A Political Future for British Malaya

Abstract

1RITISH INTEREST IN the Malay Peninsula originated in commerce. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the East India Company established a trading station at Penang: Stamford Raffles, of the ablest of its servants, early in the nineteenth, founded, at the southernmost point of Asia, the free port of Singapore. He had strong opposition to overcome from home but persevered with his new settlement, foreseeing that one free port in these seas must rapidly attract trade from the whole of the Southwest Pacific area and should provide the Company with an entrepot of unique value. Singapore and Penang, with Malacca, much reduced in importance from its ancient state, constituted the three which, after half a century of control from Calcutta, attained the independent status of a Crown Colony in 1867. As the three Straits Settlements progressed in wealth and grew in population (predominantly immigrant Chinese) their merchants developed a thriving trade with the small native ports of the Peninsula and the surrounding islands in timber, rattans, and other jungle produce: later in agricultural produce such as fruit, spices, tapioca and coconuts. Their Governors restricted their contacts with the Malay Rajahs within narrow limits, being apprehensive of entanglements in their private quarrels, which would be frowned on by higher authority. But the Malays being a sea-faring people and piracy being a national activity, occasional interventions were inevitable. Major commitments were avoided until 1874; then a treaty was entered into with the Perak chiefs to provide for the better government of that State whose rich deposits of tin had increasingly made it the scene of friction and ultimately of armed conflict between rival factions of Chinese miners-disputes which had begun to threaten the peaceful administration of the northern Settlement of Penang. This Pangkor Treaty proved to be the beginning of British Protection throughout the Peninsula, south of the Siamese States. In succession Selangor, Negri Sembilan, and Pahang followed