‘A Hand Book relative to the Straits and Java’

‘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.