Education, British Colonialism, and a Plural Society in West Malaysia: The Development of Education in the British Settlements along the Straits of Malacca, 1786-1874

Abstract

In the modern history of West Malaysia, people from four of the world's major cultural traditions-Malay, Chinese, Indian, and British-have met, settled, clashed and sought to co-exist. Although the British who came as colonizers have now gone, the complex relationship between the formal educational system of the colonial era and the divisive pluralism of contemporary West Malaysian society continues to attract considerable academic and political attention. (1) Recently published monographic studies on aspects of West Malaysian educational history have focused on the period following British Intervention in the Peninsular Malay States of Perak and Selangor in 1874, and one of these studies explicitly attributes the seeds of separatism in contemporary West Malaysian society to the educational policies implemented under British colonial auspices during the period between 1874 and 1940. (2) Since this article is concerned with an earlier period than the recent monographic studies, it cannot be employed to test or disprove the arguments of these works. The article does, however, examine the origins of West Malaysia's cultural pluralism in the century prior to 1874 and portrays this pluralism as the consequence of a multiplicity of circumstances, not merely British educational policies. It was in 1786 that Britain obtained a colonial toe-hold in West Malaysia, when Francis Light took possession of the island of Penang on