
Full text loading...
‘A Hand Book relative to the Straits and Java’. An early British tourist perspective on the Dutch East Indies (1853)
In 1853, Charles Walter Kinloch, a judge in Bengal, British India, published an account of his trip to the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies: De zieke reiziger; or, Rambles in Java and the Straits in 1852. This can be considered one of the first guidebooks for English tourists visiting Java. Drawing on Elleke Boehmer’s concept of colonialist discourse, I trace how the advice passed on by Kinloch to his readers relates to British imperial ambitions in the mid-nineteenth century, and to the function of literature as a means of forging and consolidating colonial power hierarchies more generally.