The British East India Company became interested in growing roots in Southeast Asia at the end of the eighteenth century from a desire to control seaborne trade between China and Europe and to hold the Dutch at bay. For a considerable time, commercial enterprise was confined to facilitating movements of cargo rather than procuring local produce and engaged individuals and firms with ties to India. The Company saw the Straits Settlements as an extension of the government of India. However, among the merchants operating in these seaboard settlements, an influential group campaigned for autonomy and independent identity, inspired by a growing sense that there was more to their enterprise than being intermediaries. That autonomy came in 1867, and soon after, a vigorous restructuring of the economy began to unfold, with the growth of banking, mining, plantations, large infrastructure projects, economic integration of the inland areas with the seaboard, and immigration of capital and labour from abroad.
Merchants, Bankers, Governors is at one level a straight chronological account of this huge transition. Peter Drake handles a large and complex subject expertly. For an academic work, the text is delightfully informal. The book carefully avoids details of imperialist politics that are too well-known to repeat and concentrates on the business history side of the story. The chapter organisation reminds the reader of the most significant moments in the transition.
In the process, the book adds value to the historiography of the region in another way. The history of British business in the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States reveals some of the characteristic ways that merchants and bankers who were engaged in Asian and transcontinental trades in the nineteenth century gave shape to British imperial rule. The book suggests what these features were. That discussion can contribute to the historiography of the British Empire in significant ways.
For example, while it has become fashionable among historians to read the British Empire through the lens of racial power, a serious study of business, which acted as the foundation of the empire in Asia, shows that a mainly cultural definition of the empire is unreliable. In Drake's account, imperial policy served a mainly economic aim, to develop the resources and exploit the comparative advantage of the region. That goal required borders open to capital and labour. Race and the identity of the settlers were secondary to that aim. The entry of non-indigenous Asians, as workers and entrepreneurs, was a rational policy for the Europeans ruling the territory and running businesses there. That is not to say that all governors held similar views on the subject. But overall, a cosmopolitan outlook prevailed. In other fields of state intervention—infrastructure, institutions, law—a capitalistic impulse again deeply influenced imperial policy. British firms, chambers of commerce, and political actors often disagreed on detail, but they also understood that they shared an interest in openness. This commonality of a mainly economic interest holds the chronological story together and gives it coherence.
For an Indianist (like me), this study is fascinating for other reasons too. British India, the Straits Settlements, and the Federated Malay States ran an export surplus and bought a lot of services from Britain. Doing so made economic sense because these services were needed and cheaper to buy from abroad. Yet, Indian nationalists called the transaction a drain and a subsidy the colony paid to Britain. In British-ruled Southeast Asia, there was no such sentiment. Comparisons are helpful to dispel the crude political readings of the balance of payments that mark the Indianist discussion. There was a stark contrast between these regions too. Britain's Southeast Asian colonies generated a tax per head that was way larger than British India's. If not wholly overlooked, this fiscal dimension of the Southeast Asian dynamism needed more attention in the book. Commitment to openness did not make the British Empire homogenous in any way.
The book consists of nine chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with the time from the early settlements to consolidation of business and politics in the mid-nineteenth century. Chapters 3 and 4 are more political in focus while also discussing the onset of the first era of globalisation, a sharp acceleration worldwide in trade, cross-border capital flows, and international migration, in which Malaya and Singapore joined from a position of strength. Chapter 5 describes management of currency, and banking developments at the turn of the twentieth century. Chapter 6 takes the narrative to the First World War. Chapters 7 and 8 present studies of two firms, Guthrie & Co., one of the largest rubber companies in the Malay Archipelago, and Boustead & Co., which engaged in trade, financing of trade, and financial brokerage in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Chapter 9 restates some of the larger claims of the book. The quality of evidence-based research displayed throughout is outstanding, though the reader may feel lost in detail.
The key message of Drake's Merchants, Bankers, Governors is that ‘traders were the original force in the economic development of the S.S. [Straits Settlements]’ (p. 178). This story does not discount or ‘whitewash’ the role of the imperialists, but shows that their interests and that of the capitalists and workers building the export enterprises were broadly compatible. All had a stake in openness, and openness overrode race and hierarchy. Historians of the British Empire, too often swayed by current political sentiments in their reading of the past, need to take that lesson seriously.
