History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
On July 1, 1896 Pahang, Perak, Selangor, and Negeri Sembilan became the Federated Malay States (FMS) with Kuala Lumpur as the capital. Swettenham became the first Resident General. He unified the four state civil services into the Malayan Civil Service (MCS) and centralized the departments of police, public works, posts, telegraph, and railways. No Malay ruler symbolized the new state. Education was expanded, but still only the privileged few could attend English schools. Boys were lured into the Malayan schools in Perak and Selangor by opportunities to read the Qur’an and play soccer.
Swettenham convened the first Conference of Government Medical Officers in 1898 at Kuala Lumpur, and two years later he formed the Institute for Medical Research. Malayan legislation had made smallpox vaccination compulsory in 1891. Ronald Ross while in India discovered in 1897 that mosquitoes transmit malaria. Laborers would not use nets or take quinine; but Dr. Malcolm Watson by draining and filling swamps at Klang and Port Swettenham reduced the malaria cases there from 522 in 1901 to 32 in 1903.
Watson also had streams put in pipes to prevent mosquito breeding, and in 1914 he prevented breeding by spraying streams with oil. In 1907 W. L. Braddon proved that those who ate white rice got beriberi, but those who ate brown rice did not. By 1910 research showed that the vitamins were in the outer shell. George Maxwell led a campaign against yaws in 1921, and hookworm was attacked in 1926. These and other health efforts significantly reduced the mortality rate in Malaya.
Britain and Siam made a secret agreement in 1897 that Siam would not alienate Terengganu and Kelantan to a third power. In March 1909 in exchange for a loan from FMS revenues for railway construction the Siamese agreed to withdraw from the northern Malay states of Terengganu, Kelantan, Kedah, and Perlis, and these became the Unfederated Malay States (UMS). In the treaty the British gave up their extraterritorial privileges in Siam, and after that British subjects could be tried in Siamese courts.
Sultan Zainal Abidin (r. 1881-1918) of Terengganu called the Siamese thieves and would only let the British have consular powers. Also in 1909 Ibrahim accepted a financial advisor in Johor. That year the British stopped farming out revenue and began collecting taxes. Governor John Anderson (1904-11) excluded non-Europeans from the civil service but in 1910 set up a segregated section for Malays. Malay society came to reflect the class structure of British society. In 1914 Johor signed a treaty that permitted a general advisor, and Terengganu accepted a British resident in 1919.
Mat Salleh began a rebellion in Borneo in 1895; he was killed in 1900, but the resistance lasted until 1905. Charles Brooke ruled Sarawak from 1868 to 1917 and took over territory from Brunei. He wanted to preserve the indigenous way of life in Sarawak and did not allow speculation by European developers. His son Vyner Brook became the third white raja of Sarawak; but he spent much of his time in England, and the Supreme Council did not meet after 1927. History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
R. J. Wilkinson became the federal inspector of schools in 1903 and introduced the study of Malay literature in Rumi that uses the Roman alphabet. However, when the education departments of the Straits Settlements and FMS were amalgamated in 1906, his position was eliminated. Kang Youwei fled from China in 1899 and came to Singapore, where he promoted education that combined Confucian ideas with modern science. He founded the first Chinese school for girls in Singapore, and six big schools were operating by 1906. Tan Jiak Kim helped found the King Edward VII Medical College in 1905. That year the Malay College opened at Kuala Kangsar in Johor, and in 1910 the Malay Administrative Service began accepting their graduates.
Sayyid Shaikh Al-Haji (1867-1934) came from Cairo and started the Al-Imam magazine in 1906. He advocated reforming Islam and supported female education. The Islamic pondok schools were named so because students lived in “huts” near their teacher. To’ Kenali came to Kelantan in 1908 and attracted three hundred pupils. The Council of Religion and Malay Custom was founded there in 1915, and the conservative magazine Pengasoh began publishing in Kelantan in 1918.
When the Great War began in August 1914, German residents of Singapore were interned, and German ships and property were seized. In February 1915 the 5th Light Infantry, ordered to go to Hong Kong, mutinied at Singapore because the Punjabi Muslims did not want to fight the Muslims in Turkey. They murdered their officers, released German prisoners, and roamed the streets, killing Europeans. After trials 37 mutineers were executed, 77 were transported, and 12 were imprisoned. European men were conscripted into the military, and Singapore was garrisoned by British troops for the rest of the war. History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
Sun Yat-sen visited Malaya and spent more than a year in the south lecturing and organizing. In 1910 he was in Penang for nearly six months. He founded the Overseas Affairs Bureau in 1922 to help Chinese migrants. R. O. Winsted revived Malay vernacular study when he was assistant director of education 1916-21 and when he was director from 1924 to 1931. The Sultan Idris Training College (SITC) was founded in 1922 at Tanjong Malim in Perak to train Malay teachers in gardening and agriculture. Two years later the Malay Translation Bureau at Kuala Lumpur moved to SITC, and in 1929 their staff began publishing the Majallah Guru magazine for teachers.
In 1921 Malaya had 1,627,108 Malays, 1,173,354 Chinese, 471,628 Indians, and about 46,000 others. Anti-Japanese demonstrations by Chinese teachers and students in June 1919 led to martial law being declared in the Chinese towns in Singapore and Penang. The Registration of Schools Ordinance banned the teaching of undesirable political doctrines. The 1923 Labor Code required that estates with ten or more children provide education. In 1925 Malaya suppressed the Guomindang branches because of anti-British disturbances and strikes.
Most Chinese immigrants were men, and the numbers of women gradually increased. Only a few hundred Japanese immigrated each year, but most of those were women for the brothels. In 1927 the immigration of prostitutes was forbidden, and in 1930 the brothels were closed. The sultans withdrew from the Federal Council in 1927, but they still signed the laws presented to them. In 1928 Haji Abdul Rahman led a revolt with a thousand armed men in Trengganu, but the Malay police forced them back into the interior. Rahman was exiled to Mecca, and other leaders were sent to Singapore.
For a half century the opium trade provided more than half of the Straits Settlements revenue, but in the 1920s the Government reduced opium consumption by making all addicts register. Spurred on by world opinion and the League of Nations, the international drug traffic was controlled, and Malaya closed registration at the end of 1934. By 1938 the amount of opium sold was a quarter of what it had been twenty years earlier. By then Malaya had invested abroad $57 million from opium revenues. History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
High Commissioner Laurence Guillemard (1920-27) began letting organizations nominate municipal commissioners for Singapore in 1921. He tried to decentralize the government by abolishing the Chief Secretary in 1925 and by changing the Legislative Council in 1927. In 1931 High Commissioner Cecil Clementi warned against a centralized modern government. He wanted to support local rulers and dissolve the British FMS to form a Pan-Malayan Union with all the states of the Malayan peninsula.
Malaya lacked a university, but the Federal Trade School was established in 1926, and the Agricultural College at Serdang and a technical school began in 1931. By then the combined number of Chinese and Indians in British Malaya had surpassed the number of Malayans. Chinese textbooks that were anti-British were banned. In 1930 Chinese founded the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). The Central Indian Association of Malaya was formed in 1936 to protect the interests of Indians.
Indian education was poor until an inspector of schools with knowledge of Tamil was appointed in 1937; then they began training Tamil teachers. Of the 44 English schools in the Straits Settlements and FMS in 1938 only two were open to girls. That year Malaya had more than a thousand Chinese schools with 91,534 pupils and 4,000 teachers, but only 36 of these schools had secondary classes.
The position of Chief Secretary was abolished in 1935, and the State Councils were enlarged. Strikes erupted in 1936 because wages lowered during the Depression had not been restored. In late 1938 the leftists Ibrahim Yaacob and Burhanuddin Al-Helmy founded the Young Malay Union or Kesatuan Melayu Muda (KMM). They worked for Malayan independence and adopted non-cooperation when the war broke out in 1939. The Singapore Malay Association founded the Utusan Melayu newspaper in 1939, and the Pan-Malayan Malay Congress met at Kuala Lumpur in August.
Malaya had about 37,000 Communists. May-day rallies and strikes in 1940 provoked a reaction that arrested more than 200 Communist leaders by July. The British also arrested KMM leaders, but they were released before the fall of Singapore. Eleven state associations, including Sarawak and Brunei, met at Singapore in December 1940, but they could not agree on a pan-Malayan organization. The 1941 census counted more Chinese than Malayans; but because Singapore was 77% Chinese, the rest of Malaya still had more Malayans. There was little intermarriage because most Muslim Malayans considered the immigrants heathens. History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
Canning and new technology made tin especially valuable, and the British regulated the mining with licenses to prevent monopolizing streams for sluices. The revenue increased from $500,000 in 1876 to $3,600,000 in 1888. Chinese workers excelled at mining tin until the Europeans took over the management with dredging, which required more capital. In 1887 the Straits Trading Company had $150,000 in Kuala Lumpur, and by 1898 this had increased to $1,250,000. In 1904 the Straits Settlement dollar was linked to sterling. That year Malaya produced 56% of the world’s tin, but discoveries in Bolivia and Nigeria reduced this to 36% by 1929. The bucket dredge changed Malayan tin mining in 1912. In 1913 Europeans owned one quarter of Malaya’s tin mines, but by 1937 about eighty European companies had two-thirds of them. A surplus and the Depression caused the price per ton to fall from £200 in 1929 to £120 in 1931. The London Tin Corporation controlled most of the tin in Malaya, Nigeria, and Bolivia, and so representatives from these countries made an agreement with the Dutch East Indies to limit production to one-third of their output in 1929. Thousands of Malayans became unemployed, and in 1938 Malaya accounted for only 26% of world output. Malaya restricted immigration from 1931 to 1947. History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
While the Chinese worked in tin mines and the Indians on rubber plantations, almost all the rice growers were Malays. A Department of Agriculture was formed in 1905, and the next year a $1 million irrigation project was completed in Perak, opening up 70,000 new acres for paddy. The 1913 Malay Reservations Act allowed the FMS to set aside land for Malays to grow rice and made it illegal for them to sell it to non-Malays. Yet Malaya had to import two-thirds of its rice from Burma and Siam, and many Malayans found they could make more money with rubber trees. By 1940 only 15.5% of the land had crops, and more than half of that was rubber trees.
T. H. Hill from Ceylon began a coffee plantation in 1882, and Malayan coffee production reached its peak in 1897; but the insect that devastated Ceylon’s crops and competition from Brazil ruined coffee production in Malaya. Henry Wickham brought rubber seeds from the Amazon to Singapore in 1877. H. N. Ridley tried to get people to plant them and was called “mad Ridley.” When T. H. Hill abandoned coffee, he began planting rubber trees in 1898. Ridley discovered that a single tap could extract the latex every day without harming the trees. Profit gradually increased, and in 1913 Malaya exported 33,000 tons of rubber to Europe and America. The next year Malaya produced more than half the world’s rubber. Most of the rubber workers came from southern India, and the British abolished the indentured labor system in all their territories in 1910. History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
During the First World War a lack of shipping caused a surplus of rubber to build up, and the 1910 price of $5 a pound fell to thirty cents in 1920. In 1922 the Stevenson Commission advised Malaya and Ceylon to restrict exports, and the price rebounded to $2 by 1925. Meanwhile Indonesia increased its production of rubber to 40% of the world total by 1927. The Depression and a surplus caused the price of rubber to fall to five cents a pound in 1932. In 1934 the British were joined by the Dutch, French, and Siam to restrict 98% of the world’s rubber production until 1938. Smallholders in Malaya could produce rubber for a half-cent a pound, but the large estates could not cut costs lower than twelve cents. However, the Europeans owned the estates and controlled the market, and the smallholders found their share reduced from 48% in 1934 to 32% in 1938.
Palm oil production developed after 1924 when three Guthries rubber companies became Oil Palms of Malaya Ltd. In the 1930s Malaya’s share of world palm oil production went from one percent to eleven percent. The Japanese began mining iron ore in Johor in 1920, and in 1928 a Japanese firm acquired a 50-year lease in Trengganu. By 1938 the Nippon Mining Company had a labor force of 3,000 (mostly Indians and Chinese), and more than 1.5 million tons of iron ore were exported to Japan that year.
On July 1, 1896 Pahang, Perak, Selangor, and Negeri Sembilan became the Federated Malay States (FMS) with Kuala Lumpur as the capital. Swettenham became the first Resident General. He unified the four state civil services into the Malayan Civil Service (MCS) and centralized the departments of police, public works, posts, telegraph, and railways. No Malay ruler symbolized the new state. Education was expanded, but still only the privileged few could attend English schools. Boys were lured into the Malayan schools in Perak and Selangor by opportunities to read the Qur’an and play soccer.
Swettenham convened the first Conference of Government Medical Officers in 1898 at Kuala Lumpur, and two years later he formed the Institute for Medical Research. Malayan legislation had made smallpox vaccination compulsory in 1891. Ronald Ross while in India discovered in 1897 that mosquitoes transmit malaria. Laborers would not use nets or take quinine; but Dr. Malcolm Watson by draining and filling swamps at Klang and Port Swettenham reduced the malaria cases there from 522 in 1901 to 32 in 1903.
Watson also had streams put in pipes to prevent mosquito breeding, and in 1914 he prevented breeding by spraying streams with oil. In 1907 W. L. Braddon proved that those who ate white rice got beriberi, but those who ate brown rice did not. By 1910 research showed that the vitamins were in the outer shell. George Maxwell led a campaign against yaws in 1921, and hookworm was attacked in 1926. These and other health efforts significantly reduced the mortality rate in Malaya.
Britain and Siam made a secret agreement in 1897 that Siam would not alienate Terengganu and Kelantan to a third power. In March 1909 in exchange for a loan from FMS revenues for railway construction the Siamese agreed to withdraw from the northern Malay states of Terengganu, Kelantan, Kedah, and Perlis, and these became the Unfederated Malay States (UMS). In the treaty the British gave up their extraterritorial privileges in Siam, and after that British subjects could be tried in Siamese courts.
Sultan Zainal Abidin (r. 1881-1918) of Terengganu called the Siamese thieves and would only let the British have consular powers. Also in 1909 Ibrahim accepted a financial advisor in Johor. That year the British stopped farming out revenue and began collecting taxes. Governor John Anderson (1904-11) excluded non-Europeans from the civil service but in 1910 set up a segregated section for Malays. Malay society came to reflect the class structure of British society. In 1914 Johor signed a treaty that permitted a general advisor, and Terengganu accepted a British resident in 1919.
Mat Salleh began a rebellion in Borneo in 1895; he was killed in 1900, but the resistance lasted until 1905. Charles Brooke ruled Sarawak from 1868 to 1917 and took over territory from Brunei. He wanted to preserve the indigenous way of life in Sarawak and did not allow speculation by European developers. His son Vyner Brook became the third white raja of Sarawak; but he spent much of his time in England, and the Supreme Council did not meet after 1927. History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
R. J. Wilkinson became the federal inspector of schools in 1903 and introduced the study of Malay literature in Rumi that uses the Roman alphabet. However, when the education departments of the Straits Settlements and FMS were amalgamated in 1906, his position was eliminated. Kang Youwei fled from China in 1899 and came to Singapore, where he promoted education that combined Confucian ideas with modern science. He founded the first Chinese school for girls in Singapore, and six big schools were operating by 1906. Tan Jiak Kim helped found the King Edward VII Medical College in 1905. That year the Malay College opened at Kuala Kangsar in Johor, and in 1910 the Malay Administrative Service began accepting their graduates.
Sayyid Shaikh Al-Haji (1867-1934) came from Cairo and started the Al-Imam magazine in 1906. He advocated reforming Islam and supported female education. The Islamic pondok schools were named so because students lived in “huts” near their teacher. To’ Kenali came to Kelantan in 1908 and attracted three hundred pupils. The Council of Religion and Malay Custom was founded there in 1915, and the conservative magazine Pengasoh began publishing in Kelantan in 1918.
When the Great War began in August 1914, German residents of Singapore were interned, and German ships and property were seized. In February 1915 the 5th Light Infantry, ordered to go to Hong Kong, mutinied at Singapore because the Punjabi Muslims did not want to fight the Muslims in Turkey. They murdered their officers, released German prisoners, and roamed the streets, killing Europeans. After trials 37 mutineers were executed, 77 were transported, and 12 were imprisoned. European men were conscripted into the military, and Singapore was garrisoned by British troops for the rest of the war. History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
Sun Yat-sen visited Malaya and spent more than a year in the south lecturing and organizing. In 1910 he was in Penang for nearly six months. He founded the Overseas Affairs Bureau in 1922 to help Chinese migrants. R. O. Winsted revived Malay vernacular study when he was assistant director of education 1916-21 and when he was director from 1924 to 1931. The Sultan Idris Training College (SITC) was founded in 1922 at Tanjong Malim in Perak to train Malay teachers in gardening and agriculture. Two years later the Malay Translation Bureau at Kuala Lumpur moved to SITC, and in 1929 their staff began publishing the Majallah Guru magazine for teachers.
In 1921 Malaya had 1,627,108 Malays, 1,173,354 Chinese, 471,628 Indians, and about 46,000 others. Anti-Japanese demonstrations by Chinese teachers and students in June 1919 led to martial law being declared in the Chinese towns in Singapore and Penang. The Registration of Schools Ordinance banned the teaching of undesirable political doctrines. The 1923 Labor Code required that estates with ten or more children provide education. In 1925 Malaya suppressed the Guomindang branches because of anti-British disturbances and strikes.
Most Chinese immigrants were men, and the numbers of women gradually increased. Only a few hundred Japanese immigrated each year, but most of those were women for the brothels. In 1927 the immigration of prostitutes was forbidden, and in 1930 the brothels were closed. The sultans withdrew from the Federal Council in 1927, but they still signed the laws presented to them. In 1928 Haji Abdul Rahman led a revolt with a thousand armed men in Trengganu, but the Malay police forced them back into the interior. Rahman was exiled to Mecca, and other leaders were sent to Singapore.
For a half century the opium trade provided more than half of the Straits Settlements revenue, but in the 1920s the Government reduced opium consumption by making all addicts register. Spurred on by world opinion and the League of Nations, the international drug traffic was controlled, and Malaya closed registration at the end of 1934. By 1938 the amount of opium sold was a quarter of what it had been twenty years earlier. By then Malaya had invested abroad $57 million from opium revenues. History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
High Commissioner Laurence Guillemard (1920-27) began letting organizations nominate municipal commissioners for Singapore in 1921. He tried to decentralize the government by abolishing the Chief Secretary in 1925 and by changing the Legislative Council in 1927. In 1931 High Commissioner Cecil Clementi warned against a centralized modern government. He wanted to support local rulers and dissolve the British FMS to form a Pan-Malayan Union with all the states of the Malayan peninsula.
Malaya lacked a university, but the Federal Trade School was established in 1926, and the Agricultural College at Serdang and a technical school began in 1931. By then the combined number of Chinese and Indians in British Malaya had surpassed the number of Malayans. Chinese textbooks that were anti-British were banned. In 1930 Chinese founded the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). The Central Indian Association of Malaya was formed in 1936 to protect the interests of Indians.
Indian education was poor until an inspector of schools with knowledge of Tamil was appointed in 1937; then they began training Tamil teachers. Of the 44 English schools in the Straits Settlements and FMS in 1938 only two were open to girls. That year Malaya had more than a thousand Chinese schools with 91,534 pupils and 4,000 teachers, but only 36 of these schools had secondary classes.
The position of Chief Secretary was abolished in 1935, and the State Councils were enlarged. Strikes erupted in 1936 because wages lowered during the Depression had not been restored. In late 1938 the leftists Ibrahim Yaacob and Burhanuddin Al-Helmy founded the Young Malay Union or Kesatuan Melayu Muda (KMM). They worked for Malayan independence and adopted non-cooperation when the war broke out in 1939. The Singapore Malay Association founded the Utusan Melayu newspaper in 1939, and the Pan-Malayan Malay Congress met at Kuala Lumpur in August.
Malaya had about 37,000 Communists. May-day rallies and strikes in 1940 provoked a reaction that arrested more than 200 Communist leaders by July. The British also arrested KMM leaders, but they were released before the fall of Singapore. Eleven state associations, including Sarawak and Brunei, met at Singapore in December 1940, but they could not agree on a pan-Malayan organization. The 1941 census counted more Chinese than Malayans; but because Singapore was 77% Chinese, the rest of Malaya still had more Malayans. There was little intermarriage because most Muslim Malayans considered the immigrants heathens. History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
Canning and new technology made tin especially valuable, and the British regulated the mining with licenses to prevent monopolizing streams for sluices. The revenue increased from $500,000 in 1876 to $3,600,000 in 1888. Chinese workers excelled at mining tin until the Europeans took over the management with dredging, which required more capital. In 1887 the Straits Trading Company had $150,000 in Kuala Lumpur, and by 1898 this had increased to $1,250,000. In 1904 the Straits Settlement dollar was linked to sterling. That year Malaya produced 56% of the world’s tin, but discoveries in Bolivia and Nigeria reduced this to 36% by 1929. The bucket dredge changed Malayan tin mining in 1912. In 1913 Europeans owned one quarter of Malaya’s tin mines, but by 1937 about eighty European companies had two-thirds of them. A surplus and the Depression caused the price per ton to fall from £200 in 1929 to £120 in 1931. The London Tin Corporation controlled most of the tin in Malaya, Nigeria, and Bolivia, and so representatives from these countries made an agreement with the Dutch East Indies to limit production to one-third of their output in 1929. Thousands of Malayans became unemployed, and in 1938 Malaya accounted for only 26% of world output. Malaya restricted immigration from 1931 to 1947. History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
While the Chinese worked in tin mines and the Indians on rubber plantations, almost all the rice growers were Malays. A Department of Agriculture was formed in 1905, and the next year a $1 million irrigation project was completed in Perak, opening up 70,000 new acres for paddy. The 1913 Malay Reservations Act allowed the FMS to set aside land for Malays to grow rice and made it illegal for them to sell it to non-Malays. Yet Malaya had to import two-thirds of its rice from Burma and Siam, and many Malayans found they could make more money with rubber trees. By 1940 only 15.5% of the land had crops, and more than half of that was rubber trees.
T. H. Hill from Ceylon began a coffee plantation in 1882, and Malayan coffee production reached its peak in 1897; but the insect that devastated Ceylon’s crops and competition from Brazil ruined coffee production in Malaya. Henry Wickham brought rubber seeds from the Amazon to Singapore in 1877. H. N. Ridley tried to get people to plant them and was called “mad Ridley.” When T. H. Hill abandoned coffee, he began planting rubber trees in 1898. Ridley discovered that a single tap could extract the latex every day without harming the trees. Profit gradually increased, and in 1913 Malaya exported 33,000 tons of rubber to Europe and America. The next year Malaya produced more than half the world’s rubber. Most of the rubber workers came from southern India, and the British abolished the indentured labor system in all their territories in 1910. History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
During the First World War a lack of shipping caused a surplus of rubber to build up, and the 1910 price of $5 a pound fell to thirty cents in 1920. In 1922 the Stevenson Commission advised Malaya and Ceylon to restrict exports, and the price rebounded to $2 by 1925. Meanwhile Indonesia increased its production of rubber to 40% of the world total by 1927. The Depression and a surplus caused the price of rubber to fall to five cents a pound in 1932. In 1934 the British were joined by the Dutch, French, and Siam to restrict 98% of the world’s rubber production until 1938. Smallholders in Malaya could produce rubber for a half-cent a pound, but the large estates could not cut costs lower than twelve cents. However, the Europeans owned the estates and controlled the market, and the smallholders found their share reduced from 48% in 1934 to 32% in 1938.
Palm oil production developed after 1924 when three Guthries rubber companies became Oil Palms of Malaya Ltd. In the 1930s Malaya’s share of world palm oil production went from one percent to eleven percent. The Japanese began mining iron ore in Johor in 1920, and in 1928 a Japanese firm acquired a 50-year lease in Trengganu. By 1938 the Nippon Mining Company had a labor force of 3,000 (mostly Indians and Chinese), and more than 1.5 million tons of iron ore were exported to Japan that year.
History of Malaya and British from 1896 - 1941
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