The White Rajah documents a fascinating time in Sarawak made possible by high integrity of three generations of Brooke men.

International law burst on the scene as a new field in the late nineteenth century. Where did it come from? Rage for Order finds the origins of international law in empires—especially in the British Empire’s sprawling efforts to refashion the imperial constitution and use it to order the world in the early part of that century. “Rage for Order is a book of exceptional range and insight. Its successes are numerous. At a time when questions of law and legalism are attracting more and more attention from historians of 19th-century Britain and its empire, but still tend to be considered within very specific contexts, its sweep and ambition are particularly welcome...Rage for Order is a book that deserves to have major implications both for international legal history, and for the history of modern imperialism.” —Alex Middleton, Reviews in History “Rage for Order offers a fresh account of nineteenth-century global order that takes us beyond worn liberal and post-colonial narratives into a new and more adventurous terrain.” —Jens Bartelson, Australian Historical Studies

This collection of essays collects the leading scholars on British colonial thought in Southeast Asia to consider the question: what was the relationship between liberalism and the British Empire in Southeast Asia? The empire builders in Southeast Asia: Lord Minto, William Farquhar, John Leyden, Thomas Stamford Raffles, and John Crawfurd - to name a few - were fervent believers in a liberal free trade order in Southeast Asia. Many recent studies of British imperialism, and European imperialism more generally, have addressed how the anti-imperialist tradition of Eighteenth century liberalism was increasingly intertwined with the discourses of empire, freedom, race and economics in the nineteenth century. This collection extends those studies to look at the impact of liberalism on. British colonialism in Southeast Asia and early nineteenth century Southeast Asia we see some of the first attempts at developing multicultural democracies within the colonies, experiments in free trade and attempts to use free trade to prevent war and colonisation.

A significant reinterpretation of Sarawak history, Power and Prowess explores the network of power, economic and ritual relationships that developed on the northwest coast of Borneo in the mid-nineteenth century, from which a coalition led by James Brooke established the state of Sarawak. Where many authors placed Brooke in the context of nineteenth century British imperialism, this study perceives him in the context of Bornean cultures and political economies. Brooke emerges from the historical record as a 'man of prowess', with the author identifying important ritual sources of Brooke's power among Malays, Bidayuh and Ibans, sources which derived from and expressed indigenous cultural traditions about fertility, health and status. Drawing on conceptual frameworks from political science, as well as recent southeast Asian historiography, Power and Prowess offers a detailed political history of the period and new interpretations of Brooke's career. This study also retrieves from the historical sources previously concealed narratives which reflect the interests, priorities and activities of Sarawak people themselves. J.H. WALKER lectures in political science at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

This book deals with war in three Oceanian societies. More specifi cally, it analyzes the following: the process of war in relation to population pressure among New Guinea's Maring people; exten sion and contraction in the headhunting activities of the Iban people of Sarawak during the nineteenth century; and the disrup tion resulting from the introduction of muskets in the warfare of the Maoris of New Zealand. In all of the analyses, I have viewed war as a process rather than simply as something that either does or does not occur and I have tried to see how the process relates to environmental problems or perturbations actually faced by people. The use of such an approach can, I believe, lead to important understandings about war and, more generally, about how people respond to environmental problems. A goal in this book is to show that this is so. Although it is only relatively recently that the significance of viewing war as a process became clear to me, my interest in war in relation to environmental and demographic phenomena is of long vii viii Preface standing. The beginning of the studies resulting in the present book can, in fact, be said to date back to the mid-1950s when I was in New Zealand to do library research for my Ph. D. dissertation on Maori warfare.