Subjects of an Orientalist despot: John Ross and the ‘Malaynesian’ people of the northeastern Indian Ocean, 1812–54

Using the writings of the Scottish mariner and claimant to the Cocos Islands, John Ross (1786–1854), this article, based on my Indian Economic and Social History Review lecture of September 2024, offers new information about the formerly enslaved people he had taken on by 1830 and further suggests that his experience with them led to his offering a collective term for the peoples of Southeast Asia. The stimulus for this rethinking was not based on any particular regard, but rather a proprietorial defence of his claims to space between empires and an anxiety about how he had been described by Robert FitzRoy and Charles Darwin in the famous Voyage of the Beagle. It was also, I would argue in closing, shaped by the changing nature of his own family, who would hold on to the atoll for another century and a half.