A century before the Philippines came under American control, Americans were already travelling to Southeast Asia regularly. This book looks at the writings of American diplomats, adventurers, and scientists and chronicles how nineteenth-century Americans viewed and imagined Southeast Asia through their own cultural-political lenses. It argues that as Americans came to visit the region they also brought with them a train of cultural assumptions and biases that contributed to the development of American Orientalism in Southeast Asia.
- Cover
- Contents
- A note on spelling
- Introduction
- I A book about books, and why books matter
- 1 The curtain rises
- 1.I ‘To be considered as Actors on a most conspicuous Theatre’: America’s genesis and the world beyond
- 1.II The birth of a new naval power
- 1.III Between expansionism and isolationism: America’s neutrality tested
- 1.IV Marking borders and stepping out: Southeast Asia awaits
- 2 Pepper and gunboats
- 2.I Boom! America’s ‘pepper rush’ begins
- 2.II Not so friendly after all: The attack on the American merchant vessel Friendship
- 2.III ‘You are authorized to vindicate our wrongs’: America’s first attack in Southeast Asia
- 2.IV Drama awaits: The controversy over the Kuala Batu affair back home in America
- 2.V ‘Conducted in a desultory manner’: Francis Warriner’s account of the Kuala Batu attack
- 2.VI ‘We have made no conquests, dethroned no Sultans’: Jeremiah Reynolds’ defence of American aggression
- 2.VII Far from the madding crowd: Embedded writers and the beginnings of American scholarship on Southeast Asia
- 3 Friends, but not equals
- 3.I In search of friends: America’s mission to Siam
- 3.II ‘Not a single vessel of war was to be seen’: Roberts’ mission to secure a friend for America
- 3.III The great unknown: Edmund Roberts’ arrival in Siam
- 3.IV The American eagle and the British lion: ‘Frienemies’ in the Indies
- 3.V Regarding the feeble, un-Christian Other: Oppositional dialectics in Roberts’ narrative
- 3.VI Edmund Roberts as the American Orientalist
- 4 ‘It was a scene of grandeur in destruction’
- 4.I Boom! Back to Sumatra we go
- 4.II ‘May a merciful as well as a just God direct’: Fitch W. Taylor’s Christian universe
- 4.III Finding comfort in the familiar: Fitch W. Taylor’s deliberate blindness
- 5 Flirting with danger
- 5.I From sea to shining sea: America’s expansion and consolidation in the 1840s and 1850s
- 5.II ‘Jealousy had met me at the threshold of Netherland India’: Walter Murray Gibson’s misadventure in Sumatra
- 5.III The Walter Gibson affair and its impact on American-Dutch relations
- 5.IV Those who can’t do, write fiction: Walter Gibson as American Orientalist
- 5.V The filibuster’s demise: Gibson’s final Pacific adventure
- 6 It is your shells I am after
- 6.I From antebellum to post-Civil War United States: Another America rises
- 6.II All for the sake of knowledge: Bickmore’s Scientific Jaunt across the Dutch East Indies
- 6.III ‘This indicates their low rank in the human family’: Bickmore and the theory of racial difference
- 6.IV Albert Bickmore’s adventure in conchology and America’s entry into the club of civilized Western nations
- 7 Empire at last
- 7.I Travelling in the shade of empire: American tourists and amateurs in Southeast Asia
- 7.II That other Great Game to the East: America’s rise as a colonial power from 1898
- 8 Conclusion
- 8.I American Orientalism: The contours of a new language-game, and its users
- 8.II The gathering of minds: How the echo chamber was formed
- 8.III ‘Indians’, Indians, Asians, and the disabled Native Other
- 8.IV Talking to themselves: American works on Southeast Asia as self-referential texts
- 8.V The stories we tell: America and Southeast Asia’s entanglement, then and now
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- Appendix C
- Appendix D
- Bibliography
- Index
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