Trade and Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia: Gillian Maclaine and His Business Network by G. Roger Knight (review)

This fine-grained study by an accomplished economic historian of Southeast Asia will be most welcome to all those interested in the way nineteenth-century commerce operated. Knight is the kind of careful scholar to leave no archival stone unturned, and he has consulted the usual archives in the Netherlands and London as well as the published literature on British commerce of the period. The additional treasure is the voluminous private correspondence of his principal subject, surprisingly preserved in the state archives of Scotland and of Gloucestershire, as well as in private family hands.

Gillian Maclaine was unique in his role in Java, and yet beautifully representative of the kind of pioneering enterprise that several generations of educated Scotsmen brought to Asia. His roots were firmly Scottish Highlands and Presbyterian, although his career was extremely cosmopolitan. He exemplifies the working trust among his fellow Scots in London and later in Batavia, much as Weber described it in nineteenth-century American chapel-goers, or more modern analysts in the networks of same-village and same-surname associations in the Chinese merchant diaspora. In reassuring his mother about his risky credit arrangements with other Scots traders, Maclaine praises one as "a regular Highlander" in his common sense and warm heart, while another "maintains his strict Presbyterian principles" (65). His coffee concession in the Javanese princely districts (vorstenlanden) survived amid the storms of the Java–Dutch War, because his Javanese patron and landlord, Pangeran Buminata, was "perfectly Highland" in his warmth and straightforward honesty. Maclaine's letters are, fortunately, all in English, although Gaelic formed an emotive bond among these enterprising Scots far from home.

Born on the west coast island of Mull in 1798, Maclaine benefitted from the superior Scottish education system and his gentry status to reach the University of Glasgow. The good offices of his uncle found him a place with the equally Scottish firm of MacLachlan Brothers, trading to Calcutta and beyond. His letters show initial excitement giving way to increasing frustration because he was not given responsibility. His quest, then and later, was for "an independency," meaning enough capital to trade on his own. He leapt at the chance to sail to Asia on behalf of the firm. In July 1820, he arrived in Batavia in charge of a consignment of cottons produced in the Glasgow area (then second only to Lancashire as a production center) and of some Turkish opium outside the monopoly control of Bengal opium by the East India Company. The goods were to be immediately sold to a Scottish firm in Batavia, Menzies and Anderson, for sale to Indies Chinese intermediary merchants. However, Menzies was away and Anderson had broken his arm, so Maclaine had to negotiate customs and find a sale on his own. The Batavia Scottish community came to his rescue in disposing of the opium, but within weeks he rejoined the same ship that had brought him from Calcutta, hoping to sell the cloth in Semarang. There he appears to have done well, quickly making £12,000 on sales to the "long-que'd Chinamen" (60).

It was the lure of growing coffee at a frontier outside the control of English or Dutch authorities that led Maclaine to break his links to the McLachlans. Several European planters had already leased land from one of the Javanese rulers to grow coffee. Maclaine enthused to his long-suffering uncle (and involuntary provider of credit) that it was one of the "easiest, safest … and most rapid modes of realising a fortune that possibly exists (63).

He continued, "The expense of labor is so trifling and the advance of capital so little, there being no Sink of money for an Estate, slaves etc. as in the West Indies, that coffee can actually be raised for 8 or 10 shillings per cwt" (64). By 1822, however...