Raffles and the Golden Opportunity
Victoria Glendinning
Profile Books: 2018 (reissued)
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The British science fiction writer JG Ballard, whose childhood was spent in Shanghai, one of the jewels of the British Empire when it was at its largest, observed that cinema came too late for the empire. If film had been invented a hundred years earlier, we would now have a vast movie archive of gallant officers, able administrators and grateful natives. Instead it was prewar Hollywood that filmed Kipling’s Gunga Din and Kim with its border wars and dashing British officers. And it was the Steven Spielberg who filmed Ballard’s Empire of the Sun as a collapse of a stiffly hidebound British Empire, a brief yet savage Japanese interlude before a manifestly predestined American triumph.

Cinema and television came too late to document the fleets of young Britons heading into empire like Stamford Raffles, India’s Lawrence brothers, Sarawak’s James Brooke who created his own family fief, Nigeria’s Lugard or the polyglot explorer Richard Burton who would have undoubtedly carried a concealed GoPro on his daring journey into Mecca disguised as an Afghan horse trader (an act so disrespectful that it makes my British mother’s blood boil to this day). An ambitious man like Raffles would have had a documentary crew following him in Java when he was briefly lieutenant governor (1812-1815), filming him speaking excellent Malay, landscaping the gardens of Bogor, cutting back the foliage that covered Borobudur and documenting Javanese culture with the scribe Munshi Abdullah, the grandfather of Malaysian letters.

• Tags: Issue 15, Kam Raslan, Singapore, Stamford Raffles, Victoria Glendinning