ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals for the first time the role that John Crawfurd played in preventing the incorporation of Sarawak into the British Empire and impeding calls for large-scale colonial expansion in South-East Asia. Using his position as a journalist with The Examiner and as the leading government advisor on South-East Asian matters, Crawfurd worked anonymously to orchestrate liberal Radical opposition to James Brooke’s imperial adventures. In opposing Brooke, Crawfurd developed a moral opposition to European expansion in South-East Asia. Colonial control of large tracts of land and people, he argued, would result in ‘death and economic waste’. 1 He preferred a colonialism that, in today’s jargon, would have a small footprint: the colonialism of entrepot outposts in which people, goods and capital were free to come and go.
