Class, Race and Colonialism in Peninsular Malaysia: A Political History of Malaysian Indians
Michael Stenson
SIRD: 2018
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When Michael Stenson’s book was originally published, in 1980, it represented a decisive break with most prior studies of Malaya and Malaysia. These had been largely dominated by the pluralist approach propounded by John Furnivall. Influenced by the anthropology of British orientalism, Furnivall had theorised that Asia’s multi-ethnic societies could be understood only through the close study of bounded “racial” communities and the politics of communalism. While Stenson acknowledges the role of ethnicity, he argues that interpretations of Malaya and Malaysia must be based on analysis of the political economy generated by colonialism, and in particular the dynamics of capital accumulation embedded in the relationship between the peripheral and the metropolitan. Indian labour was crucial to the Malayan colonial economy. Stenson’s focus on the Indian experience is thus central to his study of the social, economic and political structures of colonial Malaya and the social and economic transformations wrought by capitalism and imperialism.

The British expansion from controlling the Straits Settlements colonies to controlling the remainder of the Malay Peninsula may have been justified in terms of good government, as necessary to protect and advance the Malay states, but in reality it represented an extension of the mercantile economy of the Settlements. Dominion was established through a series of unequal treaties between the British government and the sultans. The rulers were assured that Malaya would remain a Malay country and that immigrant communities would never enjoy permanent residence or political rights.

Integral to a colonial economy based on the production of cheap raw materials was the recruitment of a minimally waged and preferably foreign workforce, a labour source devoid of the most elementary rights that would thus be employed under conditions of virtual enslavement. South Indians were identified as the ideal candidates to fulfil this role. Unlike the refractory Chinese, they were viewed as docile, lacking initiative and easily managed.

• Tags: Carl Vadivella Belle, Issue 15, Malaysia, Michael Stenson