The First Britsh Accounts on Bali: race and civilisation

Abstract: This article deals with the first papers of two British historian-administrators on the Malay archipelago: Thomas Stanford Raffles and John Crawfurd. The interest of this article is to present the beginnings of the British ethnological accounts on the “races” of the world, through some works of these two authors, in particular the second one. As John Crawfurd also spread his thoughts on the races to other contexts than that of the Malay archipelago, his writings give us an overview of the geographical scale of the racist theories of the XIXth century. To analyze these accounts, frequently left aside in Brazilian academic circle, is important to broaden the discussion about the notion of human races in different times and contexts.