It should be remembered that the British did not enter Asia to colonise - not initially at least. The vehicle for the British entry into Asia was the British East India Company, with its main motive to make money. (Of course, there were many young Britons who came to the region for a wide variety of personal reasons: some to study the great ancient civilisations of Asia, many to civilise and Christianise, and most probably for personal profit. But that's another story)
Migration before the British
Ancient Melaka was a very cosmopolitan city due to the open and tolerant policies of the sultans. Aware that the wealth of Melaka depended on its position in the Straits of Melaka as a trading conduit between India & the West on the one hand and China & the South-East Asian islands on the other, the sultans opened the city to whoever was willing to contribute by trade or skill. At its peak, Melaka had a population of 200,000 and Tome Pires who was in Melaka at the beginning of the Portuguese occupation wrote of 61 communities speaking 84 languages. As long as you have something to contribute and do not cause trouble to the Sultan, you are welcomed in Melaka.
This policy that lasted over a century until the fall of Melaka to the Portuguese and continued to shape the thinking of successor sultanates in the Peninsular. Malay sultans from the very beginning had no issue with allowing immigrants to settle, bringing trade and technology with them, and as a result by 1870, Chinese was estimated to be a majority in Perak and Selangor. Thus, when the British later arrived and seek to develop these states by immigration of overseas labour, the Malay sultans had no objections as it was merely a continuation of their policies.
It should be noted that Malay sultans were particularly open to Chinese immigration for two reasons. The Chinese have been in Southeast Asia for over a millennium before the foundation of Melaka. (The first documented Sabahan was a 14th century Chinese, and his name is commemorated in a road in Brunei: it is an interesting story but one that I will tell you in a later article.) Chinese who became Malays (see my first article of this series on how this is possible) were therefore not uncommon and the possibility that Hang Tuah, that icon of Malay identity, could have Chinese ancestry is only perplexing if seen through modern eyes.
Secondly, following the voyages of Cheng Ho in the 15th century, Melaka obtained the protection of Ming China. In particular, attacks by the Majapahit Empire and one from Vietnam were forestalled by the intervention of the Emperor or his court and thus, Chinese protection played no small role in the survival of the Malay state. It has become a practice of successive Malay governments, sultanates and Malaysian, to be friendly with Chinese governments, dynastic and communist. To this day, the Malaysian government continued to have strong relationship with the Chinese government, more than any others in south Asia: it was the first in South East Asia to establish diplomatic relationship with Communist China and was also very dependent on Chinese funding until 2018 to cover certain shortfalls.
Immigration under the British
Like any other commercial enterprise, the Company makes commercial profit by maximising income at the lowest cost. Like any other commercial enterprise, therefore, the Company avoided investing effort, personnel or treasure unless they absolutely they had to. The strategy was then to rely on armies or even, very often, gangs of armed men that were available locally to advance their commercial goals. Very much like corporate lobbying today, political control was exerted only to protect their business interests, and not for political gain in itself. It became an efficient way for the Company domination to control a few strategic trading ports directly and protect them by entering into treaties with the local hinterland.
Most of these agreements retain the existing political systems in those states so as to enable the local polity to to run the country themselves as long as he they relied on British military power. Thus was born the protectorate system, where local sultans retain administrative control over their internal affairs but relied on the British for defence and consequently foreign policy.
With the dissolution of the British East India Company and the assumption of their responsibilities by the British crown, and defence and foreign policy became direct responsibilities of the British colonial office. The British soon took over more of the internal administration of the states in their bid to develop them. Initially, it was to build the infrastructure to better exploit the economy but later, social policies starting with health and education to support the developing economy also became the focus. Eventually, social laws such as abolishment of slavery were also instituted in line with British social values. However the agreement with the sultans provide that always Malay customs and Islam remains the responsibility of the sultans.
Chinese and Indian communities
British economic interest was centred upon tin mining and rubber, with the labour force provided by importing Chinese and Indian labourers respectively. Most Chinese arrived in Malaya to escape wars and famine common in China in the late 19th century. As such, Chinese migration very much driven by the Chinese themselves and upon arrival in Malaya, Chinese migrant workers relied more on the social and welfare system of the Chinese clan house, where they were housed and fed until they could find work in Chinese-owned mines or in the communities that sprung up around the mines.
While Chinese settlers have been in South East Asia for some two thousand years as traders to ply the seaborne Silk Road and as fishermen to harvest the rich marine resources (and quite a few pirates to prey on passing seafarers), official Chinese settlements were only set up in Borneo and Malacca under the Yuan and Ming dynasties respectively. Most overseas Chinese however are descended from migrants who arrived from the early 19th century. Despite common understanding, Chinese migration into Peninsular Malaya predated the arrival of British administrators. They were invited by Malay rulers to mine tin, very much in demand after the invention of canning food early in the century. Individual Malay rulers found the Chinese and their protection gangs useful to supplement their warriors in the succession disputes that often erupt. One such dispute led to a full scale civil war in the 1860s in Perak, the Larut Wars.
Still, it is not that the British were not involved in Chinese migration. They did control the tin trade that created the demand for Chinese labour. The mines continue to remain under Chinese ownership and paid paid taxes to independent local sultans. It was a commercial arrangement for the British. The Larut Wars changed all that. The conflict and the instability wrought by the aggressive armed Chinese gangs convinced the British that more direct intervention was needed to protect their commercial tin interests. This led to the Pangkor Agreement of 1874, which appointed British Residents to 'advise' the Sultan of Perak. While we of course do not have much hard statistics before the arrival of the British administration, it was estimated that there was so much Chinese migration under the Malay sultans that Chinese formed a majority of the population in Perak and Selangor by the time of the British takeover.
Chinese communities were built and funded by entrepreneurs who have made their fortunes from the communities and invested their profits back into the community, and also largely lived under the protection of organised gangs, whom the British co-opted to manage the internal affairs of the Chinese communities. As such, the social systems that eventually emerged, being financially and administratively independent of the British, were also Chinese in nature. The education system, for instance, was the Chinese education system transplanted to a British Malaya. My mother attended a pre-war Chinese primary school where she learnt Chinese history and geography, with no subjects from the British or Malay curricula.
The Indians, largely Tamils, on the other hand brought over to Malaya by the British to work in British-owned rubber estates as well as to build and man the railroads. The social systems were really rudimentary and the minimum necessary to function in the commercially-minded plantations. Smaller numbers of Keralans, Telugus and Sikhs (by the way, Sikhs are Punjabis, and should never be called Bengalis, who hail from Bengal, now split between West Bengal in India and Bangladesh - yes, the Bangladeshis are the true Bengalis) from the much vaunted British India bureaucracy. were brought over to man the lower levels of the civil services, largely in the Federated Malay States and Johor. The Indians therefore relied much on the British plantation owners or the colonial office and so never developed a social system as advanced as the Chinese.
Malay-Chinese relationships
It was always understood by the Malay sultans, the British and by the migrants themselves that the arrangement was only temporary, at least understood that way initially. Indian workers would be returned to India to be replaced by fresh ones, much like the way we treat Bangladeshis today. The Chinese themselves expected to return to China with their fortunes once peace prevail in their home villages. However neither happened, and women quickly followed the men to Malaya as workers and as wives and, thus, communities started to take root.
Chinese bosses, in particular, built neighbourhoods, or even complete towns, for their workers, complete with education, healthcare and other social systems, and the accompanying entertainment, retail and other supporting trades. Still, the Chinese communities in the Malay states, however had little interaction with local Malays in their little extension of the Chinese homeland. Political affiliation still meant Chinese politics rather than Malayan with Sun Yat Sun, and later the Kuomintang deriving much funding from wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs in Malaya. The Hakkas probably had most interaction with the locals as many planted vegetables at the urban fringes, away from the core Chinese communities. The other exception would be the Chinese in the Straits Settlements and Straits Chinese - British-educated Peranakans - were probably the first tri-lingualists in Malaya,
Whichever community it was - the Malays under their sultans, the Chinese in their autonomous communities or the Indians under the charge of plantations owners - it was a very low-cost system that places minimum demands on the British colonial office. The British focus, other than external defence by Commonwealth armies, was common infrastructure and making Englishmen out of aristocratic Malays, Straits Chinese and non-Tamil Indians. That is really the reason behind Malay College Kuala Kangsar: to build a class of Malay Englishmen who will administer the country while being loyal to the British Crown and the British way of life.
The downside of this arrangement was that the races remained separated with little reason to intermingle outside of the market or some trading relationships. I do not think this was a conscious policy of the British to divide and conquer as contended by many - after all, the British had already conquered by the time the Chinese and Indians arrived. But rather it was a by-product of their method of administration, born out of a need of a small number of British officers having to run a large population with established social and political systems. It should be remembered that in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Singapore and Malacca, the cities were mixed with communities living beside each other. It was largely in the Malay states that the communities lived apart, with the cities being Chinese and the villages being Malay.
The next article looks at Malaya's first Nobel Prize nominee, recognised more outside Malaysia than within.
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