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The Colonial Legacy

Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr

in The Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the making of State Power.

In Malaya and India, the British devised a system of indirect rule whereby they relied on local norms, social organizations, and indigenous institutions of authority such as landlords and sultans who ... More

In Malaya and India, the British devised a system of indirect rule whereby they relied on local norms, social organizations, and indigenous institutions of authority such as landlords and sultans who managed the daily lives of their subjects but were controlled by the British through treaties. Both the colonial states used patronage to rule, creating dependencies between local authorities and the colonial state, and also creating economic, legal, and social structures that, along with the patronage, divided the society vertically.Less

Fiscal Dependency in British Malaya, 1890s–1920s

Diana S. Kim

in Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia

This chapter turns to Malaya, another site of British rule, where the monopoly was introduced more than a decade later in 1910, without expressed concerns about indigenous opium consumption or ... More

This chapter turns to Malaya, another site of British rule, where the monopoly was introduced more than a decade later in 1910, without expressed concerns about indigenous opium consumption or sumptuary restrictions. It shows instead how the British colonial state was highly reliant on opium revenue; and the monopoly emerged as local administrators were reversing longstanding acceptance of such dependency as a natural condition of colonial government. Over the course of several decades, taxing opium sales became conceived of as an untenable practice and challenge to fiscal order, culminating in the introduction of an opium revenue reserve fund in 1925 to enable the substitution of opium taxes. Officially, its declared purpose was to reduce reliance on opium taxes for one of the most fiscally opium-dependent territories of Southeast Asia under European rule, by setting aside a large sum of surplus revenue to which a fixed ten percent share of subsequent years' revenue would be added. The fund was first introduced in 1925 for the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Malacca, and Penang, as well as the Malay State of Johor, and extended across the Federated Malay States by 1929.Less

Exile into Bondage? Non‐White Migrants and Settlers

Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine

in Migration and Empire

Much of the functioning of the imperial economy depended on the movement of ‘non‐white’ migrants, especially indentured labourers. Some were recruited in the Pacific islands for work in Queensland, ... More

Much of the functioning of the imperial economy depended on the movement of ‘non‐white’ migrants, especially indentured labourers. Some were recruited in the Pacific islands for work in Queensland, until Australian legislation obliged almost all to leave. Most were from India, and worked especially on plantations in the Caribbean, Fiji, Natal, Malaya, Mauritius, and Ceylon. Many others, also especially from India, were free migrants, responding to domestic pressures and taking up perceived labour and entrepreneurial opportunities as in East and southern Africa. Similarly motivated were Chinese immigrants. Most such people fitted into the dual labour market model, working under white supervision, often temporarily overseas. Large numbers, often maintaining their cultural identities, also settled abroad, though entry and settlement were made difficult until recently by immigration controls erected around white settler societies.Less

The British ‘Malayans’

Tim Harper

in Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas

This chapter focuses on ‘British Malaya’ as Sir Frank Swettenham defined it by the end of the 19th century: the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca, and Singapore, and the Malay States of the ... More

This chapter focuses on ‘British Malaya’ as Sir Frank Swettenham defined it by the end of the 19th century: the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca, and Singapore, and the Malay States of the peninsula, where by the 1900s there were families who had seen three or four generations of service. They tended to stand apart from more recent arrivals, and on such distinctions the public debates of the community increasingly centred. But throughout the colonial period, careers continued to be made on a much wider canvas and some of the most important contributions to the making of the community came from those whose sojourns in the region were relatively brief. Malaya was at once one of the most plural, yet one of the most insidiously hierarchical of British colonial societies. For all its vivid life, ‘British Malaya’ was a strangely elusive and ephemeral affair, and now few traces of the imperial community remain.Less

British Expansion and Rule in South-East Asia

A. J. Stockwell

in The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume III: The Nineteenth Century

British expansion in South-East Asia was shaped by the well-being of India, opportunities in China, and international, particularly Anglo-French, rivalry. From the late eighteenth century, British ... More

British expansion in South-East Asia was shaped by the well-being of India, opportunities in China, and international, particularly Anglo-French, rivalry. From the late eighteenth century, British commerce in South-East Asia became enmeshed with British commerce in India; from the late nineteenth century, the development of agriculture and mining tied South-East Asian economies more closely to industrial and finance capitalism in Britain. The advances into ‘Further India’ during 1786–c.1830 are shown. It specifically addresses maritime South-East Asia and Britain in mainland South-East Asia. In addition, the free trade imperialism and turbulent frontiers in Malaya and Borneo, Burma, and Siam during c.1830–c.1870 are reported. It then considers imperialism and colonialism during c.1870–1914. As the British pursued their interests and extended their power in South-East Asia, the demarcation between those areas falling within Britain's formal Empire and those remaining outside it became indistinct.Less

The Dissolution of the British Empire  

WM. ROGER LOUIS

in The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume IV: The Twentieth Century

This chapter presents a discussion on the dissolution of the British Empire. In particular, it deals with the critical cases of India, Palestine, Burma, Ceylon, Egypt, the Sudan, Malaya, the West ... More

This chapter presents a discussion on the dissolution of the British Empire. In particular, it deals with the critical cases of India, Palestine, Burma, Ceylon, Egypt, the Sudan, Malaya, the West Indies, and tropical Africa. Above all, it explains how the initial phase of disengagement, presided over by Clement Attlee, eventually found its culmination in the era of liquidation dominated by Harold Macmillan. There were three main periods. The first was that of the Labour government, 1945–51; the second that of the Tory governments of Sir Winston Churchill and Sir Anthony Eden, 1951–7; and the third that of Macmillan from 1957. The immediate causes of the end of the British Empire are to be found not only in the nationalist movements in Empire itself but also in the lessons learned from the Algerian revolution and in the danger of Soviet intervention in the Congo. It is shown that the international climate expedited the advance to independence, but the circumstances varied from region to region, from colony to colony.Less

‘The Nation Within’: British India at War 1939–1947: Raleigh Lecture on History

C. A. Bayly

in Proceedings of the British Academy Volume 125, 2003 Lectures

This lecture discusses the remarkable recovery of British India and the Indian army that made the reconquest of Burma and Malaya possible. The Indian army is shown to have displayed a number of ... More

This lecture discusses the remarkable recovery of British India and the Indian army that made the reconquest of Burma and Malaya possible. The Indian army is shown to have displayed a number of strengths during its final years, such as its reorganisation and provision with new equipment. It was also given a higher political profile, and Indian soldiers were given new initiatives by their commanders. The lecture determines that the final campaign of the Indian army helped create the social order of the new nations of the Subcontinent.Less

Chinese Women’s Vegetarian Houses in Singapore: (1954)*

Marjorie Topley

Jean DeBernardi (ed.)

in Cantonese Society in Hong Kong and Singapore: Gender, Religion, Medicine and Money

This chapter describes the Chinese woman's vegetarian house as it is in Singapore at the present time, and attempts to analyse the reasons for its existence. These organizations of vegetarians are ... More

This chapter describes the Chinese woman's vegetarian house as it is in Singapore at the present time, and attempts to analyse the reasons for its existence. These organizations of vegetarians are formed with the object of providing board and lodging for unattached women who worship Buddha. Many of these women are without immediate family connections in Malaya, are unmarried and have nobody to care for them and nowhere else to go in their old age. The majority of these houses are formed to meet the needs of Chinese immigrant women workers. In addition, there are those which have grown up to cater for the needs of local born women; those who have no wish to marry, or who are lonely widows with nobody to support them, or, for various reasons, prefer not to inflict themselves on their relatives and friends.Less

The Legal Context and Counter-insurgency by Committee

David French

in The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945-1967

The British threw a veneer of legality over their operations by avoiding imposing martial law and instead employing emergency powers regulations to create a legal framework within which their ... More

The British threw a veneer of legality over their operations by avoiding imposing martial law and instead employing emergency powers regulations to create a legal framework within which their security forces operated. The meaning of the concept of ‘minimum necessary force’ precluded the British from employing genocidal methods against their opponents, but did permit them to employ a very high degree of often lethal force. In the absence of martial law, the civil administration and police were not subordinated to the army, and so the British they had to develop a form of machinery to enable them to coordinate the activities of the different branches of government. The result was counter-insurgency by committee.Less

Ratification and its Consequences

A. W. BRIAN SIMPSON

in Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention

This chapter describes the rejection of the proposal by Gladwyn Jebb that the UK should now take no further part in the United Nations negotiations, and describes the US change of policy, provoked by ... More

This chapter describes the rejection of the proposal by Gladwyn Jebb that the UK should now take no further part in the United Nations negotiations, and describes the US change of policy, provoked by the proposed Bricker amendment to the US constitution, which led the US to give up its leading role in human rights protection. It described the decision to extend the European Convention, but not its First Protocol, to the colonial empire, at a time when there had arisen a number of colonial insurrections, most notably in Malaya, Cyprus, and Kenya, where its provisions could not be fully implemented. It gives an account of the processes whereby, as colonies became independent, bills of rights came to be incorporated in some of their constitutions, dealing in particular with the Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria and Malaya, and with the Radcliffe proposals for Cyprus.Less

What colonial legacy?: The Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (House of Language) and Malaysia’s cultural decolonization

Rachel Leow

in Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational productions and practices, 1945-70

This essay argues that an examination of the cultural effects of decolonisation can yield a clearer appreciation of the combined role of both coloniser and colonised in the making of the postcolonial ... More

This essay argues that an examination of the cultural effects of decolonisation can yield a clearer appreciation of the combined role of both coloniser and colonised in the making of the postcolonial order. Taking an approach informed by Michel Foucault, Jean-François Bayart and Romain Bertrand, it shows that the ethnic tensions which erupted over questions of national language planning, multilingualism, and culture in postcolonial Malaya, and persist through to the present, cannot be explained away as a simple “colonial legacy” inflicted by British divide-and-rule policies. They must also be recognised as the result of a particular hegemonic configuration, produced and maintained through the agency of postcolonial subjects themselves.Less

Discourses of Difference:: Isabella Bird, Emily Innes, and Florence Caddy

Eddie Tay

in Colony, Nation, and Globalisation: Not at Home in Singaporean and Malaysian Literature

This chapter examines representations of Malaya in the writings of Isabella Bird, Emily Innes, and Florence Caddy, British writers who were in Malaya for different periods of time between 1879 and ... More

This chapter examines representations of Malaya in the writings of Isabella Bird, Emily Innes, and Florence Caddy, British writers who were in Malaya for different periods of time between 1879 and 1888. It provides a reading of their works as discourses of differences that reinforce colonialist attitudes about Malaya and its people. It suggests that the works of these women are a response to the condition of being not-at-home in that there is an attempt to create through their writings an environment that is hospitable to the colonial enterprise, even if the voices are different.Less

The Exhaustion of Colonial Romance: W. Somerset Maugham and Anthony Burgess

Eddie Tay

in Colony, Nation, and Globalisation: Not at Home in Singaporean and Malaysian Literature

This chapter examines representations of Englishness and the British Empire in the writings of W. Somerset Maugham and Anthony Burgess. It suggests that Maugham's representation of Europeans in ... More

This chapter examines representations of Englishness and the British Empire in the writings of W. Somerset Maugham and Anthony Burgess. It suggests that Maugham's representation of Europeans in Malaya is troubled by a reservation expressed in the work as to the authority of Englishness. Burgess, on the other hand, harbours an anxiety as to the role of the Englishman in the tropics. Taken together, the works of these two authors depict a Malaya that is gradually becoming socially and politically uninhabitable to its colonial occupants.Less

‘There is no way out but through’:: Lee Kok Liang and the Malayan Nation

Eddie Tay

in Colony, Nation, and Globalisation: Not at Home in Singaporean and Malaysian Literature

This chapter examines the postcolonial project of “writing back” against metropolitan representations of Malaya as evidenced in the works of Lee Kok Kiang. It discusses Lee's disenchantment with ... More

This chapter examines the postcolonial project of “writing back” against metropolitan representations of Malaya as evidenced in the works of Lee Kok Kiang. It discusses Lee's disenchantment with London and his reclamation of Malaya as his home. It suggests that though Lee was able to return to a vision of Malaya as home and nation, subsequent political events which led to the emergence of Malaysia's ethnic nationalism have come to problematize this vision.Less

The Post-Diasporic Imagination: The Novels of K. S. Maniam

Eddie Tay

in Colony, Nation, and Globalisation: Not at Home in Singaporean and Malaysian Literature

This chapter examines the concept of post-diasporic experience in the works of K. S. Maniam, a Malaysian novelist and a third-generation descendent of South Asian migrants who worked as indentured ... More

This chapter examines the concept of post-diasporic experience in the works of K. S. Maniam, a Malaysian novelist and a third-generation descendent of South Asian migrants who worked as indentured labourers in the plantation estates of British Malaya. It describes Maniam's articulation of a post-diasporic consciousness against the ethnic nationalism expressed in the New Economic Policy. It suggests that his writings do not foreground a diasporic condition per se but rather a struggle to recover the diasporic condition so as to interrogate the socio-political space of the nation.Less

Discourses of Difference: The Malaya of Isabella Bird, Emily Innes and Florence Caddy

Tay Eddie

in Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and Southeast Asia

This chapter explores both resemblances and divergences within Isabella Bird's The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (1883), Emily Innes' The Chersonese with the Gilding Off (1885), and Florence ... More

This chapter explores both resemblances and divergences within Isabella Bird's The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (1883), Emily Innes' The Chersonese with the Gilding Off (1885), and Florence Caddy's To Siam and Malaya in the Duke of Sutherland's Yacht “Sans Peur” (1889). These are narratives written by three very different women who were in Malaya under varied circumstances. It specifically analyzes the extent to which their works conform to the idea that women's travel writings might be considered as constituting “discourses of difference”. It also makes the point that, apart from gender, there are other internal distinctions to be made within the “discourses of difference”. These include differences in terms of class, marital status and the particular circumstances that brought these women to Malaya. In general, the three accounts of British presence in Malaya reveal the variety of ways in which colonialism is articulated by women writers who were in Malaya between 1879 and 1888.Less

A Welcoming Soil: Isamic Humoralism on the Malay Peninsula

Charles Leslie and Allan Young

in Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge

This chapter explores Islamic humoralism on the Malay Peninsula. Although Islam was successfully implanted in Malaya, and Islamic concepts are used by Malays to interpret and reinterpret empirical ... More

This chapter explores Islamic humoralism on the Malay Peninsula. Although Islam was successfully implanted in Malaya, and Islamic concepts are used by Malays to interpret and reinterpret empirical realities, the pre-Islamic aboriginal view of the workings of the cosmos, and the positive valence of coolness in the universe and its human microcosm, still fundamental to Malay thought, have radically altered the received theories of Islamic humoralism. Malaya proved a remarkably receptive soil for Islamic religion and medical theories. Their humoral theory provided Islamicized Malays with a new grammar with which to organize ideas about humanity and the universe. Medieval Greek-Arabic humoral theories concerning foods, medicines, and diseases whose etiology stems from the natural world appear in simplified but otherwise virtually unchanged form in contemporary rural Malaysia.Less

‘We Hope to Raise the Bendera Stambul’: British Forward Movement and the Caliphate on the Malay Peninsula

Amrita Malhi

in From Anatolia to Aceh: Ottomans, Turks, and Southeast Asia

In the decades between the 1870s and the 1920s, groups of Malay Muslims circulated symbols of the Ottoman Caliphate in gestures of defiance against British colonial intervention on the Malay ... More

In the decades between the 1870s and the 1920s, groups of Malay Muslims circulated symbols of the Ottoman Caliphate in gestures of defiance against British colonial intervention on the Malay peninsula. This was the period of ‘forward movement’, in which Britain progressively colonised successive Malay States, and it roughly coincided with the European confrontations which produced the First World War, Ottoman collapse, and the abolition of the Caliphate. At peninsular and global scales, these developments advanced the geo-body as the only legitimate means by which to organise territory. As a result, the Muslim world located around the Indian Ocean was decisively divided into a series of discrete, contiguous states, fragmenting the ummah, its latent political community. Malayan invocations of the Caliphate were local responses to this global reorganisation, of which peninsular colonisation formed an important and disruptive part.Less