IT was just as extensive as it suited the personal interest of the Resident to make it;* but on a different system it may be contemplated, that its importance will not fall short of that which is now attached to China. The restrictions which exist do not arise so much from the limitations and institutions of the Japanese, as from the nature and constitution of the Dutch factory:* the degraded state of which would appear to have sunk the Dutch character very low in estimation.
The Japanese are a highly polished people, considerably advanced in science, highly inquisitive and full of penetration. There seems no reason to doubt the estimate of the population (twenty-five millions); nor the high character given of the country, and of the people, by the early voyagers; and on the score of religion and its prejudices, on which so much has been industriously circulated by the Dutch,* they are found to be simple and inoffensive.
abridged
A polite way of saying that hitherto trade with Japan had been frustrated by the limited imagination of the British Residents at Bencoolen, on the otherwise Dutch-controlled island of Sumatra. Bencoolen, today Bengkulu in Indonesia, was a British Residency from 1785 to 1825; Raffles became Lieutenant-Governor there in 1818, and served until 1824.
In this context, ‘factory’ means a warehouse, not a place of mass production, though factories in the modern sense did now exist thanks to Richard Arkwright.
Raffles suspected that the Dutch cynically circulated discouraging reports of Japan to put their trade rivals off, but he also felt that the slovenly way the Dutch did business there made the Japanese think ill of all Europeans. Raffles was also influenced by his pride in England’s moves towards the abolition of the slave trade, which he feared the Dutch would reverse; in fact they did not, and in a letter to William Wilberforce in 1819 Raffles admitted that he was sometimes unfair to the Dutch.