Lord Jim begins with an evocation of various port cities in the “east.” The first narrator directly cites Bombay, Calcutta, Rangoon, Penang, and Batavia as just a few of the places where the title character worked for short periods of time as a clerk. The reader is thus whisked immediately into a world of colonial relationships, for Britain, the Netherlands, and France all had come to possess both formal and informal control over most of south Asia and southeast Asia by the late nineteenth century. The coastal cities of Bombay and Calcutta in India proper, Rangoon in Lower Burma, and Penang, an island off peninsular Malaysia, all served—along with Singapore—as key nodes in a trading network that enabled the far-flung British empire in the eastern world to move goods and people in an attempt to solidify Britain’s economic and political predominance in the region. These cities, which also functioned symbolically as the dividing line between the greater world outside and the interior regions of ruled territories, became cosmopolitan centers, attracting members of various indigenous groups from inland areas as well as different types and classes of Europeans.
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