Peninsular Malaysia

From Hobson's Choice

Prior to the creation of the modern Malaysia Confederation (1963), the eleven sultanates on the Malay Peninsula represented a single important British colony. In 1963, the twelve sultanates were joined with the island/city of Singapore; then, in 1965, the Borneo sultanates of Sarawak and Sabah were added, which shifted the demographic balance and caused Singapore to withdraw from the federation.

1 Prior to Colonial Rule
2 European Rule
3 Notes
4 See Also
5 External Links

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Prior to Colonial Rule

There appear to have been Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist influence in pre-Islamic Malaya; there were settlements and tributary states all along the coast of the Bay of Bengal by the 5th century C.E.^[1] Moreover, Malaya was an important hub for trade between Southwest Asia and China. It was also, for a time, a major component of the trading empire of Srivijaya.^[2]

Islam arrived in the Peninsula around the 12th century, most likely from Gujarat.^[3] Additionally, the region had long been under the direct (or indirect) rule of Tamils (the Chola Empire), and there is little doubt that the rise of Islam in Southern India guaranteed a corresponding appearance in entrepôts like Kedah and Johor. The rise of Islam in Malay was stimulated and guided by its success in Aceh, across the Strait in Sumatra.

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European Rule

Peninsular Malaysia, c.1872

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The first European power active in the region was Portugal; the Viceroy in India, Afonso de Albuquerque, was determined to capture the Port of Malacca and control the strait between it and Sumatra. He had already conquered Goa and established a modus operandi:

...In January 1510, with the help of the Hindu Chief of the area, who was an enemy of the Muslim Sultan, he captured Goa; but soon thereafter he wsas driven out by a counterattack. Returning six months later, he captured it again and took a terrible vengeance on the population. As he himself boasted in a letter to his king: "Afterwards, I burnt the city and put all to the sword... Whenever we could find them no Moor was spared, and then [we] filled the mosques with them and set them on fire."^[4]

While Albuquerque's goal was hegemony, not empire, he seems to have believed that the isolation and small numbers of the Portuguese in the theater necessitated extreme brutality, to ensure that resistance would be rare.

Malacca's importance was well recognized by the Portuguese. D'Albuquerque attacked Malacca with a fleet of 18 ships and captured it in 1511. Urging his followers before the attack to "quench the fire of the sect of Mahamede," d'Albuquerque also emphasized the prospects of material gain. "I hold it certain that if we take this trade of Malacca away from them (the Moors) Cairo and Mecca will be entirely ruined and Venice receive no spices unless her merchants go and buy them in Portugal.^[5]

The Netherlands United East India Company (VOC) began its conquest of the East Indies from further east: Bantam and Batavia (Java); Tidore, Amboina, and Banda (the Moluccas). The VOC was in competition now with both the Portuguese and the English, and though this was a strictly private, commercial war between rival corporations, it was accompanied by the most profound cruelty. The VOC initially allied itself with the Sultanate of Aceh, whose leadership had struggled long and hard against the Portuguese; as a result, by 1635 Malacca itself became a citadel in the midst of enemies.^[6] The final assault on Malacca (1641) was carried out in alliance with the Sultanate of Johore.

In 1795, the government of the Netherlands was taken over by a revolutionary committee (18 Jan); the French Revolutionary government had conquered, then annexed, the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium). By May of that year, the new Batavian Republic was very closely aligned with France. The British swiftly seized control of the Netherland's possessions in the East Indies and held them until 1818.

After the Napoleonic Wars, Netherlands rule returned briefly; at the time, its presence in Malaya was fairly small, and the British government was very reluctant to cede a lucrative possession to its erstwhile adversary. After a complicated power struggle involving the individual sultanates of the East Indies, different interested parties in the UK, and the Netherlands government, a final settlement was reached in 1824 under which the lands today comprising Indonesia were awarded to Amsterdam, while the Peninsula was relegated to the British sphere of influence; Penang and Malacca were transferred to British rule.

British rule in Malaya was relatively low-intensity; aside from the existing enclaves of direct European rule, and the development of Singapore, the authorities were content to form alliances and protectorates with the surviving local despots. The main diplomatic headache was Siam, whose new dynasty was determined to confirm suzerainty over all former Siamese territories. Ironically, another component of the Siamese issue was that Ligor—an older Siamese province with tenuous political ties to the new regime—was sufficiently independent of Bangkok to wage war on its own.^[7] Without Singapore, the Malays constituted 50.1% (3.96 million), the Chinese 36.8% (2.92 million), and the Indians 11.2% (0.88 million). But with the addition of Sarawak and Sabah, the Malays were 46.1% (5.12 million), the Chinese 42.2% (4.68 million), and the Indians 9.4% (1.04 million). Therefore, political leaders on both sides of the Singapore Strait had an interest in Singapore's withdrawal.

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Notes

↑ Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia, University of Hawaii Press (2001), p.17-18.
↑ Ibid., p.19-20.
↑ Nicholas Tarling, The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Cambridge University Press (1999), p.339.
↑ Ram Prakash Anand, Origin and Development of the Law of the Sea: BRILL (1983), p.
↑ Ibid.
↑ Donald B. Freeman, The Straits of Malacca Gateway Or Gauntlet?, McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP (2003), p.98
↑ Andaya & Andaya (2001). p.119.<ref> Even this was not actively pursued until the Treaty of Pengkor (1874), in which the UK intervened in the succession of the Sultanate of Perak. Naturally, the winner of the succession struggle awarded his British friends control over Perak's foreign policy and defense; soon afterward, three other sultanates were incorporated into the Federation of Malay States (FMS; this also included the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca, and Singapore). Later, the British secured rights to four sultanates to the north, and compelled them (and Johore) to make the same protectorate agreements with Britain as the FMS. In 1946, the FMS was merged with the unfederated Malaya sultanates to become the Federation of Malaya. ==Demographics and Singapore== A common theme in [[Southeast Asia]] is conflict pitting the "native" ethnic cohort against a relatively recent immigrant cohort of subalterns, such as the Chinese. The majority of people in Peninsula Malaysia are Bumiputra, or people who lived in the region prior to European rule. During the colonial period, the Bumiputra suffered a trend towards [[underdevelopment]] and marginalization; the Chinese and Indians frequently became prosperous merchants or civil servants. Later, Bumiputra politicians would call for remedial programs to reduce the domination of the economy by other groups. Proposed or actual remedial programs tended to take punitive forms against the Chinese. When the Peninsula was organized into a federation of 11 sultanates plus Singapore, the Chinese comprised 44.1% of the population (4.3 million), versus 43.3% Malay (4.2 million); the Indians accounted for another 10.6% (1.04 million).<ref>In-Won Hwang, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=RkWCNJCl0WAC Personalized Politics: The Malaysian State Under Mahathir]'', Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (2003), Table 3.3, p.54.</li></ol></ref>