In 1819 Singapore was a flat, swampy and densely wooded island with few inhabitants. But Raffles saw the possibilities of developing it as an entrepot on the Calcutta - Canton route and as a British stronghold to prevent Dutch domination of the Malacca Straits. "It has been my good fortune," he wrote, "to establish this station in a position combining every possible advantage, geographical and local." In three months it had a population of around three thousand, and in three years the population rose to ten thousand. Within twenty years of the founding of Singapore, China was entered, Hong Kong taken over and a row of treaty ports opened up. The foundation of Singapore had secured for Britain the Eastern seas.
Raffles had a long career in the East; where he had been sent by the East India Company which he had entered at the age of fourteen as a clerk. He rose rapidly in the Company and unlike most of his contemporaries devoted his spare time to studying the languages, culture and zoology of the East. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1817, and on his final return from the East founded the London Zoo with Sir Humphrey Davy.
His achievement in developing Singapore was largely unrecognised in his life time; but towards the end of the nineteenth century his reputation grew and the Life of Sir Stamford Raffles appeared in 1897. The author, Demetrius Charles Boulger, drew on material in the India Office Records and received access to all the documents in the possession of the Raffles family.

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