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Historical person

James Brooke

1803–1868

James Brooke was born in India in 1803 to a family connected with the East India Company and served in the Company’s army before wounds received in the First Anglo-Burmese War ended his conventional military career. With inherited money he purchased the schooner Royalist and sailed to the Malay Archipelago. In Sarawak he assisted the Brunei ruler’s representatives during a local rebellion and in 1841 received authority over the territory, beginning the personal regime later known as the White Rajahs.

As rajah, Brooke built an administration around alliances with local communities, suppression of rivals and campaigns presented as anti-piracy operations. Supporters credited him with limiting some abuses and creating durable institutions; critics in Britain questioned the scale of violence used in expeditions and the close relationship between private rule and British naval power. Brooke’s position gradually gained international recognition, and his family dynasty expanded Sarawak after him. In declining health he spent more time in England and died at Burrator in Devon in 1868, leaving the rajahship to his nephew Charles Brooke.

In George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman’s Lady, When Elspeth is abducted, Flashman follows her through Singapore and Borneo, where James Brooke’s campaigns against river piracy force him into fighting he would rather avoid.

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring James Brooke (1 series)

The Flashman Papers in Order

by George MacDonald Fraser 12 books 4.2(80,547)

The Flashman Papers present the supposed memoirs of Sir Harry Paget Flashman, the bully expelled from Rugby School in Tom Brown’s School Days who becomes a decorated Victorian soldier despite being a coward, liar, opportunist and sexual predator. George MacDonald Fraser places this fictional witness inside documented nineteenth-century…

All books in this series