British Malaya Research Articles

Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (Book review)

Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (Book review)

The movie-struck girl in British Malaya, 1919–1937

ABSTRACT This article outlines some of the key cultural shifts that influenced moviegoing for girls and women in British Malaya. To reconstruct the patterns of film exhibition during the silent and early sound era, it draws on archival resources, including American trade press, local popular press, and oral interviews with elderly Singaporeans; these were conducted in the 1980s, by the Singapore National Archives, when spectators who experienced silent moviegoing were still alive. Methodologically, this work draws on feminist film scholarship that focuses on the socio-cultural role of cinematic consumption at a defined, historical moment. The article contextualises cinemagoing within a wider framework of spatial geographies under colonial rule. It also interrogates the popularity of Hollywood on the national screens, and the related, gendered anxieties on moviegoing expressed across the Malayan public sphere.

Exceptions to the Abolition of Chinese Indenture: Chinese workers on rubber estates in Interwar British Malaya

ABSTRACT In a 1931 report investigating the status of labourers in British colonies, the Colonial Office declared that the system of indenture had been abolished across Malaya. This claim belied the realities of labour practices on the ground. On plantations, mines and in colonial homes, Chinese workers continued to labour under formal indenture and to endure indenture-like practices well into 1930s. This article explores the slow decline of Chinese indenture in Malaya, concentrating on the rubber industry in the Unfederated Malay State of Kelantan during the interwar years. The Chinese migrant workers that were brought to Kelantan in that era signed contracts for one year with the terms of the contract enforced by colonial administrators. These workers endured poor working conditions and high death rates. Those that sought to escape faced criminal conviction and punishments including fines and incarnation. By showing the continuation of indenture in Kelantan, this article challenges the assumption made by historians that Chinese indenture had ended globally by the early 1920s. It also develops new understandings of the fragmentary and complex process of abolition.

A history of mental illness among women in the Straits Settlements in the nineteenth century.

The Straits Settlements, a collective colony under the administration of British Malaya, was a very unhealthy area in the early years of the nineteenth century. One of the most common sicknesses was mental illness, which could not be cured by medicines. The number of women suffering from mental illness was higher than in men, and it was found that there were many internal and external causes. The increasing number of women patients affected the role of mental hospitals, which were not only for treatment purposes, but also for business. This study will discuss the factors causing women to suffer from mental illness, and the role of the asylum for women mental patients in the nineteenth century.

The “Evil Spectators?”

Abstract This article rethinks the relationship between opium and empire in twentieth-century Asia. A rich scholarship focuses on the success of anti-opium activists, whose moral crusades gave birth to today’s global drug control regimes. By contrast, I center attention on the lesser-known pro-opium forces, demonstrating how “bad” actors, recognized now as apologists for a dangerous drug, were once essential stakeholders in imperial rule. This article traces the interconnected lives of actors that favored continuing the drug’s legal commerce across Southeast Asia: the merchants, bankers, agents of shipping firms, insurance agencies and warehousing companies as well as employees of colonial industries and governments that sustained opium supply chains from India to British Malaya and French Indochina into the 1930s. Hardly a coherent coalition of profit-seeking actors, these pro-opium forces represented situational allies with linked fates despite diverse opinions, fragmented interests, and ambivalent positions toward their own opium-entangled practices. Understanding their dispersed nature gives scholars reason to revisit the imperial origins of global drug control, while underscoring Southeast Asia’s importance for understanding global histories of drugs and international relations.

‘Making Manly Men’: Manufacturing Boyhood in the Great Outdoors and the Boy Scout Movement in British Malaya (1910–1966)

ABSTRACT In British Malaya, Scouting promoted the virtues of the Great Outdoors and opened up space for alternative views of boyhood for indigenous boys. Although Malayan boys were no strangers to being out-of-doors prior to the movement’s introduction, Scouting established an educational framework in which outdoor learning gained traction and where the Great Outdoors came to be identified as an ideal environment for cultivating a wholesome, active, and healthy boyhood. In an era where social exchanges between colonial and colonised boys were limited, Scout activities in the open-air, notably camping and hiking, fostered homosocial bonds between boys of diverse ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds in their ‘boys-only world’. Outdoor activities also nurtured the ideal of an insouciant, yet physically demanding and vigorous boyhood, where a boy’s ‘innate gang-spirit’ and ‘tendency for mischief’ were to be encouraged. In that endeavour, the Great Outdoors was conceptualised and extoled by (adult) Scoutmasters as a desirable substitute for a boy’s very own home. By harnessing newspaper sources, Scout literature, and the oral histories of former Malayan Scouts, this paper seeks to demonstrate how Scouting shaped and regulated cultural representations and understandings of the ‘Great Outdoors’ for boys’ education during the colonial era into the post-colonial present.

Foothills Estate was a lovely place

This photo essay chronicles the life of my grandfather, C. Rajah, who travelled from India to British Malaya in or around 1920. He eventually made his home in a rubber estate in the north of the Malay peninsula called Foothills Estate, Kulim. There, he grew his family and built a life that was, by all accounts, a good one. The story I tell is based on tales I heard about him and Foothills Estate, documents in my possession and some items I inherited. It is an attempt to counter the stereotype in modern Malaysia that those who come from the estates are to be regarded as ‘uncultured, illiterate and poor’.

An Ocean Apart: Meteorology and the Elusive Observatories of British Malaya

An Ocean Apart: Meteorology and the Elusive Observatories of British Malaya

Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya by Arunima Datta (review)

Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya by Arunima Datta (review)

Book Review: Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya

Book Review: Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya

A British Labor Settlement Experiment and the Socioeconomic Experience of the Chuah Tamil Settlement in British Malaya

AbstractWe explore the socioeconomic experience of a group of south Indian Tamil laborers and their families who established the Chuah Tamil agricultural settlement in British Malaya during the Great Depression. These were laborers who, though unemployed, refused to be repatriated to south India. Progressing from subsistence farming to small-scale agricultural production, their settlement evolved into an organized, socioeconomic system. It was also a critical field experiment for the British to assess the viability of a self-generating labor pool. In this article, we examine the social history of the settlers and the development of the Chuah Tamil colony within the context of Britain's overarching desire to create a labor source. Our study contributes to the reconciliation of microsocial history and colonialism, as well as to global labor history more broadly, by situating the settlers’ experience and the settlement itself in relation to historical contemporaries.

Revisiting British Malaya's Era: An Intriguing Historical Legal Analysis of Land Administration and Colonial Forestry

The land and forest administration system in Malaysia faces a complexity bias due to the misinterpretation of rules and legislation, leading to increased disputes. The reliance on British law for matters like land ownership amplifies this issue, and the intricacies of static and dynamic arrangements further compound the complexity. Previously, Malay rural land rights were based on usufructuary principles, but the colonial land alienation policy redefined unalienated land, land reserved for public purposes, and reserved forests as State Land. This study seeks to comprehensively review and analyse legal rules, cases, statutes, and regulations to understand ancient land law practices and the influence of British colonial land law on land administration. Conducted in Peninsular Malaysia, the study focuses on primary documents, cases, and critical analyses from three states: Perak, Penang, and Kelantan. The findings of the study highlight the contentious nature of land rights and autonomy in utilizing natural resources in Malaysia. The country inherits both formal and informal land tenure systems rooted in customary law, making dispute resolution challenging. The principal characteristic of ancient land law is based on a hypothetical model of the ancient customary land tenure system, encompassing different eras, missions, and principles. Significantly, the study reveals a direct and strong connection between colonial land law and current land law practices in the respective states. Additionally, Malaysia's land law has been influenced by Islamic law (Syariah) to some extent and blended with other ancient customary laws before the introduction of Torren in 1897.

DENYING AND DEFLECTING THE RACISM OF EMPIRE: THE TROPE OF THE ‘MALEVOLENT NATIVE’ IN THE WRITINGS OF THE COLONIAL FUNCTIONARY AND AUTHOR HUGH CLIFFORD

Hugh Charles Clifford (1866-1941) was a colonial functionary who served in various capacities in British Malaya, notably in the kingdom of Pahang (as colonial agent, 1887-1888; Superintendent (1889) and Resident (1896-1900, 1901-1903). Apart from his duties as a colonial administrator, Clifford was also the author of numerous works of fiction that were set in the kingdom and was thus an active contributor to the colonial imaginary. This paper looks at the fictional works of Hugh Clifford. It focuses on one specific theme that recurs repeatedly in several of his works, which is the notion that the aboriginal and other Asiatic communities of the Malay Peninsula were living under the overlordship of the Malays. That a British colonial functionary like Clifford could have foregrounded such a theme while seemingly unaware of his role and subject-position as a functionary of the British Empire is telling in many respects. In many ways, the fictional works of Clifford can be read as a systematic and sustained effort to deny and deflect the racism at the heart of racialized colonial capitalism then, which served as the basis of British imperial rule across Asia and Africa.

Perceptions and Land Law Influences: Unravelling Colonial Land Law and Forest Management Policies During British Malaya Era

Perceptions and Land Law Influences: Unravelling Colonial Land Law and Forest Management Policies During British Malaya Era

Colin Buchanan Radford (1931–2022)

Colin Buchanan Radford was raised by his grandparents in a modest Nottingham household. His love for French, drama, and performance was instilled by a housemaster at the school where he was educated from the age of seven, and where he became a keen cricketer and county shot-putter. He was commissioned into the Royal Artillery, and was stationed in what was known then as British Malaya. His PhD thesis, on ‘The Role of Woman in Twentieth-Century French Drama’, was completed in 1970 at Queen’s University Belfast, and he delivered his inaugural lecture, ‘A Dramatist in Search of His Public’, on Armand Salacrou, in QUB in 1975. He published a number of pieces on French theatre, and co-authored, with Christopher Shorley and Mary Hossain, Signposts to French Literature (London: Hutchinson, 1988), a wide-ranging introduction to the canonical authors of French literature, and a staple of the A-level classroom for many years. Colleagues in Queen’s remember Colin first and foremost for the major part he played in shaping French studies at Queen’s in the 1970s and 1980s, as Professor and Head of the Department of French, as Head of the newly formed School of Modern Languages in the early 1990s, and as Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He was a specialist in French drama, ahead of his time in examining the role and representation of women in French theatre, and also a pioneer in teaching twentieth-century and, in some cases, living authors. For Colin, French drama was not just an academic pursuit: he was synonymous with, and widely remembered for, the ‘French play’ — produced in the Group Theatre, Belfast, and elsewhere. He spearheaded the production of plays by experimental writers such as Jean Anouilh, Jean Cocteau, and Eugène Ionesco. He is particularly fondly remembered as an inspiring director who instinctively understood how theatre worked: he was able to nurture the talents of even reserved students, and knew how to captivate an audience confronted with challenging, and even uncomfortable, dramatic materials.

“Back to the Jungle”: Investigating Rats, Grass, Scrub Typhus, and Plantations in Malaya, 1924 – 1974

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine epidemiological research into scrub typhus in British Malaya between 1924 and 1974. Interwar research, I show, explained the incidence of the disease through conjunctions of rats, mites, plantations, lalang grass, and “jungle.” In the process, interwar researchers bridged a novel scientific vocabulary centering on disease “reservoirs” with older suspicions of plantations enabling “pests,” as well as with a later, explicitly ecological understanding of infectious disease. In exploring this history I thereby help to re-historicize the emergence of ecological notions of disease reservoirs, whilst also pushing at the limit-points of influential notions of “tropicality.”

Rural social engineering: reordering the countryside in decolonising India and Malaysia (1947–60)

Abstract In an interview in the early 1980s, Michel Foucault predicated that, from the eighteenth century on, modern government rationality has essentially been a form of urban planning. This article challenges this argument. It discusses the formation of rural social engineering, that is, the state-led efforts to design new men and new social orders outside the cities through plans, during decolonisation in Asia. Based on the comparative study of India after Partition (1947) and British Malaya during the counter-insurgency war (1948–60), the argument is that we can understand rural social engineering particularly in the 1950s less as a consequence of colonial inheritance or international change but as the result of how decolonisation unfolded including its patterns of violence, social conflict, and migration. As such, rural social engineering constituted a central element in the postcolonial ‘art of the government of man’.

The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of Labor

The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of Labor

Fishes of Empire: Imperialism and ichthyological introductions in British Malaya, 1923–42

The cultural, technological, and socioeconomic dimensions of exotic animal introductions into the Malayan Peninsula have largely escaped the notice of scholars of British Malaya. At the same time, the scientific literature on exotic ichthyological introductions into Malaya has framed such introductions in largely biological terms. Biological factors alone, however, cannot explain the introduction and cultivation of exotic (sometimes temperate) fishes in tropical Malayan waters. Between 1923 and 1942, the Fisheries Department of the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States experimented with introducing three categories of exotic fishes into the Malayan Peninsula. These fishes—the sepat siam, Chinese carp and English trout—were reared and released into demographic and geographical landscapes profoundly shaped by imperial power. These animals were thus ‘fishes of Empire’, their introduction and cultivation in the Malayan Peninsula significantly influenced by the scientific, socioeconomic, technological, and cultural contexts of the British Empire. Studying the places, peoples, and technologies that shaped (and were in turn shaped by) these fishes of Empire offers insights into the intersections of imperial power, colonial science, and environmental history.

Surplus Transfers from British Colonial Malaya

Martin Khor’s 1983 book on Malaysian economic dependence provided the first comprehensive estimates of the ‘colonial surplus’ from British Malaya. Khor described how Great Britain secured this from the colonial Malayan economy and estimated various types of surplus extracted via different means. Unsurprisingly, super-profits for privileged foreign capital owners are well known. The terms of trade have been important determinants of the colonial trade surplus. Financial surpluses are distinguished by those secured through the colonial currency board system, foreign commercial banks and colonial public finances, involving fiscal policy. The wealthy Malayan colony transferred funds to London at very low interest rates, but borrowed from British banks at exorbitant rates, besides paying high transactions charges. Colonial managerial privilege was also significant. Such surplus transfers were enabled by various colonial arrangements. Thus, colonial Malaya lost significant financial resources. Only some have changed in the post-colonial era, sometimes rather slowly. JEL Codes: B27, N15