what kind of personality did stamford raffles have?

Question

i need it for comparison of how people from his country thought of him as and how did singaporean at that time view him as.

Answer 1

Foreword
For almost two hundred years, specialists on the Malay World have been intrigued by the life and personality of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826). By today’s standards, he died at a relatively young age, but the years he spent in Java, Sumatra and Singapore have cast a long shadow over the region’s history. While Raffles is most known as an administrator of Java during the Napoleonic Wars and as Singapore’s ‘founder’, his scholarly works and essays are now standard citations, even when their
assumptions and conclusions are disputed. Since Demetrius Boulger completed his lengthy study of Raffles in 1897, there has been a steady stream of academic and popular publications dealing with what one authority has called an ‘enigmatic’ figure, to the extent that he even has his own bibliography! It is therefore hard to believe that publishing houses in London in the early 1880s were dubious about the feasibility of a Raffles biography, despite the iconographic status he had by then attained in Singapore. Indeed, when unveiling a statue of Raffles in 1887, the
Governor of the Straits Settlements, Sir Frederick Weld, described him as “one of England’s greatest sons”.
It is hardly surprising that this outsized individual has generated
controversy, particularly in terms of his own ambitions and his attitude towards indigenous societies. Perhaps the most effusive praise came from the pen of Munshi Abdullah, Raffles’ scribe and to whom Raffles could do no wrong; and at the other end of the spectrum, Syed Hussein Alatas, writing in 1971, argued that Raffles was at best an “enthusiastic empire builder” rather than the “humanitarian reformer” depicted by British colonialists. Nevertheless, any consideration of such judgements must
be historically contextualised, for it is inevitable that views advanced by individual writers reflect the issues and concerns of the times in which they live. In this sense Rethinking Raffles is very much a book of the early twenty-first century. Khairudin Aljunied himself sets the stage in his Preface, where he notes that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the religious practices attributed to an individual or a society seemed to
have reverted to “old modes” of expression, which have now assumed new significances and implications. At the same time, it is evident that influential spokespeople and their opinions are always products of specific environments that can themselves be historically located and investigated.
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