Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles (5 July 1781 – 5 July 1826) was a British statesman who served as the Lieutenant-Governor of the Dutch East Indies between 1811 and 1816, and Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen between 1818 and 1824. He is best known mainly for his founding of modern Singapore and the Straits Settlements.

Raffles was heavily involved in the capture of the Indonesian island of Java from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars. The running of day-to-day operations on Singapore was mostly done by William Farquhar, but Raffles was the one who got all the credit. He also wrote The History of Java (1817).