Spaces of occupation: Colonial enclosure and confinement in British Malaya

Abstract

This article examines how the geography of foreign occupation changed in British Malaya between 1895 and 1960. In particular, the article reveals how notions related to enclosure and confinement influenced the introduction of new territorial and spatial categories in British Malaya that enclosed the region's landscape and natural environment while simultaneously concentrating the region's diverse population into racially and economically segregated communities in the Malay interior. This geography, crafted during the early colonial period, came to have particular significance in the period following World War Two. At that time, during the so-called Malayan Emergency, the British administration forcibly resettled hundreds of thousands of Malaya's rural inhabitants into highly regulated and repressive state spaces, known as New Villages, White and Black Areas, and Regrouping Areas. Utilizing a mixture of secondary sources, archival materials, and digital mapping technologies, this article shows how the creation of these new Emergency spaces were not novel but were a continuation of longstanding patterns of land control in the colony that remade Malaya's natural environment on a vast scale.