LOW, Captain James (1791-1852)
A Dissertation on the Soil & Agriculture of the British Settlement of Penang, or Prince of Wales Island, in the Straits of Malacca; including Province Wellesley on the Malayan Peninsula. With Brief References to the Settlements of Singapore & Malacca, and accompanied by incidental observations on various subjects of local interest in these straits
Singapore: Printed at the Singapore Free Press Office, 1836. Large octavo. (9 7/8 x 6 inches). v, 321, errata leaf. Two hand-colored folding lithographic plates printed in Calcutta by J.B. Tassin. Presentation copy.
Original cloth backed. Blue paper boards.
Rare Singapore imprint by the earliest serious Western scholar of the Thai language and a pioneering observer of Siam.
Captain James Low was a Madras Army officer posted to Penang from 1819 and the earliest sustained Western scholar of the Thai language and Siamese culture. Educated at Edinburgh, he learned Malay and Thai, served on missions along the Andaman coast (notably to the Raja of Ligor in 1824), compiled vocabularies, and amassed drawings and manuscripts. His Thai-facing publications laid the groundwork for nineteenth-century European study of Siam: A Grammar of the Thai or Siamese Language (Calcutta, 1828); "On Buddha and the Phrabát" (Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3, 1831); "Extracts from the Journal of a Political Mission to the Raja of Ligor in Siam" (Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, July 1838); "On Siamese Literature" (Asiatic Researches, 20, 1839); and the collected treatise On the Government, the Literature, and the Mythology of the Siamese (London, 1839), followed by further philological and religious studies, including translations from the Phra Pathom, in JASB (1848-49). He also prepared early maps of Siam, Cambodia, and Laos. Published in Singapore in 1836, A Dissertation on the Soil & Agriculture of Penang is Captain James Low's practical survey of the island and its mainland Province Wellesley, written from the vantage of a resident East India Company officer. Low classifies soils and terrain, links them to climate and monsoon, and then moves crop by crop through the region's staples and plantations: coconut, areca, sugar-cane and garden produce around the coast; and the island's signature spices (nutmeg and clove). He touches on the working realities of agriculture: clearing and fallow, water management, pests and diseases, labour and land tenure, and the revenues and trade that follow. Beyond agronomy, Low devotes substantial space to social observation in Penang and the Straits. A long section on "Crime" treats policing, punishments, and the legal complexion of the settlement and later chapters range across a variety of ethnographic notes. The book's index and common-terms register point to further everyday topics such as "gaming," "police," "oath," and "superstition", as well as to his comparative references to Siam and the Siamese along the peninsula, consistent with Low's broader expertise in Thai language and culture. Together these sections make the volume a useful social portrait of Penang's multiethnic life in the 1830s as much as a handbook of crops and soils.
Item #39091
Price: $6,800.00