Chinese Enterprise and Malay Power: Nineteenth-Century Central Malaya from a Regional Perspective

Introduction The year 1874, when the British first established indirect rule on the Malay Peninsula, has conventionally marked the start of “modern” Malay history. 1 For those engaged in the writing of this “modern” history, the preceding period from 1826-1874 has often been treated as an era of stagnation or decline. With the exception of a few studies, notably that of Khoo Kay Kim, analysis of the period between the signing of the 1926 Burney Treaty (when the British “withdrew” from the peninsula) and the 1874 Pangkor Treaty (when they “came back”), has been coloured by a colonial historiography that might be summed up by K. C. Tregonning’s remark that “for most of the nineteenth century A.D. the Malay Peninsula was much the same as it had been in the nineteenth century B.C., a tangled mass of jungle.” The theme of post-1826 decline proved equally irresistible to important post-war historians like D. G. E. Hall who, despite seeking to present a more Asia-centric history of the region, could only arrest the pace of assumed nineteenthcentury decline to a fragile stasis. A later generation of nationalist Malay historians likewise characterised this era as one of declining Malay political power, something that was linked to the onset of a wider cultural malaise within Malay society. One outcome of this particular trajectory within Malay historiography has been the representation of the earlier decades of the nineteenth century as a sorry preamble to “History proper”. This paper challenges this trajectory by replacing a Penang-centric, colonial vantage point with an alternative regional perspective. My focus is the interior of the upper Malay Peninsula. This region, once regarded as the key to British commercial penetration of the Malay Peninsula and a logical hinterland for the outpost of Penang, fades from view in the wake of the 1826 Burney Treaty. Visions of dynamic growth were replaced with perceptions of decay and disorder. The strength of this perception has obscured an interesting vignette concerning a growing tin industry that would sponsor the emergence of a robust new Malay polity at the heart of the central Malay Peninsula.