Rajah Charles Brooke, Monarch of All He Surveyed

Charles Brooke was the second and by far the most interesting of the three Brooke 'White Rajahs' who ruled Sarawak (now a state of the Federation of Malaysia) for almost exactly a century to 1941. The founder of the dynasty, James, was a flamboyant character whose well publicised exploits against Borneo 'pirates' attracted public admiration and controversy in Britain. Charles, his nephew, who succeeded him as a ruler of the semi-private possession in 1868, was the product of an adolescence spent as a midshipman in the Royal Navy and a young adulthood among tribal peoples in the remote corners of his uncle's vast domain. These two formative influences – sail-era navy and equally primitive traditional Borneo – are both unutterably alien to modern experience, one reason why it is a difficult task for the historian to penetrate Charles' austere Victorian facade.

Colin Crisswell has written the first biography of this insufficiently appreciated man. It is a workmanlike job which covers the half-century reign of the second Brooke Rajah in thorough but pedestrian style. Crisswell has used the standard primary sources without unearthing significant new material, and his cautious interpretation is heavily dependent on the writings of others. He is at his most authoritative in the two chapters based on his own doctoral research which unfortunately concern the least interesting (as well as least admirable) aspect of Charles' career, namely his ultimately thwarted ambition to absorb the Sultanate of Brunei, the original suzerain of Sarawak. (Like many of his predecessors Crisswell has, in toiling through the abundant Colonial Office files on this subject, absorbed a little too much nineteenth-century cant with regard to Brunei, as when he dismisses the Sultanate's dogged resistance to political extinction as primarily the result of 'self-interest and xenophobia'.)