White Rajah: A Biography of Sir James Brooke

Sir James Brooke was an extraordinary ‘Eminent Victorian’, whose life was the stuff of legend: he was a character that George Macdonald Fraser would scarcely dare to invent; Errol Flynn wanted to play him in a movie. Over a hundred years after his death, his rule is still remembered through out South-East Asia. Althrough he was only a private citizen, James Brooke was wealthy and opinionated, and had such a sense of authority that on his first visit to Sarawak in 1841 he was mistaken for an envoy of the expanding British Empire. Brooke was a skilful opportunist who played off the different sections of Sarawak society against each other and finally manoeuvred himself to become the sole ruler of a single kingdom. Too often the story of James Brooke has been wrapped in the myths of empire, both positive and negative, making the man himself hard to see. In White Rajah, Nigel Barley looks beyond the Imperial arguments, allowing one of the great icons of the age to emerge for what he was: a noble, inspired, flawed, fascinating, contradictory individual.