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Historical person

Thomas Stamford Raffles

1781–1826

Thomas Stamford Raffles was a British colonial administrator best known for establishing Singapore as an East India Company trading settlement in 1819. He had earlier governed Java during the British occupation and promoted administrative, scientific and antiquarian projects, while remaining part of an imperial system founded on conquest and unequal commercial power. His later years were marked by disputes with the company and by the development of his natural-history collections.

Raffles is often an off-stage founding presence in historical fiction about colonial Singapore rather than the central character of a major novel. Works set in the city’s later imperial society, such as J. G. Farrell’s The Singapore Grip, depend on the commercial and political order created in his era even when they do not dramatise his life directly.

In Christopher Nicole’s Pearl of the Orient, it’s not long before he senses a chance to set himself up forever after crossing paths with Stamford Raffles, a visionary young colonial official who dreams of conquests to expand Britain’s growing empire. In Patrick O’Brian’s The Nutmeg of Consolation, Stamford Raffles supplies Jack with a captured ship, renamed Nutmeg of Consolation, for the voyage toward Australia. Other novels featuring Thomas Stamford Raffles include Julian Stockwin’s To the Eastern Seas.

Series

Series featuring Thomas Stamford Raffles (3 series)

Aubrey–Maturin Novels in Order

by Patrick O’Brian 21 books 4.5

The Aubrey–Maturin novels follow Royal Navy officer Jack Aubrey and surgeon, naturalist and intelligence agent Stephen Maturin from the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France through the War of 1812 and the first years after Waterloo. Across twenty completed novels, their friendship links shipboard command, espionage, science, domestic…

All books in this series

Thomas Kydd in Order

by Julian Stockwin 27 books 4.2

The Thomas Kydd series follows a Guildford wig-maker pressed into the Royal Navy in 1793 and traces his rise from inexperienced landsman to admiral. Across twenty-seven novels, Kydd learns the work of the lower deck, crosses to the quarterdeck and commands increasingly important ships during the French Revolutionary…

All books in this series