It was, he felt, his last roll of the dice. Writing to his confidante, the Duchess of Somerset (one of the innumerable Scots who populated his life), in February 1819, just weeks after he had raised the Union Flag over Singapore, Thomas Stamford Raffles conceded ‘if this last effort for securing our interests also fails, I must be content to quit politics and turn philosopher’.

He need not have worried. Soon he could report to her that ‘My new colony thrives most rapidly. We have not been established four months and it has received an accession of population exceeding five thousand, principally Chinese, and their number is daily increasing… it is a child of my own and I have made it what it is’.

Raffles’ reputation as a man of action was secure. As his second Resident in Singapore, John Crawfurd, was to write many years later: ‘Activity, industry and political courage were the most remarkable endowments of his character… He was not perhaps an original thinker but readily adopted the notions of others’.

Crawfurd was missing the point in regards to originality. In the best Enlightenment manner, Raffles sought to bring a scientific approach to bear on every object of his philosophising, whether in the realms of geography, geology and natural history, or in anthropology, archaeology and linguistics. And such an approach was not just about ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ but also a readiness, in the light of observation and experience, to be open to the evolution of ideas. A detail brought back by an expedition he sent to Japan particularly impressed him: ‘a regular geographical and statistical survey [being undertaken] of the country … for the Japanese themselves are wonderfully inquisitive in all points of science and possess a mind curious and anxious to receive information without inquiring from what quarter it comes’. He could have been describing himself.

Development on the basis of observation and experience, allied with a pragmatism attuned to changing circumstances, characterises Raffles’ thinking throughout the 1810s. Such changes could be quite dramatic at times, as in his notion of the local Chinese population as a ‘supple, venal and crafty’ group, when he considered they were conspiring with his Dutch enemies, turning to one of near adulation at ‘the eagerness of this extraordinary people’ when he came to comprehend their all-important role in the success of his ‘child’ of Singapore.

Fundamental to these pragmatic philosophical developments were his changing views on trade. At a time when the prospect of snatching Java from the Dutch colonial government and acquiring its vice-governorship beckoned, he could be quite the interventionist and imperialist. In a long and detailed memorial of June 1811 to his great patron, Gilbert Elliot, Lord Minto, Governor-General in Bengal, Raffles pointed out that ‘the annexation of Java and the Eastern Isles to our Indian empire opens to the English nation views of so enlarged a nature as seem equally to demand and justify a bolder policy both of a commercial and political kind than we could have lately contemplated’. For, he explained, ‘that altho[ugh] the Dutch have been generally condemned by us for the severe restrictions and monopolies they have adopted, yet there are many of their Regulations which we must approve… By continuing therefore until we see cause to alter all existing Restrictions and Regulations for Trade, we shall only do what prudence, caution and our own interest dictate.’ In Borneo, he suggested, ‘no settlement is likely to succeed in that quarter which is founded on a commercial instead of a territorial basis’. So Raffles exhibited both imperialist and monopolistic tendencies. Free trade, as John Bastin, the doyen of recent Raffles studies, puts it, was for him a thing for the future, not necessarily the present.

What changed Raffles’ outlook was the 1816 reinstatement of the Dutch in Java. No expansionist temptations now stood in the way of his acceptance of more exclusively trade-based arrangements. Within a year, he was writing to George Canning, the minister responsible for the East India Company, that ‘the object of the British Government is not extension of territory’ and had turned his attention instead to the potential economic advantages of a ‘station’ in the approaches to the Straits of Malacca.

Here was the genesis of Singapore, and of the leitmotif of the mature Raffles’ philosophy, as he was to express it in 1819:

Our object is not territory, but trade; a great commercial emporium, and a fulcrum, whence we may extend our influence politically as circumstances may hereafter require … One free port in these seas must eventually destroy the spell of Dutch monopoly.

‘Not territory but trade’ was, as Crawfurd would doubtless have pointed out, an unoriginal sentiment. Almost forty years earlier, the British Prime Minister, Lord Shelburne, had used the phrase ‘Trade, not dominion’ and there is an important link between these two expressions of the same sentiment.

Raffles’ 1811 memorial to Minto includes a single, unattributed quote:

The Dutch genius … has never yet been able to discover, that in the long-run it must be more profitable ‘to make smaller profits on a larger capital, than larger profits on a smaller capital’ and their policy has been not unaptly compared to a man putting out one of his eyes, in order to strengthen the sight of the other.

Any quote without an attribution is revelatory. It indicates both parties are familiar with the source; in this case, it is the chapter ‘Of the Profits of Stock’  in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Notably, in an added wink from Raffles to Minto, this work – specifically, the section on ‘the Education of Youth’ in Volume V – is also a source of the analogy in the second part of the sentence.

Enter Adam Smith, who now becomes central to this story.

It was a discussion with Smith, during a journey from Edinburgh to London, that had brought about Shelburne’s philosophical epiphany – ‘the difference between light and darkness through the best part of my life’ – and it was Shelburne who subsequently introduced Smith’s notion of ‘trade not territory’, first promulgated as the means to a more fruitful relationship with the rebellious American colonies, into British government thinking. It was also Smith who encouraged Shelburne to support Alexander Dalrymple, proponent in the late 1760s of the clearest model for Raffles’ Singapore scheme, the free trade entrepôt on the island of Balambangan, situated between Borneo and Palawan.

And it was Smith who made such an impression on the young Gilbert Elliot in 1782: ‘I have found one just man in Gomorrah; Adam Smith, author of the Wealth of Nations. He … is a wise and deep philosopher’. It was not such a surprising tribute, given that Elliot’s father was a close friend of Smith’s. Indeed, it was Elliot senior who introduced Smith to Shelburne. So it is altogether conceivable that it was Minto who first brought the ideas of Smith to Raffles’ attention. Such speculation aside, it was certainly the case that when Raffles published his History of Java in 1816, ‘Dr Adam Smith’ was the single writer on political economy he quoted at length.

The mature Raffles emerges fully-fledged in his Administration of the Eastern Islands, written just months after the establishment of Singapore in 1819. It was partly an attempt by Raffles to find an administrative escape from the grimness of Bencoolen in West Sumatra, to which he had been consigned since the return of Java to the Dutch, but it also comprised his blueprint for British policy in the Great Archipelago. It marks him out as the complete Smithian, not just in terms of governance, economy and trade, but also, taken in conjunction with his contemporaneous plans for a Malay College, education and religion.

Raffles begins with his usual bugbear: the ‘greedy policy’ of the Dutch colonial administration, whose ‘narrow and rigid monopoly’ has led to ‘the destruction of native trade of the Archipelago’. Here, Raffles’ vehemence in regards to the Dutch – ‘the Vandals of the East’ – is at one with that of Smith, who abhorred their ‘perfectly destructive’ colonial practices. Britain, by contrast, should be clear in its objective ‘being purely commercial … our relation with the native states [should be] conducted exclusively on that principle … The acquisition of further territory [was] comparatively unimportant and perhaps objectionable’. Once again, he quotes the mantra ‘that trade and not territory is our object’:

Our establishments should be directed to no partial or immediate views of commercial profit but to the preservation of a free and unrestricted commerce and to the encouragement and protection of individual enterprise and the interests of the general merchant… [They] should be looked upon as so many outposts or stations erected for the convenience and security of our general commercial interests and not as governments intended for the rule and detailed management of a dominion.

Such a policy could only be to the mutual benefit of all – except, of course, the monopolists:

Our own interests are so manifestly connected with the advancement and improvement of the native states, that it is obvious we can have no views which are not equally to their advantage, and our interference is in consequence more likely to be invited than looked upon with jealousy and distrust… Our commercial treaties will have for their object the free and safe navigation of the coasts and rivers, and the security of intercourse at the different ports, rather on a principle of responsibility than one of direct check and control. By raising the importance of the acknowledged chiefs, and making them responsible for the prevention of piracy, this important object may be obtained with far greater facility and certainty, than by the largest establishment of gun boats and cruisers.

The establishment of Singapore may have been vehemently opposed by the Dutch state, but it

was hardly established as a free port, when speculations were immediately entered into by the Dutch merchants of Batavia, and several ships are already engaged by them to proceed to Singapore for the purchase of our Indian goods, which they are thus enabled to import without the charge of double duties, which the articles would be liable to if imported into Batavia in British bottoms. The produce of Java is also imported into Singapore on equally favourable terms, and thus the double duties exacted from foreign vessels at Batavia and Calcutta are naturally evaded, to the manifest advantage of the commerce of both countries.

There was, to be sure, a civilising aspect to Raffles’ plans, but it was one that would spring naturally from the commercial environment rather than being imposed:

By confining our national regulations to the society which may collect at our proposed emporia, they will become centres of civilisation as well as of commerce; while by avoiding with the native states all interference which may not be of a political nature, we shall expose to their view, and recommend for their adoption, those arts and rules of civilised life, which contribute to the superior happiness of our condition, and leave them free to adopt and apply them among themselves, in the degree and manner which may be most accordant with their own notions and feelings.

An important stimulant to the adoption of such ‘arts and rules’ was, in Raffles’ eyes (as it was in Smith’s), education:

The field which is thus open to the philanthropist needs no comment. He will look to the remoter effects which may be produced by the diffusion of knowledge by the aid of the press and of moral instruction by the means of our schools which would emanate from our principal stations.

In recognition of this, Raffles was formulating plans for education simultaneously with those for administration. In 1819, he published his prospectus for a Malay College at Singapore. It was a remarkable document for its time in two respects.

Firstly, it was to be a multicultural institution both in its intake and its curriculum. Malays were to be instructed in the manner of the two sons of the Regent of Semarang, who had been ‘sent to Bengal, where they remained only two years, but returned to their native country not only with a general knowledge of the English language, but versed in the elements of general history, science, and literature’. Europeans, in turn, were to be afforded ‘the means of instruction in the native languages’. Chinese students were welcome, too, though they were required to pay for attendance on the hard-nosed basis that they ‘are wealthy enough to do so, and are sufficiently aware of the advantages of education’. The college would collect and circulate material relating to local culture in a manner best ‘calculated to raise the character of the institution and to be useful or instructive to the people’. It was an approach to cultural inclusiveness that Raffles had brought with him from Bencoolen where, his wife recorded, ‘Sir Stamford… opened his house to the higher class of natives on all occasions. During the whole period of his residence in Sumatra he had some of them present during the hours of social intercourse.’

Secondly, the proposed syllabus of the college was entirely without reference to the teaching of any religion. Raffles’ intention was to create a secular institution. This may have been a necessity in an institution wishing to attract a full cultural range of pupils, but it also seems to have reflected his philosophical approach.

Raffles’ views on the religions he encountered in Asia exemplify his pragmatism. While he was constantly alive to the past glories of Hindu and Buddhist monumentalism in South East Asia, he had little use for contemporary manifestations of Hinduism in India, a culture diminished by ‘the odious distinction of castes’ and ‘the double load of foreign tyranny and priestly intolerance’.

His views on the religion brought to India by that ‘foreign tyranny’ were even less complimentary. ‘The Malayan nations’, he wrote in his History of Java, ‘had, in general, made considerable progress in civilisation, before the introduction of the Mahometan religion among them’, but ‘the desolating influence of the false prophet of Mecca’, its propagators with ‘the Koran in one hand, and the sword in the other’, had corrupted Malay culture. In Raffles’ view, ‘Mahometan’ laws sat uneasily on top of an adequate existing legal system but, much more seriously, this ‘robber religion’, by its attitude to ‘infidels’, didn’t just tolerate but actively encouraged two of the things Raffles most detested: piracy – inimical, of course, to trade – and slavery. The latter of these, following Smith, he considered, making a direct comparison with monopoly, ‘twice cursed, that its effects are not less ruinous to those who enforce it than those who are subjected to it’.

Raffles’ views on Christianity are more complicated to distinguish, not least because such a major source of information on his life is the memoir compiled by his second wife, Sophia. It was well within the capabilities of ‘The Editor’, who reduced Raffles’ nine-year first marriage to a single footnote, to bend the overall balance of the source material to fit her own proto-Victorian piety. Yet what can be discerned in Raffles himself is a spirit of compromise, which, in this context, was a particularly Smithian approach. Raffles may have proposed a secular approach to syllabus, but was prepared to be administratively pragmatic in order to get his College off the ground. Its bye-laws were to include the injunction that ‘The forms of Protestant worship will be observed… but neither native students nor Native Masters are compelled to attend Christian worship. The European officers of the Institution will all be Protestant Christians, but the Native Masters may or may not be Christians’. Similarly, his view of missionaries may have been distinctly variable, but he was happy to encourage their work as a useful counter to the corrosive influence of ‘Arab Sheikhs and Sayeds’. It was not their spirituality, but rather their secular achievements, that he admired in certain Christians, whether it was the Chinese lexicography of Robert Morrison or the parliamentary opposition to the slave trade of William Wilberforce.

This, then, was the essence of Raffles’ vision: a pragmatically secular society, dedicated to developing a scientific understanding of the world around it and eschewing territorial gain in favour of free and unimpeded commerce. In the end, his mature views were much less colonialist or imperialist than they were, in the spirit of Smith, globalist.

Raffles and his contemporaries may have played down the importance of his philosophy in favour of his practical achievements, but it is the former that distinguishes his legacy. Without it, Raffles would be no more relevant to modern Singapore than, say, are William Farquhar, the first Resident (who counter-claimed it as his own creation), or, for that matter, the Johor Sultanate. Instead, for all the talk of ‘Asian values’, it is Raffles’ Enlightenment spirit – whether pertaining to pragmatic secularism, education or trade – that resides in the very DNA of the place as it is today.

There are, thus, many more reasons for retaining those statues of Thomas Stamford Raffles in the heart of Singapore beyond the single argument (advanced, ironically, by a Dutchman, Albert Winsemius) that it bolsters international confidence in the city state. Although, it has to be said, that particular argument carries a recognisably Rafflesian ring to it.