Federated Malay States

The Colonial Era · Treatise · 15 min read

How Did Racial Categories Form in Malaya?

The box for "race" wasn't discovered; someone proposed changing it in 1901—and he wrote down his reason

In 1901, the census superintendent of the Federated Malay States wrote a suggestion in his report: before printing the next set of census forms, wherever "nationality" appears, it should be changed to "race". The reason he gave—the term was wider, more exhaustive, and would not give rise to ambiguous questions when classifying people. Ten years later, this change was complete. Thirty years after that, the man in charge of census-taking for all of Malaya admitted in his report that he could not define the word.

The Colonial Era · Chronicle · 16 min read

Who Planted These Rubber Trees? Who Came to Plant Them?

In 1897, there were only 345 acres of rubber estates in the Federated Malay States; forty-three years later, over two million acres

Tin mines needed people to dig, rubber needed people to plant and tap. Between 1850 and 1930, the demographic structure of this land was completely rewritten—and that didn't happen naturally; it was organised by a specific set of recruitment systems, contract terms, and shipping routes. The most popular picture is "the Chinese dig mines, the Indians tap rubber, the Malays grow rice in the countryside". The actual composition of estate labour in 1918 knocks this down with just one number.