An entertaining book on a little known invasion

Last year, when I took a short holiday to Singapore, I bought at Kinokuniya (the terrific bookstore in the Takashimaya building in Orchard Road) this book, Raffles and the British Invasion of Java: 

That's how, as I was recently flying over Indonesia on my way to Hanoi, I was reading about the invasion of one of the islands below, a little over two hundred years ago.  

While I haven't yet finished it, I am finding it a very enjoyable read, mainly due to the wittiness of the author when dealing with an era which now seems so foreign to modern sensibilities.   As it turns out, the story is full of over-the-top, self made and often eccentric men who rose to success on the back of the capitalistic (and nationalistic) turmoil of those days.

I haven't read about Stamford Raffles before, but the author offers this period in his life (administratively heading, at remarkably young age, a sizeable but short-lived military invasion of Java to take it from the Dutch, who were nominally French, due to Napoleon's adventurism in Europe) as something of a counterpoint to the view of him as the wise and high achieving subsequent founder of Singapore.   Apparently, there is strong divide in the historical record between those contemporaries who thought he was great, and those who couldn't stand him.   

It's not written as "dry" history, and sometimes there are flourishes which are perhaps more for putting a picture in your mind, than knowing if they are literally true.   But the surprising thing is that some of the quasi-absurd details do, on further reading, turn out to be clearly true.  (Or, at least, based on historical records, while allowing for autobiographical details to sometimes be invented.)

One of the key things from the book which I had never thought about before was how unhealthy and disease ridden the far flung parts of the empires were for Europeans.  Tim Hannigan notes that this meant that it was a common view that you had to be a pretty desperate type of character to want to voluntarily work there, which explained some of their bad behaviour.   

Anyway, based on what I've read thus far, I recommend it.