generally had a presence in the area, which in turn provided an anchor for missionaries from Europe. On top of this, people travelling from the Eastern to the Western Indian Ocean (or the other way around) had to pass through the Straits, usually stopping off or changing ships, so it was quite a lively sort of place.
In other ways, though, it was still a bit of a backwater, though. It was around two generations since Stamford Raffles (he for whom the famous hotel is named) had pitched the idea of Singapore as the jewel in the British Empire’s maritime territories. the rest is, of course, history, but it wasn’t quite yet.
The Straits were humid, a challenging disease environment for Europeans, and didn’t have the same history of dense urbanism or westward connections as South Asia. For a group of people trying to run an Asiatic Society and a journal to go with it, the pickings could be slim.
The first of these societies, the Asiatic Society of Calcutta (modern Kolkata), had been founded back in 1784, more than a hundred years before the Straits Branch (1877) and forty years before the London Branch (also known as the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland), in 1824. There were other branches in Mumbai (1804), Chennai (then Madras, founded 1817), Hong Kong (1847)…
The Kolkata and London societies (with an honourable mention for Chennai) were viewed as the gold standard: lots of people with lots of different skills and specialisms, presenting papers at packed, often lively gatherings. (Sometimes the journals published full transcripts of meetings, which can be hysterical.) Hundreds of pages could be filled each year with the printed versions of these papers, on matters of translation, history, archaeology (long before the word itself was in regular use), natural history and anything else relevant to the general understanding of Asia.
World-renowned experts designed their travels around the opportunity to present at these societies, and exchanged views about the most exciting, pressing or challenging matters in their fields in the footnotes and forewords of their journals. By the slow-travel standards of the mid-19th century, these societies were the ones that Made Things Happen.
In comparison, the Straits Branch journal in its early years, seems to have been a slightly desperate affair: small numbers of articles, often by the same handful of people. Sometimes a slightly half-hearted offering along the lines of ‘Some things I have been thinking about’ by some passing traveller who. One gets the impression that visitors to the Straits settlement were often bribed to give a paper, literally any paper, about anything, in return for a nice dinner and a crack at the best brandy.
Some charming articles combine a range of interests, with talk about picnic trips to lost ruins. A light antiquarian description of how high and long the walls were and whether they had carvings on them will accompany a record of all of the unlucky animals that got shot over lunch.
A very short note about a man irritating a cobra with a stick, passed on by another man (who mostly wrote about politics and linguistics when he wrote articles on his own account) was a sudden and vivid insight into some of the core features of the Straits Branch in the mid-1800s. It was a world of
mainly men: some wives and daughters did live out in the colonial enclaves in Southeast Asia, but they were a minority (whose company on picnics to old ruins was, therefore, highly desirable)
far from home, and often living the sort of lives that must have made home quite a difficult thing to define
a bit socially isolated: by the mid-19th century imperial operatives were encouraged to keep a certain distance from the local population, despite being functionally completely dependent on quite intimate household relationships with servants, translators, labourers and ‘native experts’ in various things
pretty well educated, with a strong background in European history, including ancient Greece and Rome, in Latin and Greek language and in at least one Asiatic language (often Sanskrit) and, in many cases, also with professional expertise in something like engineering
obsessed with labelling: they were mostly saturated with European ideas about the world at the time, including the idea that everything under the sun (and indeed in space) could, and should, be categorised and labelled, and that most everything under the sun could (and should) also be put into hierarchies, including people, languages, cultures, races…
hungry to make sense of new places they found themselves in and, probably, with quite a bit of free time to do so
and above all, quite conscious that they were not quite in the middle of things. To some that was exciting, the adventurer’s frontier. To others it seems to have been more of a disappointment, or a stepping stone. They wanted to be in Calcutta, or Madras or New Delhi, or maybe Shanghai. They wanted the big meetings with the greatest experts of the day and the papers that changed how the world (or at least, European knowledge world) understood Buddhism or Indic languages or ancient bridge building. They wanted to be those experts. What they’d got was a shooting party at a weekend with some interesting ruins and a note about what happened if you poked a snake with a stick…
Great work was done by the Straits Branch, of course, especially as the Straits settlements, including Singapore grew in importance and global significance. And some of those early picnic tales have come to be vital as the earliest scholarly records of particular buildings. I’m not trying to ridicule anybody’s efforts. Nevertheless…
What draws me to the Straits Branch is the nakedness of those early days. They say you see who a person really is when they are under pressure. As a historian, the same can be true of other things: when you see something being done without much time or resource, you get to see some of its bare bones, the factors that really make it go.
In this case, the skeleton I realised I was looking for was the learned society, those groups of mainly men who, from the eighteenth century onwards, organised themselves to understand specific things: their local area, a particular skill or hobby, the places where imperial powers dispatched them to work.
Those features of their lives - being mainly men and far from home, a bit socially isolated, hungry to make sense of new places, by labelling and categorising and joining things up with what they had learned as well-educated men and also subtly competing with other men doing the same thing, even if they were out on the edge - subtly shaped the knowledge they created.
How we understand the world today, and especially how we understand things like the history of Asia, carries the fingerprints of the Straits Branch, so expect more to follow…