Race and ethnicity in Malaysia

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.