Political and Commercial Considerations Relative to the Malayan Peninsula

Political and Commercial Considerations Relative to the Malayan Peninsula has been described by John Bastin as the rarest of all books printed in Malaysia in the nineteenth century. Only a hundred copies were printed and about a third of these were distributed throughout the East India Company establishments in London and Calcutta, where they incomprehensibly disappeared, as did most of the copies that were left in the Penang secretariat. In his introduction to this reprint of Anderson’s most significant work, Bastin renders a fascinating account of the whole history of the book subsequent to its publication, the inexplicable fate of most of its printed copies and lists the few known copies of this exceedingly rare volume which have been known to survive.

Anderson wrote the book in the hope of dispelling current misconception about the nature of the tributary relationship between Kedah and Siam; indeed Anderson’s implicit purpose seems to have been to show that it was advantageous to British interests should it decide to intervene in the affairs of Kedah. Whatever the purpose may have been, Anderson’s book, though perhaps imperfect in many places being the product of an ambitious and impetuous spirit, presented an exceedingly meticulous account of the prevailing conditions of the Malay States in the Western part of the peninsula in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a source on historical geography, Anderson’s work has unparallelled value and foreshadowed the writings of latter-day colonial scholar-administrators who described the Malay Peninsula in scrupulous and exhaustive detail such as Maxwell, Swettenham and Low.

As the MBRAS volume is a facsimile reprint of the original, Anderson’s spelling of place names would have undergone some very fundamental changes in keeping with current developments in the national language. Thus, the casual reader may be expected to adjust himself slightly to archaic variations which include Rumbow (Rembau), Colong (Kelang), Junk Ceylon/Salang (Phuket) and Quedah (Kedah).