A compact, concise biography of Thomas Stamford Raffles - born on a West Indiaman of which his father was Captain, in the Caribbean. The year was 1781, not long after the American Revolution and when other great changes were presaged - including the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon and the struggle to abolish slavery (at least insofar as it pertained to Britain). Raffles was to play a part in the wake of these paradigm changes - governing in Java after the Dutch were dislodged, emancipating slaves (ahead of his time and well beyond the scope of his orders) and even visiting Napoleon at the start of his exile on St Helena. However, Raffles everlasting monument was the founding of Singapore, not by force of arms but by skilful diplomacy and legal means, outflanking the Dutch. By all accounts Raffles was a humane and unusually far-sighted thinker, a strategist with the Nelson touch of action this day. He found time to amass a quantity of animal and plant data - re-discovering the ruins of Borobudur (of which the Dutch were apparently unaware of or at least uninterested in). He published a foundational history of Java and, in his short-lived retirement, was one of the founders of London Zoo. His personal life involved great tragedy - losing four of five children to tropical disease, and bore a long-term illness (probably a brain tumour) with remarkable equanimity. He died too young and was treated appallingly by his employer, The East India Company, but he was a giant of a man and this biography is a testament to that. ( )

Short, readable biography of the founder of Singapore. Includes a few maps but no pictures. The one new fact I learned about Singapore history was that although the island was claimed for England by Raffles in 1819 as a foothold against a Dutch monopoly in SE Asia (and to provide a port for English trading interests enroute to China), England's ownership of Singapore wasn't ratified until 1824. In that year, a diplomatic resolution gave the Netherlands control of all lands south of the Equator, while England was allowed to keep all its territories and ports above the line. Thus Malacca (which the British had returned to Holland in 1816 after the Napoleon Wars) was returned to England at the same time, together with some small previously-held Dutch ports in India. A good example of why, even though one thinks one knows everything there is to know about a subject, reading 'one more book' on a subject almost always pays off. ( )

This biography by Maurice Collis is one of the better anthologies of the life of Sir T.S Raffles I have read to date. ( )

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