A list of names and other lnformation from the British graves at Bengkuku on the west coast of Sumatra, which the Honorable East India Company occupied from 1685 to 1825.

This is an important, revisionist account of the origins of the British Empire in Asia in the early modern period. David Veevers uncovers a hidden world of transcultural interactions between servants of the English East India Company and the Asian communities and states they came into contact with, revealing how it was this integration of Europeans into non-European economies, states and societies which was central to British imperial and commercial success rather than national or mercantilist enterprise. As their servants skilfully adapted to this rich and complex environment, the East India Company became enfranchised by the eighteenth century with a breadth of privileges and rights – from governing sprawling metropolises to trading customs-free. In emphasising the Asian genesis of the British Empire, this book sheds new light on the foreign frameworks of power which fuelled the expansion of Global Britain in the early modern world.

This is not the story of the Honourable East India Company, about which much has already been written, although it has to do with the East India Co, and in particular with one of their more humble servants. It is the story of a remote outpost of empire in the 1820s, told by a young Eurasian in the long letters home to his father in England. William Grant Day was educated in England and then sent back to Sumatra with his brother, Tom, to look after his father's spice plantation. In his letters home William writes of the day to day life in the fever ridden settlement of the Company's station at Fort Marlborough (Bencoolen); of the slaves working the plantation; of the opium trade; of the bickering and morals in the small European community; of death and disease and duelling; of Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore; of loneliness and boredom and Dutch intolerance; and through it all the insecurity of life and the humdrum business of running a spice plantation. Perhaps also we can read between the lines a little and feel what it must have been like to have been an educated Eurasian in an outpost of Empire.