Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Pioneer Merchants of Singapore: Johnston, Boustead, Guthrie and Others by R. E. Hale (review)

2023; Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society; Volume: 96; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ras.2023.a900794

2180-4338

Seng Guo-Quan,

Asian Studies and History

Reviewed by: The Pioneer Merchants of Singapore: Johnston, Boustead, Guthrie and Others by R. E. Hale Seng Guo-Quan The Pioneer Merchants of Singapore: Johnston, Boustead, Guthrie and Others. By R. E. Hale. Singapore: World Scientific Press, 2022, 352pp. ISBN 9789811247125 This book is partly a collection of three brief historical biographies of A. L. Johnston, Edward Boustead and Alexander Guthrie—the early European merchants of colonial Singapore; and partly a pseudo-memoir of Johnston. Unlike Boustead and Guthrie, Johnston is a relatively unknown member of the earliest European mercantile settler group, except for the fact that Johnston Pier—Singapore’s main pier between 1856 and 1933—was named after him. The book’s chief value lies in in the author’s use of a set of letters, discovered in a regional archives in Scotland, and written by Johnston’s business partner, to reconstruct a biography and pseudo-memoir of the man. Even with these Scottish letters, what the author manages to make out of Johnston’s biography (pp. 3–41) is scant. Born on the Isle of Man to Scottish parents in 1783, and joining the East India Company (EIC) as a midshipman at the age of 12, Alexander Laurie Johnston rose through the ranks on the company’s ships in India and the Asian seas until about 1812. Around that time, he bought and began to command his own ship, settling in Singapore in 1820. He started his trading firm A. L. Johnston and Co. in 1823. The author is able to assemble very little about Johnston’s businesses beyond glimpses revealed in his partner’s letter back home. He was most likely taking opium from Bengal, and Straits produce (tin, pepper, gambier, birds’ nests, etc.) from Singapore to Canton to trade with the Chinese. He also serviced other ships and served as banker and property and insurance agent to other merchants (p. 31). Much of the biography revolved around whatever could be gleaned about Johnston’s public life as a leading citizen of the colony. He was appointed a Justice of the Peace, and served on the Grand Jury. He often chaired meetings, from whence mercantile opinions could be represented to the colonial government. In 1841, he retired to Scotland, where he died nine years later. Probably because so few historical facts can be gathered about Johnston, the author proceeds to write a pseudo-memoir that takes up close to half the book [End Page 166] (pp. 42–156). Buried in an inconspicuous part of the Introduction, is a throwaway line that actually explains what this part of the book is about: ‘In addition to Johnston’s biography there is a large section of his recollections as imagined based on the author’s research, recalling his days in Singapore while in retirement in Scotland two years prior to his death in 1850.’ How then did the author ‘imagine’ such lengthy ‘recollections’ of Johnston into being? Upon closer reading, the pseudo-memoir is a chronicle of interesting events in Singapore’s colonial history between 1820 and 1841, spliced with ‘auto-biographical’ anecdotes, and commentaries a leading citizen like Johnston (or the author himself) would have given. To give an example of the anecdotal self-portraits, in a passage recounting Stamford Raffles’ appointment of a Town Committee in October 1822, the author writes, ‘I was appointed to a new Town Committee a week later with Davis…and Sam Bonham… Beset by an uproar of complaint from merchants on all sides and from all communities who feared the present arrangements and business would be disrupted, with losses to all which they could ill afford. I too had my doubts…’ (p. 66). To give another example, of the author’s commentarial prose, he writes, in a passage reflecting on European relations with the Chinese, ‘I now realise just how little we understood the Chinese even though we worked alongside them and depended on them to bring in the produce which we exported to the West.’ (p. 154). This blurring of lines between history and personal commentary is hard to understand. It does not make the pseudo-memoir any more readable because short of the artistic license granted by historical fiction, all...