Reply to “Rice Cultivation and the Ethnic Division of Labour,” by Paul H. Kratoska

Abstract

In Kratoska's article (CSSH, 24:2, April 1982, 280-314) I was identified as one of several scholars who have contributed to helping influence a model of British colonial pursuance of a policy of ethnic division of labour that several particulars . . . is wrong, and taken as a whole . . . oversimplifies and seriously distorts the situation in colonial (p. 280). While this is not the place for a full rebuttal of Kratoska's contrary arguments (my response will be contained in Kajian Malaysia 11:2, Dec. 1984 [Journal of Malaysian Studies]), I must reply here to the part of his article in which he implies I have been guilty of creating the false impression that government discouragement of non-Malay padi cultivation was a policy that was in effect not only in the 1930s but also throughout the earlier period of British rule (p. 281). That this is patently untrue is clear to anyone, including Kratoska, who has read my two books, Origins of a Colonial Economy: Land and Agriculture in Perak, 1874-1897 (Penang: Universiti Sains Malaysia Press, 1975) and Peasants and their Agricultural Economy in Colonial Malaya 1874-1941 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1977). In the book that Kratoska cites and where I am made out as assuming this erroneous policy, I had pointed out as early as in the introductory chapter dealing with the Malay States before 1895 that the British were concerned to attract nonMalay capital and labour into rice farming. An excerpt summarising what I described as a British dual agriculture concept for Malaya, that is, the development of plantation agriculture especially by European capitalists and peasant agriculture by local and immigrant labour, will bear this out.