For the Irish cricketer of the same name, see John Crawfurd (cricketer)

John Crawfurd (cricketer)

John William Frederick Arthur Crawfurd was an Irish cricketer. He was a left-handed batsman and a left-arm fast-medium bowler....

John Crawfurd (13 August 1783 – 11 May 1868), Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 physician, and colonial administrator and author, was born in the island of Islay

Islay

-Prehistory:The earliest settlers on Islay were nomadic hunter-gatherers who arrived during the Mesolithic period after the retreat of the Pleistocene ice caps. In 1993 a flint arrowhead was found in a field near Bridgend dating from 10,800 BC, the earliest evidence of a human presence found so far...

, Scotland. He followed his father's footsteps in the study of medicine and completed his medical course at Edinburgh

Edinburgh

Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...

 in 1803, at the age of 20.
He joined the East India Company

British East India Company

The East India Company was an early English joint-stock company that was formed initially for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but that ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and China...

, as a Company surgeon and was posted to India's Northwestern Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh

Uttar Pradesh

Uttar Pradesh abbreviation U.P. , is a state located in the northern part of India. With a population of over 200 million people, it is India's most populous state, as well as the world's most populous sub-national entity...

) from 1803–1808. Following that he was sent to Penang

Penang

Penang is a state in Malaysia and the name of its constituent island, located on the northwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia by the Strait of Malacca. It is bordered by Kedah in the north and east, and Perak in the south. Penang is the second smallest Malaysian state in area after Perlis, and the...

, where he first acquainted himself with Southeast Asia, and applied himself to the study of Malay language

Malay language

Malay is a major language of the Austronesian family. It is the official language of Malaysia , Indonesia , Brunei and Singapore...

 and culture. It was also in Penang

Penang

Penang is a state in Malaysia and the name of its constituent island, located on the northwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia by the Strait of Malacca. It is bordered by Kedah in the north and east, and Perak in the south. Penang is the second smallest Malaysian state in area after Perlis, and the...

 where he met Stamford Raffles

Stamford Raffles

Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, FRS was a British statesman, best known for his founding of the city of Singapore . He is often described as the "Father of Singapore"...

 for the first time.

In 1811, Crawfurd accompanied him on Lord Minto

Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, 1st Earl of Minto

Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, 1st Earl of Minto PC , known as Sir Gilbert Elliott between 1777 and 1797 and as The Lord Minto between 1797 and 1813, was a Scottish politician diplomat....

's military expedition of Java from the Dutch in 1811. When Raffles was appointed the Lieutenant-Governor by Lord Minto during the 45-day Java Expedition, Crawfurd was appointed the post of Resident at the Court of Yogyakarta( modern-day Jarkata) in November 1811. As Resident, he pursued in the study of the Javanese language, cultivated personal relationships with several Javanese aristocrats and literati, and was sent on diplomatic missions to Bali

Bali

Bali is an Indonesian island located in the westernmost end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east...

 and the Celebes (now Sulawesi

Sulawesi

Sulawesi is one of the four larger Sunda Islands of Indonesia and is situated between Borneo and the Maluku Islands. In Indonesia, only Sumatra, Borneo, and Papua are larger in territory, and only Java and Sumatra have larger Indonesian populations.- Etymology :The Portuguese were the first to...

). This scholastic pursuits, and his knowledge of the local culture proved to be invaluable to Raffles' government in Java.

However, tensions arise between Crawfurd and Raffles when he was asked to assist Raffles in introducing land reform in the Cheribon residency. Crawfurd, with his experience of India, was always a keen supporter of the Village System of revenue collection, and he vigorously opposed Raffles' attempts to introduce the individual (Ryotwari

Ryotwari

The ryotwari system, instituted in some parts of British India, was one of the two main systems used to collect revenues from the cultivators of agricultural land. These revenues included undifferentiated land taxes and rents, collected simultaneously...

) settlement into Java.



Java was returned to the Dutch in 1816, and Crawfurd returned to England that year, turning to writing books. In 1820 he published his three-volume History of the Indian Archipelago. That following year in 1821, Crawfurd's expertise was recognised by Governor-General Lord Hastings

Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of Hastings

Francis Edward Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of Hastings KG PC , styled The Honourable Francis Rawdon from birth until 1762 and as The Lord Rawdon between 1762 and 1783 and known as The Earl of Moira between 1793 and 1816, was an Irish-British politician and military officer who served as...

, who sent him on a mission as an envoy to the courts of Siam (modern Thailand

Thailand

Thailand , officially the Kingdom of Thailand , formerly known as Siam , is a country located at the centre of the Indochina peninsula and Southeast Asia. It is bordered to the north by Burma and Laos, to the east by Laos and Cambodia, to the south by the Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and to the...

) and Cochin-China (modern Vietnam

Vietnam

Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...

.) In between those two missions, Crawfurd was appointed British Resident of Singapore in March 1823. The mission to the court of King Rama II

Buddha Loetla Nabhalai

Phra Bat Somdet Phra Poramenthramaha Isarasundhorn Phra Buddha Loetla Nabhalai , or Rama II , was the second monarch of Siam under the House of Chakri, ruling from 1809-1824. In 1809, Isarasundhorn succeeded his father Buddha Yodfa Chulaloke, the founder of Chakri dynasty, as Buddha Loetla Nabhalai...

 was virtually the first official visit to one of the most powerful nations in the region since the Siam–England war of 1687 with the previous Siamese Ayutthaya kingdom

Ayutthaya kingdom

Ayutthaya was a Siamese kingdom that existed from 1350 to 1767. Ayutthaya was friendly towards foreign traders, including the Chinese, Vietnamese , Indians, Japanese and Persians, and later the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and French, permitting them to set up villages outside the walls of the...

. Hastings was especially interested in learning more about Siamese policy with regard to the northern Malay states. The missions were of limited obvious success, though the one to Siam did pave the way for closer relations with Britain, leading King Rama II to ally his kingdom with the British in the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826). This in turn helped Captain Henry Burney

Henry Burney

Henry Burney was a British commercial traveller and diplomat for the British East India Company. His parents were Richard Thomas Burney , headmaster of the Orphan School at Kidderpore, and Jane Burney , and he was a nephew of the English writer Frances Burney . On 30 June 1818 at St...

 conclude the Treaty of Amity and Commerce (Siam–UK)

Treaty of Amity and Commerce (Siam–UK)

A Treaty of Amity and Commerce that is known in the history of Malaysia as the Burney Treaty was concluded in the latter part of 1826 by Henry Burney, an agent of British East India Company, with King Rama III of Siam. This followed from the inclusion of Siam as nominal British ally in the peace...

 in June 1826 in the reign of King Rama III.

He was again sent on another envoy mission to Burma (Myanmar) in 1827, by Hastings' successor, Lord Amherst

William Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst

William Pitt Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst, GCH, PC was a British diplomat and colonial administrator. He was Governor-General of India between 1823 and 1828.-Background and education:...

. It was to be his last political service for the Company – a difficult but nonetheless a historically significant one. These envoy experiences from envoy missions gave him material to write and publish his Journals in 1828 and 1829. This documentation proved to be useful guides to future missions, and resource materials for scholars – being reprinted nearly 140 years later by Oxford University Press.

Crawfurd was a polygenist, he studied the geography of where different races were located, he believed that that different races had been created separately by God in specific regional zones for climatic circumstance.

In his retirement years after the Burmese mission, he spent the remaining years of his long life devoted to writing books and papers on Eastern subjects. Though he made several unsuccessful attempts to enter the British Parliament in the 1830s, he was elected President of the Ethnological Society in 1861, and in 1868 as the first President of the Straits Settlements Association, which was formed to protect the Colony's interests. That was his last office before his death in South Kensington, London on 11 May 1868 at the age of 85.

Books written by Crawfurd

• History of the Indian Archipelago (1820)
• Journal of an Embassy to the Court of Ava in 1827 (1829)
• Journal of an Embassy to the Courts of Siam and Cochin-China, exhibiting a view of the actual State of these Kingdoms (1830)
• Inquiry into the System of Taxation in India, Letters on the Interior of India, an attack on the newspaper stamp-tax and the duty on paper entitled Taxes on Knowledge (1836)
• Grammar and Dictionary of the Malay Language (1852)
• Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands and Adjacent Countries (1856)