Reviewed by: Chinese Business in the Making of a Malay State, 1882-1941: Kedah and Penang Neil Khor Chinese Business in the Making of a Malay State, 1882-1941: Kedah and Penang Wu Xiao Aun Singapore: NUS Press, 2010; 271 pp, index. ISBN 978-9971-69-496-8 (Paperback) George Town, the capital city of Penang state in northwestern Malaysia, is dotted with Western-style mansions. Some have been converted into business premises, whilst others have been demolished to make way for high-end condominiums. Only a handful survive in their original state with large lawns, and not many house the original families that built them. They were built to make a statement. Locally known as 'ang mor lau' (literally, the white man's house), these were more social-climbing 'statements' than homes. Seldom revealed is how these families were able to pull together so much wealth to build their houses and what effects their business activities had on the host communities that made them rich. Who were their business partners and how did they contribute to the economic basis of Malaysia's early industries? This book by Wu Xiao Aun, Professor at Peking University and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Chinese Overseas, first published in 2004, is one of the most lucid accounts of the rise of Chinese family businesses, their networks and their activities in Penang and Kedah. In the process of uncovering the workings of family businesses, the central thesis of the book is about the catalytic role these families played in the 'making' of a Malay state. Obviously, there are questions that immediately come to mind. Is the lens of family history, no matter how intricately described, able to shed enough light on the complex process of the emergence of a 'Malay state'? What is the definition of a 'Malay state', especially when applied to the Kedah sultanate, the oldest Malay-Muslim sultanate in Malaysia with roots going back to pre-Islamic times? Whilst it is undeniable that the businesses built up by these Chinese families are inextricably bound up with the emergence of a legislative framework, infrastructure and administrative system that we have come to identify with the 'modern state', is this the whole story? To a certain extent, the book attempts to answer these questions by way of charting the various stages of the evolution of Chinese family businesses roughly corresponding to the various phases of British intervention in Kedah. Whilst the relationship between Chinese traders and the Malay aristocracy predates Western colonialism, the presence of the British in Penang did strengthen the middleman position of the Chinese, especially if the latter were British subjects. Nonetheless, this business relationship was beneficial to the Chinese as well as their Malay aristocratic counterparts. In fact, the basis of the wealth of the Choong family, for example, was based upon the special relationship between the Choong patriarch Choong Cheng Kean and his patron, the Raja Muda of Kedah. [End Page 115] The British not only tolerated, but encouraged, the Chinese to strengthen this intermediary role as they were the buffer between expanding British commercial interests and the 'modernizing' Malay state. In the case of Kedah, there was a further complication as all parties had to take into account the role of Siam(modern Thailand) as Kedah's overlord. There were three sources for the capital the Chinese families accumulated through their business activities, intermediary role and special relationship with the Kedah aristocracy. The most valuable was paddy destined for Chinese-owned rice mills in Penang; secondly, an assortment of revenue farms ranging from the lucrative opium & spirits to gambling & pawn-broking; and finally, tax collection and money lending. Wu's exhaustive use of colonial records and, more importantly, his mining of family records add new dimensions to this often-told tale. We see the same process at work with Yap Ah Loy in Kuala Lumpur, albeit the Yap dynasty did not grow as influential as the Lim, Choong and Phuah families in Kedah. More interestingly, after each of these families made their money in Kedah, they moved to British Penang, using the latter as their base and access point to the global marketplace...
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Aug 26, 2019
Iman Satra Nugraha 
Open Access
