Historians have long acknowledged the importance of country traders in the increase in English trade with China and in the expansion of British influence in Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

However, comparatively little is known about the individuals who carried out this trade. From amongst the hundreds of ships’ captains who engaged in innumerable commercial transactions between 1770 and 1820, only a few have received any great attention. An account of the life of Francis Light has been published because of his association with the founding of Penang while Thomas Forrest has received some attention because of the published accounts of his ground-breaking voyages. No diaries or ships’ logs are readily available, even if they exist at all. A couple of general reminiscences of life at sea which include some references to the country trade may be found, but are not detailed and were written decades after the events they describe. The only extant description of life on a country trader ship is to be found in a series of letters written by a youthful 3rd Officer, John Adolphus Pope, who sailed in the Western part of the Malay Archipelago between 1786 and 1788.

The reason for the paucity of documented material lies in the fact that unlike the actions of the servants of the large trading companies, the operations of the country traders only came into official records when there was some misadventure, when they were allotted an official task or when they fell foul of Company procedure.

The present work is an attempt to fill this vacuum. It will show how important the impact of the country traders was, firstly, on a selection of the Malay societies with which they came into contact, for British trade and empire building, and as an irritant to the Dutch administration. It will demonstrate through the experience of numerous individuals how they contributed in a variety of ways to these historical developments.