THE POMPEII OF THE EAST - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 12

The economic theorist Adam Smith, whom Raffles frequently quotes, abominated the Dutch
colonial monopoly. He advised administrators of the rising British empire to abandon mono-
polist economics in favor of a free-trade system, so as “to open the most extensive market for
the produce of his country, to allow the most perfect freedom of commerce … to increase as
much as possible the number and competition of buyers.” 32 Java and its surrounding islands
were thus not a lost cause, Raffles argued, but a natural laboratory for free-market economics
and a golden opportunity for a progressive colonial power to enrich both itself and its sub-
jects. 33
All good in theory, of course, except for the small matter of volcanoes. Raffles's challenge
in 1815, as a self-styled imperial visionary, was to adapt his hothouse modern ideas of
free trade and political liberty to a wholly different cultural ecology: one in which
everything—from the fertile soil beneath his feet, to the omnipresent mountains set against
the sky, to the periodic matter of that sky itself—was volcanic, and whose inhabitants meas-
ured history by the remembered cataclysm of eruptions.
In Batavia, on the morning of April 11, 1815, Raffles woke late in darkness, having
dreamed his nightly fill of British dominion over the East Indies. By the time he was wading
through knee-high ash in his vice-regal garden, ten thousand of his Sumbawan subjects were
already dead. His initial response to the catastrophe was in character as both a modern bur-
eaucrat and a scholar: he demanded full written reports of the event from his regional subor-
dinates. But the full extent of the devastation appears to have dawned fatally slowly on the
British governor. It was not until August, on hearing reports of famine on Sumbawa, that he
sent a ship laden with rice as a form of disaster aid, with Lieutenant Owen Phillips in charge
of relief operations. Raffles takes pride in this act in his History , though by our modern reck-
oning his humanitarian gesture was pitifully inadequate: a mere few hundred tons of rice,
capable of feeding perhaps twenty thousand survivors on Sumbawa for a week.
Figure 1.8. An idealized Javan landscape from the early nineteenth century paints an idyllic scene; but it
also shows the proximity of village life to the volcanic mountains that run east-west across the East Indies
archipelago. (Lady Sophia Raffles, Memoirs of Sir Stamford Raffles [London: John Murray, 1830], 149.)
Given the cataclysmic scale of Tambora, it is also accorded strangely minimal space in
Raffles's History of Java . His narrative of the eruption is not to be found in the long chapters
on Javan history or even in the generous section on volcanoes. Rather, it is squeezed into a
lengthy footnote between essays on Java's “Mineralogical Constitution” and its “Seasons and
Climate” as an episode that “may not be uninteresting” to his readers. Raffles thus stands as
the first in a long line of Western historians to miss, or in his case willfully deny, Tambora's
impact. His reticence on Tambora is easily explained. Raffles represents Tambora as no more