Bencoolen
R.J. Wilkinson’s 1938 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society surveys the 140-year history of the British East India Company’s settlement at Bencoolen (1685–1825), arguing that the station was a persistent financial and political failure that nonetheless produced a vivid record of early colonial life in Sumatra.
Summary
Wilkinson frames Bencoolen as a case study in the limits of the East India Company’s trading model in the Malay world. The settlement originated in 1685 when, following the British expulsion from Bantam in Java, the Directors sought a fortified base at a safe distance from Batavia. The mission intended for Priaman instead landed at Bencoolen, and Fort York was built there despite the Directors’ objections about its proximity to the Dutch and its notorious unhealthiness. What followed was nearly a century and a half of attempts by successive Deputy-Governors to buy enough pepper to make the station pay its way—efforts that usually failed.
The article draws heavily on the private letters of Deputy-Governor Collet (published 1935) and the 150 volumes of Company records at the India Office to reconstruct the social and material conditions of the garrison. Wilkinson paints a picture of a small, isolated community plagued by malaria and dysentery, internal quarrels, and a high deathrate that made saving for a return to England a near-impossibility for most servants. The narrative is not a chronological digest but a thematic portrait: the tension between the Company’s commercial mandate and the political entanglements that inevitably arose from maintaining a military presence among Malay polities; the moral and physical degradation that isolation and mortality produced; and the structural inability of a pepper-trading station to generate sufficient revenue to justify its garrison costs.
Wilkinson is careful to resist the temptation of simple condemnation. He acknowledges that the Deputy-Governors were sent as traders, not empire-builders, and that the temptation to sacrifice Malay interests to Company revenue was “very great indeed.” The settlement’s failure was not merely a matter of individual incompetence but of a model ill-suited to the Sumatran context.
Key Findings
- Fort York was established on 25 June 1685; Fort Marlborough replaced it in 1714 on higher ground two miles away, designed by Collet as “the strongest fortification in India” (p. 128).
- Fort Marlborough was “cut off” by the Malays in 1719, survivors escaping by sea to Negapatam; the settlement was captured by the French under d’Estaing in 1760 (pp. 128, 129).
- The loss on the settlement between 1778 and 1783 was £37,589; Collet personally made £8,000 in four years, while his right-hand man Mr. Lloyd left with only £258 and his prospective son-in-law Mr. White died penniless (p. 130).
- Salaries were modest by English standards: Deputy-Governor £200 p.a. (plus possible £100 bonus), Senior Member of Council £30, factor £20, writer £5 (p. 128).
- The garrison on paper comprised 240 Europeans under two captains plus locally recruited native troops called “Bugis”; Bantal alone held fifty cannon (p. 128).
- In 1825 the Directors exchanged Bencoolen for Malacca, which also proved a financial failure (p. 130).
Conclusion
Wilkinson’s definitive takeaway is that the British East India Company “appears at its worst in Malaya,” and that Bencoolen’s failure was structural rather than incidental. The settlement could not be made to pay because the pepper trade alone could not sustain a military garrison, and the political interventions that the garrison necessitated only deepened the settlement’s entanglements without generating revenue. Singapore, the Company’s one success in the region, was founded in direct disobedience of its orders—a final irony Wilkinson leaves as the article’s closing note.
Context
- Primary sources: 150 volumes of Company records at the India Office and the private letters of Deputy-Governor Collet (published 1935) (pp. 127, 128).
- Historiographical contribution: A mid-century survey that humanizes the colonial trading station through primary documentary evidence, predating the more critical postcolonial historiography of the 1960s and 1970s.