No orchids for Mr. Raffles. A review of Syed Hussein Alatas' Thomas Stamford Raffles.

However, at the time, Alatas was plowing a lonely furrow, even as Euro-American institutions and Cold War ideology were recasting the civilizational discourse of colonialism as modernization theory. There was a brief moment in the 1970s and 1980s when intellectuals like Syed Hussein Alatas (hereinafter referred to as Alatas), Ashis Nandy, and Ngugi wa' Thiong'o raged against the ideological structures of colonialism that continued to wound the enterprise of intellection. In one phrase, "Raffles was not a political theorist" (p. 26), he moves us away from the vaporous prose of colonial writers who instituted Raffles as a man of genius and of unparalleled foresight. [Extracted from the article]

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