Fiscal Dependency in British Malaya, 1890s–1920s

2020 ◽  
pp. 121-152
Author(s):  
Diana S. Kim
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Natural Condition ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Rule ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Reserve Fund ◽  
Colonial Government

This chapter turns to Malaya, another site of British rule, where the monopoly was introduced more than a decade later in 1910, without expressed concerns about indigenous opium consumption or sumptuary restrictions. It shows instead how the British colonial state was highly reliant on opium revenue; and the monopoly emerged as local administrators were reversing longstanding acceptance of such dependency as a natural condition of colonial government. Over the course of several decades, taxing opium sales became conceived of as an untenable practice and challenge to fiscal order, culminating in the introduction of an opium revenue reserve fund in 1925 to enable the substitution of opium taxes. Officially, its declared purpose was to reduce reliance on opium taxes for one of the most fiscally opium-dependent territories of Southeast Asia under European rule, by setting aside a large sum of surplus revenue to which a fixed ten percent share of subsequent years' revenue would be added. The fund was first introduced in 1925 for the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Malacca, and Penang, as well as the Malay State of Johor, and extended across the Federated Malay States by 1929.

scholarly journals “Imperium in Imperio”: The Corporation, Mining, and Governance in British Southeast Asia, 1900–1930

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
DAVID BAILLARGEON
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
State Model ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
State Regulations ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Corporate Ventures

This article examines the history of mining in British Southeast Asia during the early twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the histories of the Burma Corporation and the Duff Development Company, which were located in British-occupied Burma and Malaya, respectively. It argues that despite being represented as “rogue” corporate ventures in areas under “indirect” colonial rule, the contrasting fates of each company—one successful, one not—reveal how foreign-owned businesses operating in the empire became increasingly beholden to British colonial state regulations during this period, marking a shift in policy from the “company-state” model that operated in prior centuries. The histories of these two firms ultimately demonstrate the continued significance of business in the making of empire during the late colonial period, bridging the divide between the age of company rule and the turn toward state-sponsored “development” that would occur in the mid-twentieth century.

IRELAND, COLONIAL SCIENCE, AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL CONSTRUCTION OF BRITISH RULE IN INDIA, c. 1820–1870

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 963-987 ◽  
Author(s):  
BARRY CROSBIE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Irish People ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Global Exchange ◽  
Geological Research ◽  
Colonial Science

ABSTRACTThis article examines the role that Ireland and Irish people played in the geographical construction of British colonial rule in India during the nineteenth century. It argues that as an important sub-imperial centre, Ireland not only supplied the empire with key personnel, but also functioned as an important reference point for scientific practice, new legislation, and systems of government. Occupying integral roles within the information systems of the colonial state, Irish people provided much of the intellectual capital around which British rule in India was constructed. These individuals were part of nineteenth-century Irish professional personnel networks that viewed the empire as a legitimate sphere for work and as an arena in which they could prosper. Through involvement and deployment of expertise in areas such as surveying and geological research in India, Irishmen and Irish institutions were able to act decisively in the development of colonial knowledge. The relationships mapped in this article centre the Irish within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices during the long nineteenth century, thereby making a contribution towards uncovering Ireland's multi-directional involvement in the British empire and reassessing the challenges that this presents to existing British, Irish, and imperial historiography.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 163-172
Author(s):  
Nurfadzilah Yahaya
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Advisory Board ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Sepoy Mutiny ◽  
Legal Arbitrage

This chapter recounts how the members of the Arab diaspora attempted legal arbitrage under colonial rule. It analyses the members' expansion and modification of Islamic law, while at other times they policed the boundaries of Islamic law even as mere translators. The chapter tells the story of the surprising involvement of the outsider — the Arab diaspora — in aiding colonialists to accumulate legislative power. The pace of change from the mid-nineteenth century onward was brisk, and the Arab diaspora capitalized on it while attempting to navigate uncertainty and risk. This chapter also investigates how Arab diaspora in Southeast Asia were able to influence the shape of law to a great extent. It takes a look on how concessions to Arabs in the Straits Settlements, in the form of the Mohamedan Marriage Ordinance, and their appointments as members of the Mohamedan Advisory Board after the Sepoy Mutiny subsequently tied them more closely to the British colonial government, along with the rest of the Muslim population in the colony.

scholarly journals WHITE ANTS, EMPIRE, AND ENTOMO-POLITICS IN SOUTH ASIA

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROHAN DEB ROY
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asians ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Democratic Socialism ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Governmental Intervention ◽  
British Colonial

AbstractBy focusing on the history of white ants in colonial South Asia, this article shows how insects were ubiquitous and fundamental to the shaping of British colonial power. British rule in India was vulnerable to white ants because these insects consumed paper and wood, the key material foundations of the colonial state. The white ant problem also made the colonial state more resilient and intrusive. The sphere of strict governmental intervention was extended to include both animate and inanimate non-humans, while these insects were invoked as symbols to characterize colonized landscapes, peoples, and cultures. Nonetheless, encounters with white ants were not entirely within the control of the colonial state. Despite effective state intervention, white ants did not vanish altogether, and remained objects of everyday control until the final decade of colonial rule and after. Meanwhile, colonized and post-colonial South Asians used white ants to articulate their own distinct political agendas. Over time, white ants featured variously as metaphors for Islamic decadence, British colonial exploitation, communism, democratic socialism, and, more recently, the Indian National Congress. This article argues that co-constitutive encounters between the worlds of insects and politics have been an intrinsic feature of British colonialism and its legacies in South Asia.

scholarly journals A Selected Fiction? Lawrence Durrell and the Overgrown Typescript of Bitter Lemons

2017 ◽  
pp. 82
Author(s):  
David Roessel
Keyword(s):  
Public Information ◽  
The Public ◽  
Publication History ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Lawrence Durrell ◽  
Colonial Government

This article looks at previously unmined archival documents in order to explore the preand post-publication history of Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons, a travelogue written during the ‘emergency years’ of the EOKA campaign against British rule and for union with Greece. It examines the ways in which paratextual documents surrounding this publication history illuminate the awkward, sometimes contradictory, relationship between Durrell’s book and the last years of the British colonial government in Cyprus, a government for which Durrell worked as an employee in the Public Information Office.

scholarly journals Peasants, Colonialism, and Sovereignty: The Garo rebellions in eastern India

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
SANGHAMITRA MISRA
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Northeastern India ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article studies two seismic decades in the history of the Garo community, marked out in colonial records as among the most violent and isolated people that British rule encountered in eastern and northeastern India. Through a densely knit historical narrative that hinges on an enquiry into the colonial reordering of the core elements of the regional political economy of eastern and northeastern India, it will train its focus on the figure of the rebellious Garo peasant and on the arresting display of Garo recalcitrance between 1807 and 1820. Reading a rich colonial archive closely and against the grain, the article will depart from extant historiography in its characterization of the colonial state in the early nineteenth century as well as of its relationship with ‘tribes’/‘peasants’ in eastern and northeastern India. A critique of the idea of primitive violence and the production of the ‘tribe’ under conditions of colonial modernity will occupy the latter half of the article. Here it will argue that the numerous and apparently disparate acts of headhunting, raids, plunder, and burning by the Garos on the lowlands of Bengal and Assam were in fact an assembling of the first of a series of sustained peasant rebellions in this part of colonial India—a powerful manifestation of a community's historical consciousness of the loss of its sovereign self under British rule.

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