History may be a contested terrain and it is certainly among the most contested of the Humanities. But nonetheless we need to return to history time and again, simply to remind us of where we are in the present; and that the road from the past to the present and into the future is never a linear, simple, teleological one. Contingency and chance are always the bedfellows of history, and we need to remember that. My concern, however, as someone who looks at the politics of history-writing, stems from those instances where we discover selective appropriations and readings of history that are meant to serve other instrumental purposes: be they the furthering of other unrelated agendas or interests.
One recent case comes to mind, when the Makkal Sakti leader P Waythamoorthy revealed that in the lead-up to Malaya’s independence in 1957 a letter was sent to the Reid Commission by Lau Pak Kuan, leader of the Pan-Malayan Federation of Chinese Associations PMFCA. Lau’s letter addressed his concern about the special status given to the Malays in the proposed Constitution of the Federation of Malaya then. While Lau Pak Kuan’s concerns were relevant and timely then in the 1950s, my concern is how this historical note is being brought to play today, when some activists are demanding that the British government of today pay compensation to ethnic minorities in Malaysia who, they argue, have been ‘let down by the British’.
Now frankly the logic of this argument baffles me entirely. For a start I cannot see how the British government of today is in any way indebted to citizens of another independent country, notwithstanding the colonial relations between Britain and Malaya in the past. If we were to entertain this premise at all, then we might as well push it to its logical extreme – and on that note Britain will have to fork over billions, if not trillions, of dollars or pounds to not only Malaya but also Singapore, Burma, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and a dozens of other colonies and protectorates in Africa and the Arab world. ( I can imagine how this would go down in No. 10 Downing Street today, under the current economic climate of Western Europe.)
And why should we stop at Britain? Perhaps France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal should also pay billions of dollars to people all over the world for what happened half a century ago, as a result of actions done by their ancestors who are already dead. Should the American government pay millions of dollars to all the Afro-Americans whose ancestors were brought there as slaves as well?
In our historical assessment of things past, we need to be cold in our analysis: Colonial capitalism from the 19th to mid-20th centuries was founded on the logic of racialised capitalism, and it was the logic of racialised capitalism that rationalised and necessitated the mass migration of native Asian, African and other native races across the colonies: Britain facilitated the migration of millions of South Asians to Malaya, Burma, Singapore, Africa and elsewhere to serve the interests of colonial investors who needed cheap, domesticated and politically submissive labour at low costs to maximise their profits. The same applies to the migration of East Asians from China to the colonies of Southeast Asia, that was likewise done to increase profits. The added bonus to the Empire was the introduction of racial differences and the creation of ethnic-racial enclaves that were kept apart by the apparatus of the colonial police state, and then the creation of a racial hierarchy that kept native Asians apart and the colonial masters above everyone. Period. There is no happy ending to this, anymore than there is a happy ending to slavery or patriarchy.
Living as we do in post-colonial states that remain blighted by the legacy of racialised capitalism and racial differences, we ought to take the first step in the process of mental decolonisation, by consciously questioning and rejecting the logic of compartmentalised racial difference. The problem is ours, now, whether we like it or not. Selective appropriations of historical data to serve other unrelated causes does nothing to improve our conditions, and certainly does not end the problem of racial stereotyping.
And as a related question, I am still curious as to why this campaign seems directed primarily at addressing the status of ethnic minorities in Malaysia? Do these activists not realise that among the other results of colonial-enforced migration to Malaya was the marginalization of the then native Malay entrepreneurial class? Following the announcement of the Selangor Tin Mining concession in 1873, which came at the end of the Selangor Civil War of 1866-1873, native Malay tin mining activities in Selangor gradually decreased. By 1891, Chinese migrants were in the majority in Perak and Selangor. British intervention in the Sultanates did not end to stem the tide of migration from China, it merely regulated it instead. The colonial authorities sought to use the Chinese Protectorate system which was first introduced in Singapore in 1877 as a means of monitoring the Chinese, whom they used as a source of cheap labour to: 1. increase their own British companies’ profits, and 2. marginalise native Malay tin producers as well. By the 1890s there were still around 350 privately-owned Malay tin mines in the Kinta valley of Perak alone, but these were soon to be eclipsed by British and Chinese-owned mining operations.
So let us be frank and blunt about all this: Racialised colonial capitalism victimised practically all the Asian communities of the colonies, and it led to the crippling of native industry in places like British Malaya and British Burma. The saddest thing about this whole sick and sordid episode is how Asians were used by the colonialists to replace and marginalise other Asians. Whatever bad blood or distrust that emerged then, and which persists now, can be dated back to this period of colonial intervention that could be described as one of the lowest points in humanity’s development: How ethnicities and races were pit against each other, for the sake of capital gains and material profit.
But dont waste your time going to Downing Street today to demand compensation please: Our problems today need present-day solutions, and not injections of selective reconstructed history to weave a nice narrative. We cannot avoid realpolitik, and we ought to come back to the real world.
End.
Dr Farish Ahmad- Noor is the Senior Fellow for the Contemporary Islam Programme; S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU).