Two imperialists: a study of Sir Frank Swettenham and Sir Hugh Clifford
J. de V. Allen’s 1964 study examines the intellectual and administrative worldviews of Sir Frank Swettenham and Sir Hugh Clifford, the two most prominent early Residents of the Malay States, using their own published writings (over twenty books between them) and Royal Colonial Institute proceedings as primary sources. Set against the backdrop of the Residential System from its inception in 1874 through Clifford’s final governorship in 1927, the article argues that the two men’s fundamental divergence lay in their competing definitions of “regeneration”: Swettenham measured the justice of British rule by material progress and revenue growth, while Clifford measured it by the happiness and moral contentment of the Malays themselves. This difference in criteria explains why Swettenham’s imperialist confidence hardened with age while Clifford’s was progressively undermined, culminating in what Allen identifies as Clifford’s intellectual bankruptcy and personal tragedy.
Summary
Allen frames the article around three questions: the historical role of the early Residents, their actual relationship with the non-European populations they governed, and the dynamic of the imperialist movement as judged by the men themselves over time. He rejects the standard caricatures — valiant pioneers, financial adventurers, or imperious civil servants — as each containing “a germ of truth” but none being wholly fair. The Residents occupied an anomalous position: neither nineteenth-century empire-builders nor twentieth-century colonial administrators, but a fossilized form of imperial power in which British gentlemen were sent to “put the houses of natives in order” without much attention to legal technicalities (pp. 41–42). Their subjects were also unusual in the imperialist imagination — not the “naked African savages or fawning Indian coolies” of standard literature but a people with whom several Residents formed genuine personal relationships (p. 42).
The article’s central analytical concept is “regeneration,” a term both men employed with “remarkable abandon” but in fundamentally different senses (p. 55). For Swettenham, regeneration was a material and environmental transformation: give the Malay peace, security, centralised government, property rights, roads, railways, and investment, and the “unregenerate” subject would metamorphose toward something “very like a European” (pp. 55–58). He explicitly stated that when “the features of the country change, their language, manners, religion and even their colour will probably undergo as great a change” (p. 58). For Clifford, regeneration was restricted to political reform — the termination of feudal chiefdom and the liberation of the people from arbitrary rule — and he was acutely aware that forcing a “Thirteenth Century” people to “bear Nineteenth Century fruit” risked making them “morally weak and seedy” (p. 58). Clifford’s justification rested on a hypothetical plebiscite: the Malays themselves would choose British rule over the ancien régime (p. 58).
Allen traces how this divergence played out over decades. Swettenham’s ideas were “set hard” by his 1903 retirement, and his later editions of British Malaya (1929, 1948) merely reasserted his earlier opinions in “a more dogmatic form” (p. 61). He continued to insist in 1946 that Malays were incapable of self-rule (p. 60). Clifford, by contrast, experienced a progressive erosion of confidence: from the confident 1898 assessment that the British had “little to fear from the Day of Judgement” (p. 59), through the anguished political officer in Bushwhacking (1901) who “suffers with” the people he is ordered to persecute (p. 63), to the 1916 admission in The Further Side of Silence that no argument could “staunch the blood which I saw flow” in pre-intervention Pahang — a passage Allen identifies as representing “intellectual bankruptcy at last” (p. 72). Clifford’s fiction, particularly his stories about Malays rather than the white colonial society favoured by Maugham, reveals a man who “wrote about Malaya because he dreamed about it,” in contrast to Swettenham who “wrote about Malaya because he knew about it” (p. 55).
Key Findings
- Swettenham served 33 years entirely in the Peninsula (Assistant Resident 1874 at age 23, Resident 1882, Governor and High Commissioner 1901–1904); Clifford served in Pahang from 1887 (age 20) until his transfer in 1903, then held governorships in Trinidad, Ceylon, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria before returning to Singapore as Governor and High Commissioner in 1927 (p. 54).
- The Residential System was not technically Indirect Rule: the rajas were “stripped of all real power at the first possible moment,” and only the penghulu (village headmen), ranking below the District Officer, were incorporated into the administration; State Councils formed in the 1870s–1880s had their powers “systematically whittled away from 1896 until 1926” (pp. 50–51).
- Swettenham’s claim in Footprints in Malaya (1942) that the Residents founded Indirect Rule is rejected by Allen, who notes that Swettenham “certainly accepted none of the premises of Indirect Rule” and that his own accounts of deliberately disguising his control of the Malays “ring far truer” (p. 61).
- Clifford’s 1902–3 Royal Colonial Institute address declared that “the vast bulk of the Malays have attained to a measure of contentment and happiness unprecedented in their history, and it is upon this contentment and this happiness that the British administration stands four-square, broad-based upon a people’s will” (p. 58).
- The Treaty of Federation, signed by the four Sultans and effective from 1896, regularised the Residents’ position and marked the beginning of the end for the informal personal-rule system; by the 1920s the Residential System’s “intellectual basis, as well as its administrative structure, was an anachronism, and it was well past repair” (p. 53).
- Clifford resigned his governorship after only two years (1927–1929) and retired to England suffering from cyclical insanity; his last book, In Days that Are Dead, was published in 1926, and he “had no more to say” thereafter (pp. 70, 73).
Conclusion
Allen’s definitive takeaway is that the parting of the ways between Swettenham and Clifford was not a matter of timing but of fundamental intellectual orientation, visible from their earliest writings. Swettenham represented the tradition in imperialism that “best survived the next fifty years” — a materialist, progressive creed that could accommodate the twentieth century’s colonial structures without crisis. Clifford represented the romantic tradition, which was “exposed as bankrupt” by the industrial, racially stratified colonialism of the twentieth century, and whose representative was left with “the memory of the passionate enthusiasm and burning conviction of the last Century, together with the dreams of the one British dependency that was different from all the rest” (pp. 61, 73). The intellectual appeal of imperialism, Allen concludes, was “the poorer” for Clifford’s departure from it.
Context
- The article draws primarily on the published works of Swettenham and Clifford themselves (over twenty books between them), their papers to the Royal Colonial Institute, and a “few official or unpublished papers”; Allen does not appear to have relied heavily on Colonial Office files, which he notes would produce a different and equally partial picture (p. 42).
- Historiographically, the article sits at the intersection of imperial intellectual history and Malayan administrative history, using the two men’s self-representations to interrogate the assumptions of the Residential System rather than to reconstruct its bureaucratic operations. It anticipates later critiques of colonialism by taking the imperialists’ own words seriously as evidence of their worldview, while refusing both hagiography and wholesale condemnation.