Details of Research Outputs

Southeast Asia has long been a target for European maritime trade and seaborne expansion. During the early colonial period, private traders who served the British East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) came from afar to search for Southeast Asian spices, and Chinese silks and porcelains. Due to the growing economic opportunities in the region, Chinese emigration to Southeast Asia increased rapidly in the eighteenth century. While Leonard Blussé and Tonio Andrade chronicled the increase of the Chinese population in and around pepper and sugar plantations in Dutch Java, the rise of the Chinese population in pepper plantations in British Malaya remains understudied. Why did the British need for Chinese labor in Southeast Asia increase during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? How can we understand the connection between early British trade expeditions, migration patterns, and their colonial ambitions in Malaya? This chapter draws on surviving documents in the British EIC China Factory Records (G/12) to investigate the rise of Chinese settlements in pepper plantations in the Straits Settlements in Malaya. The British EIC records, mostly digitized, contain valuable information about the logistics of British colonial operations and labor recruitment before the nineteenth century, and the British views of the Dutch in their empire conquests. As important as the Dutch VOC sources in Frank Dhont's chapter, these English records are also pivotal in understanding the production and circulation of colonial knowledge for the procurement of pepper, and the systematic recruitment of Chinese laborers in Southeast Asia. This chapter contains three main parts. The starting point is the British quest for a foothold in Southeast Asia and their motivations. The analysis begins with a detailed discussion of Britain's need to gain better access to trade with China and the decisions that lead to the need to bolster supplies of pepper and other spices in Southeast Asia, which in turn was the major catalyst that led the British EIC to make use of Chinese laboring networks in Southeast Asia. The second part of the chapter draws on British colonial documents to examine what kinds of specific Chinese laboring skills the EIC was looking for in the late eighteenth century. The last part discusses the circulation of colonial representations that portrayed Malay natives as feudal and Chinese migrants as entrepreneurial in Southeast Asia. These stereotypes formed the underpinnings of the increases in the Chinese population in British Malaya.