The Federation of Malaya

The Federation of Malaya, Persekutuan Tanah Melayu, is a federation of thirteen states in two halves: eleven on the Malay peninsula, between Siam and the Strait of Malacca, and two across six hundred kilometres of the South China Sea in northern Borneo. It holds about thirty-four million people, and the distance between its halves is the governing fact of its internal politics. Kuala Lumpur is the capital. It became independent of Great Britain on 31 August 1957.

Its head of state is an elected king. The Yang di-Pertuan Agong is chosen for a term of five years by the Conference of Rulers, from among the nine hereditary rulers of the peninsular states, by a settled order of rotation. He keeps his own throne while he reigns, so that for five years one man is a constitutional figurehead in thirteen states and the ruler of one of them.

George V is King and Protector of Malaya, as Ernest V was before his abdication on 31 October 2028, and it is the only one of his fourteen capacities in which he is not head of state. The protectorship is residual and external: a guarantee against attack from outside, which has never been invoked. He performs no act within the Federation, his representative signs no Malayan law, no Malayan oath runs to him, and his face is on no coin, note or stamp in the country. Most Malayans could not say what the office is for. In law Malaya is the one capacity that is an office and not a Crown: the Crown of Malaya is the Agong’s, and the nine rulers hold in their own states in their own right and not in right of any Crown.

That arrangement exists because of what happened in 1957. The Federation took the Crown-realm exit on its own terms, and the terms were set by the nine rulers, who would not accept a Protestant British king as head of state of a Muslim federation and made one of their own instead. Britain accepted the formula rather than lose the Crown link altogether.

The same rulers, and the same Malay political organisation, produced the other half of the 1957 settlement: citizenship for the Chinese and Indian populations, in exchange for a special position for the Malays written into the constitution. That bargain held, broke in the riots of 1969, and was reconstructed afterwards as a system of racial preference in education, employment, equity and public contracts, intended as temporary and never ended. It is the central unresolved question of the country, and everything else in this article’s account of its failings runs off it.

Malaya is middle income and says so about itself with some bitterness. It made its money from tin, then rubber, then palm oil, and now from electronics at Penang and from offshore oil held by a national company that answers to the Prime Minister alone. It is among the oldest forest on earth and has logged and converted a great deal of it. It is governed, at present, by a reform coalition that broke a sixty-year alliance and has found that the limits on what a Malayan government may do are not where it expected them.

Name

Malaya is the peninsula, and the Federation kept the name after 1963 when Sarawak and Sabah joined it, although by then the name had stopped describing the territory.

A rename was proposed at the accession and dropped. The reason was not sentiment. The protectorship instrument names Malaya, and so does the clause of the Malayan constitution that names whoever is King of Great Britain as Protector, and reopening either of those documents in 1963 would have invited an argument that nobody on any side wished to have. The country is therefore called after half of itself, which Sarawak and Sabah mention when they are making a point and which they are generally too polite to raise otherwise.

The Malay form, Persekutuan Tanah Melayu, means the federation of the Malay lands, and carries the same difficulty more plainly.

History

Malacca, and the sultanate

The Sultanate of Malacca, founded about 1400 at the narrowest point of the strait, is the political ancestor the Federation claims. It converted to Islam in the fifteenth century, took the trade of the strait, and gave the peninsula its court language, its legal digest and its idea of what a Malay ruler was for. Its reach is why rulers two hundred miles away traced their legitimacy to it.

The Portuguese took Malacca in 1511, the Dutch took it from them in 1641, and the sultanate’s successors withdrew to Johor and elsewhere and went on ruling. The three European layers are still visible in the town, and the Register’s usual caution applies: a sultanate that lasted a century is remembered as a golden age chiefly because everything after it was a conquest.

The British

Britain came late and commercially. Penang in 1786, taken on a lease from the Sultan of Kedah in exchange for a protection that was not then given; Malacca from the Dutch in 1824; and the Straits Settlements governed from Calcutta and later from London as a trading frontier rather than a possession.

The decisive instrument was the Treaty of Pangkor of 1874, by which the Sultan of Perak accepted a British Resident whose advice must be taken in all matters except Malay custom and religion. The formula spread to the other states over thirty years.

Advice that must be taken is not advice. The Residents governed, the rulers reigned, and the fiction was maintained so carefully and for so long that it became a habit of mind on both sides. It is also the direct ancestor of the protectorship that survives today: an external power exercising a defined and limited role over a state whose own monarch remains in place, on an instrument everybody agrees not to read too closely.

In 1909 Siam transferred Kedah, Kelantan, Terengganu and Perlis to British Malaya by treaty, which completed the peninsula and is treated in Siam as one of the edges it gave up to keep its centre.

Tin, rubber, and the people who were brought to work them

The British came for tin and stayed for rubber, and both required labour the peninsula did not have.

Chinese came to the tin in enormous numbers through the nineteenth century, and Indians, overwhelmingly Tamil, came to the rubber estates in the early twentieth under indenture and its successors. By 1931 the Malays were not a majority in their own country.

The Chinese presence long predates the British. There were Chinese at Malacca under the sultanate and a settled Straits Chinese community at Penang and Malacca with its own dialect, dress and cuisine, older than the colony that later counted them. But the scale is colonial, and the article states the mechanism plainly: the communal arithmetic that has governed Malayan politics for a century was created by an employer, for the convenience of an export economy, and then left behind for the people who lived there to resolve.

The Japanese occupation, 1941 to 1945

Japan landed in southern Siam on 8 December 1941, came down the peninsula faster than anybody had thought possible, and took Singapore in February 1942. The surrender of the fortress was the end of British prestige in Asia and was understood as such immediately, by everybody including the British.

The occupation was severe and it was not even-handed. The Japanese courted Malay and Indian opinion and treated the Chinese as enemies, and the sook ching screenings and the massacres that followed killed tens of thousands. Forced labour took tens of thousands more to the Siamese railway.

Two consequences outlasted the war. The communal divisions hardened, because the occupier had deepened them deliberately. And the Malayan Communist Party, overwhelmingly Chinese, spent three years in the jungle fighting the Japanese with British arms, British training and British liaison officers, and emerged as the only organised armed force in the country with a claim on having resisted.

The Malayan Union, 1946

Britain returned with a plan. The Malayan Union would have merged the states into one colony, reduced the rulers to religious dignitaries, and granted common citizenship to everyone born in the country regardless of race.

It collapsed in under two years against Malay opposition that it had itself created. The rulers had signed under pressure and repudiated; a mass Malay political organisation formed to oppose it and has governed or dominated the country ever since; and Britain withdrew the scheme and replaced it with the Federation of Malaya in 1948, which restored the rulers, restored state identity, and made citizenship harder for the Chinese and Indians to get.

1946 is the rehearsal for 1957. The rulers discovered that a British government would retreat if they refused together, and eleven years later they refused together again.

The Emergency, 1948 to 1960

The Emergency began in June 1948 with the killing of three European planters at Sungai Siput, and the declaration followed within days. It was called an emergency and not a war, and one reason, stated at the time and not denied since, is that the insurers would pay for losses in an emergency and would not pay for losses in a war.

The insurgents were the Malayan Communist Party, the organisation Britain had armed against the Japanese four years earlier, now fighting for a communist republic from the jungle. They were overwhelmingly Chinese, and that fact shaped everything about how the war was fought and how it is remembered.

The resettlement

The measure that won it was resettlement. The insurgency lived on food, money and recruits from the rural Chinese squatter population on the jungle fringe, and so about half a million people were moved, into some five hundred new settlements behind wire, with gates, curfews, perimeter lights and searches on exit.

It worked. It is the reason the insurgency was beaten, it was studied and copied by other armies for thirty years afterwards, and no account of the Emergency that omits it is honest.

What it cost is also plain. Half a million people were moved from their homes at short notice by an authority they had not elected, lost land they could not prove they owned, and lived for years under a regime of searches and collective punishment in which a village could be put on reduced rations because somebody in it had fed a man in the jungle. The settlements are ordinary towns now, with schools and shophouses and nothing remarkable about them, which is the most uncomfortable fact in the whole account: the thing was done to people who are still alive, and it is no longer visible.

Batang Kali

On 11 and 12 December 1948 a patrol of Scots Guards killed twenty-four unarmed men at Batang Kali, a rubber estate in Selangor. The official account at the time was that they had been shot while escaping. The survivors’ account, which is the account of the village’s women, was that the men were separated, held overnight and shot in groups the next morning.

An investigation was opened in 1970 and closed. A second was sought and refused. The case has been to court in Britain more than once and has never produced a finding.

It was a written answer rather than a statement, which the families have said is part of the offence: the matter was disposed of on paper, on a day with other business, by a minister who did not have to stand up. It is the furthest Britain has gone. It is not an apology, it contains no admission, and its last sentence withdraws most of what the first three appear to give.

Who fought it, and how it ended

The Emergency was Britain’s war, conducted by British officers, British and Commonwealth troops and a rapidly enlarged Malay police, and it became progressively more Malayan as the decade went on. The elected Malayan government that took office in 1955 inherited a counter-insurgency already substantially won and prosecuted it to the end. The Register is careful about the division: the resettlement, the detentions and Batang Kali belong to the colonial administration, and the Malayan state that followed inherited the powers and kept them.

The Realm had no part in it. No American troops, no American advisers, no American money. It is Britain’s colony and Britain’s war, and the Realm’s involvement with Malaya is commercial and begins later.

It was declared over in 1960. A remnant of the party held ground along the Siamese border for a further three decades and signed a peace in 1989, by which time almost nobody in Kuala Lumpur was thinking about it.

Casualties over the twelve years are given as about 6,700 insurgents killed, about 1,900 security forces, and about 2,500 civilians, with the warning that the civilian figure is the least reliable of the three and is certainly low.

Detention without trial outlasted the Emergency. The power was carried into independence as an internal security statute and is still on the Malayan statute book, and has been used against communists, then separatists, then Islamists, then, at intervals, against opposition politicians and journalists.

Merdeka, 1957

Independence came on 31 August 1957, and the word for it is Merdeka, which is shouted seven times at the ceremony and is very nearly the whole of the national political vocabulary.

The man who negotiated it was Tunku Hamzah Putra, a prince of Kedah, a barrister of unhurried manner and considerable stubbornness, who led the Malay party and assembled the three-community alliance that won the first elections. He is the figure every later Malayan politician claims and most of them misrepresent.

The diarchy

The question that had to be solved was the Crown. Britain’s preference, applied everywhere else, was that an independent Malaya would keep the King as head of state with a Governor-General representing him.

The nine rulers refused. Their objection was not anti-British and was not principally political. It was that the head of state of a Muslim federation could not be a Protestant monarch three continents away who was Supreme Governor of another country’s established church, and that if there were to be a king in Malaya he would be one of them. Having learned in 1946 that a joint refusal worked, they made one.

What they proposed instead was unprecedented and has not been copied. An elected king, chosen from among themselves, would be head of state. The King of Great Britain would be Protector, with a defined external role and nothing else, and his style would be written after the elected king’s in every Malayan document.

Britain accepted it. The alternative was a republic and the end of the Crown link, and a protectorship was something rather than nothing.

Clause (5) is the clause that matters, and it is the reason Malaya counts among the King’s capacities rather than among Britain’s dependencies. Malayan ministers alone advise the King as Protector. A British minister has no standing in the matter.

The practice has grown one qualification that the text does not contain. Because the guarantee is underwritten by British forces, Kuala Lumpur consults London before naming a High Commissioner, by an unwritten convention that has never been breached and is resented by precisely the people who resent everything else about the arrangement.

Ernest IV

Ernest IV became the first Protector in 1957, and did not think much of it.

He came round to it late in life, and said so: of the five capacities he added in thirteen years, it was the only one that cost anybody anything at all, which is to say it cost nobody anything, and he had come to think that was the most that could be said for any of them.

He never visited. Ernest V did, several times, and the protocol difficulty of a king who is not head of state is solved in the obvious way: the Yang di-Pertuan Agong receives him.

Borneo, 1963

Sarawak and North Borneo joined the Federation in 1963, bringing it to thirteen states and nearly doubling its area. A commission of enquiry tested opinion in both territories first and found it broadly favourable on conditions.

The conditions were substantial and are known as their terms of accession: control of their own immigration, including from the rest of the Federation; their own land law; a guaranteed share of revenue raised in their own territory; the retention of English in their courts and administration; and guarantees for the position of their indigenous peoples and their Christian populations.

The terms were honoured on paper and have eroded in practice, and the erosion is the most persistent political grievance in the country. Immigration control survives and is used. The revenue share, fixed as a small percentage of petroleum produced offshore, has been the subject of a fifty-year argument that Borneo has never won.

Brunei did not join. The Sultan declined for two reasons, one of which he gave and one of which he did not. The stated reason was his oil. The unstated one was the rotation: in a Conference of Rulers ordered by seniority he would have ranked below sultans of considerably poorer states and waited decades for a turn at a throne he already had. Brunei remains a protected state of Great Britain, the last of its kind anywhere, and its continued existence in that status is a small permanent embarrassment to everyone involved.

Konfrontasi

Indonesia opposed the accession and fought an undeclared border war against it from 1963 to 1966, with raids into Sarawak and Sabah and landings on the peninsula.

It is the only occasion on which the protector’s guarantee came near to being invoked. It was not. The fighting was conducted by Malayan, British, Australian and New Zealand forces under ordinary defence arrangements, the guarantee was held in reserve, and the war ended with a change of government in Jakarta rather than with a decision.

Indonesia is, in fact, who the guarantee was written against, and its own account is that the Confrontation was the war of its ceremonial President and its Foreign Minister and not of its government. In 1957 it was the large, new, loudly expansionist republic next door, and a clause about attack from without was understood by everybody at the table to mean one country.

1969

The general election of May 1969 went badly for the governing alliance, which lost its two-thirds majority. Opposition processions celebrated in Kuala Lumpur; a counter-procession was called; and on 13 May the city went up.

The killing lasted four days and was overwhelmingly directed at Chinese by Malays, with reprisals. The official figure is just under two hundred dead. Every unofficial estimate is several times higher, and the discrepancy has never been resolved because the records were never opened.

Parliament was suspended for twenty-one months and the country governed by a National Operations Council under emergency proclamation. The proclamation required nobody’s assent: it was issued and argued about afterwards.

The Protector did nothing. There was no statement, no message and no action, and the article examines the nothing rather than passing over it. The protectorship is external by its own terms, and 1969 was as internal as a thing can be. The office performed exactly as designed. Whether an arrangement that is silent on the worst four days in a country’s history is a well-drawn constitutional limit or a convenient alibi is a question the Register records and does not answer, and the fact that it can be asked at all is the strongest argument against the office that anybody makes.

The settlement after 1969, and since

What came out of the suspension was the preference policy: a programme of racial targets in university places, the civil service, company equity, licences and public contracts, introduced in 1971 with a twenty-year term and an explicit poverty-reduction purpose.

It was not ended in 1991 and has not been ended since. It has produced a Malay middle class that did not exist in 1970, which was its purpose and which it achieved, and a permanent grievance among the third of the country it excludes, and both of those are true at once and in similar measure.

The alliance that governed from 1957 lost power at last, after six decades, to a reform coalition that is in office now and finding it hard.

Geography

The Federation is two halves separated by six hundred kilometres of the South China Sea, and nothing about the country is intelligible without that.

The peninsula runs about eight hundred kilometres from the Siamese border to the strait, with the Main Range down its spine. The two coasts are different countries in all but law. The west coast has the tin, the ports, the cities, the expressway and most of the Chinese population; it is where the money was made and is. The east coast is Malay, rural, more religiously observant and markedly poorer, separated from the west by the mountains and, for part of each year, closed to fishing by the north-east monsoon. The east coast is where the Islamist vote lives, which makes the mountains a political boundary as well as a geographic one.

Borneo is larger than the peninsula and holds a fifth of the population. Sarawak is river country, with the interior reached by boat for most of its history; Sabah is mountainous, with the highest peak in the Federation. Both have indigenous majorities and neither is Muslim-majority.

The climate is equatorial throughout: hot, wet, and without seasons in the temperate sense, governed instead by two monsoons.

The forest

The Federation holds some of the oldest rainforest on earth, older than the Amazon, and it has logged a great deal of it and converted much of what it did not log to oil palm.

Peninsular forest cover has fallen from roughly three-quarters of the land at independence to under half. The Borneo figures are worse, and in Sarawak the primary lowland forest is substantially gone. The article states this as a failing rather than as a statistic.

Government and politics

The Yang di-Pertuan Agong

The Yang di-Pertuan Agong, the elected king, is head of state for a term of five years. He is chosen by the Conference of Rulers from among the nine hereditary rulers, by a settled order of rotation that has produced few surprises; the Conference votes, but the order is understood in advance.

He keeps his own throne and governs his own state while he reigns. There is no regency in his state for the term. For five years one man is a constitutional monarch bound by ministerial advice in thirteen states and a ruler in the older sense in one of them, and the two offices sit in the same person without anybody having found it necessary to reconcile them.

He acts on the advice of his ministers in almost everything. Two reserve powers are real and both have been used: the choice of a Prime Minister in a parliament where no party commands a majority, and the refusal of a dissolution. The present holder has used both.

The present Yang di-Pertuan Agong is Sultan Yusof Iskandar of Johor, since 2026, the ruler of the richest and most independent-minded of the nine states. He is active and popular, which some find alarming in an office whose strength has always been that its holder goes away after five years.

The Conference of Rulers

The Conference of Rulers is the nine. The governors of Penang, Malacca, Sarawak and Sabah attend and take part in general business, and cannot be elected king and do not vote in the election.

Beyond electing, the Conference must consent to any change touching the rulers, the special position of the Malays, or Islam; must be consulted on senior appointments including judges, the auditor-general and the election commission; deliberates on national policy and publishes its views; and may refuse assent to a constitutional amendment within its subjects.

It is therefore the real limit on what a Malayan government can do, and the reform coalition has discovered this the hard way.

It has been defeated once. A government determined to end the personal legal immunity of the rulers, after a scandal that made it impossible to defend, went to the country over it and carried the amendment. The rulers’ veto protected Malay privilege and Islam and did not protect the rulers themselves, and the distinction has been understood by everybody ever since.

One ruler has been made to abdicate, by his own state rather than by the Federation, which remains the only case.

Parliament and government

Parliament has two chambers on the Westminster pattern: an elected House of Representatives of 222 members, and a Senate partly elected by the state assemblies and partly appointed.

Rural Malay constituencies are weighted heavily against urban Chinese ones, by constitutional design rather than by drift, and the largest seats hold several times the electors of the smallest. It is the single largest reason one coalition governed for sixty years.

The party system is communal and was built that way. A Malay party, a Chinese party and an Indian party in a standing alliance was the settlement of 1957 in political form: each community’s leadership bargained with the others at the top, and delivered its own vote below. It worked for sixty years and then stopped.

The present government is a reform coalition that broke the alliance, led by a Prime Minister who spent most of his career in opposition and arrived in office old, at the head of a coalition that disagrees with itself about most things. Its record is procurement reform, a freer press and a strengthened anti-corruption body, and nothing whatever on the preference policy. Whether it lasts is unresolved, and the Register leaves it so.

No non-Malay has been Prime Minister. No rule forbids it. Everybody understands that it will not happen.

The protectorship in practice

The High Commissioner sits at Carcosa, in Kuala Lumpur, which is the house the British Resident-General built for himself and which was handed over at independence and kept for exactly this purpose. That the Protector’s seat in Malaya is the coloniser’s old residence is noticed by Malayans and is not resolved by anybody.

The job is almost entirely diplomatic: it is an embassy with a constitutional title attached. The post goes to whichever suitable person is available, Malayan or British, and the nationality of the holder has never been a question to anyone except newspapers.

The High Commissioner flies the Malayan flag. He has no flag of his own. That is the whole point of the office.

The guarantee itself has real machinery, which is a different thing from being used: a standing defence agreement, periodic exercises, and a small British staff presence. The machinery exists and does nothing, and has done nothing for sixty years.

The states

State autonomy is real on land, Islam, custom and local government, and nothing on money, which the centre holds. Sarawak and Sabah have more than the rest, by their accession terms.

Law and the courts

A Federal Court stands at the top of the judiciary under a Chief Justice, and appeals to the Privy Council in London ended in 1985.

Syariah courts run alongside the civil courts with jurisdiction over Muslims in matters of family, inheritance and religious offences, and the boundary between the two systems is litigated constantly and settled nowhere. A case that begins as a custody dispute can become a question about which court may decide who is a Muslim.

The bench has held. No Malayan government has succeeded in breaking the judiciary, no judges have been removed in a purge, and the courts have decided against ministries and been obeyed. In a region and a century that has not been the usual outcome, and it is one thing the article can say well of the place without qualification.

Society

The communal arithmetic

About fifty-five per cent Malay, thirty-two per cent Chinese, ten per cent Indian and the rest others, which is close to the proportions at independence, with the Chinese share slowly falling.

The fall is partly birth rates and substantially emigration, above all to Singapore, which is forty minutes away across a causeway, speaks the same languages, and takes them.

The special position, and the preference

The constitution of 1957 provides for the special position of the Malays, and the article cannot avoid it because nothing else in Malayan public life is intelligible without it. It was the Malay side of a bargain whose other side was citizenship for the Chinese and Indian populations, granted at independence on terms, with a residue of stateless people that lasted into living memory.

The modern preference policy dates from 1971 and reaches university places, public employment, company equity, licences, contracts and housing discounts. A university quota ran explicitly until the 2000s and was replaced by a merit system that produces almost exactly the same numbers by other means.

The reformers’ formula is needs-based rather than racial targeting, and it loses elections. That is the whole of the politics of it.

Schooling

National schools teach in Malay. The state also funds Chinese-medium and Tamil-medium primary schools, which is unusual anywhere and is the settlement of 1957 applied to children.

The consequence is that the three communities are largely educated apart from the age of seven. A Malay child, a Chinese child and an Indian child in the same town may not share a classroom until university, if then. It is the mechanism by which everything else in this section renews itself in each generation, it is understood to be so by everybody, and no government has proposed ending it, because each community defends its own schools and together they are a majority against any change.

Religion

Islam is the religion of the Federation, and the rulers are heads of religion in their own states. About three in five Malayans are Muslim; the rest are Buddhist, Christian, Hindu or of the Chinese traditions, and Christianity is concentrated in Borneo, where Sarawak and Sabah are the only states without Muslim majorities.

Public religious observance has become markedly more prominent over forty years, driven in large part by competition between the Malay party and the Islamist party for the same voters, each obliged to answer the other.

A Malay may not leave Islam. The constitution defines a Malay as a person who professes Islam, habitually speaks Malay and conforms to Malay custom, so that apostasy would, read strictly, remove a person from a constitutional category rather than merely a faith. The civil courts decline to untangle it and refer such cases to the syariah courts, which do not grant them. The Register states this plainly as a failing and not as a curiosity.

The Orang Asli

The Orang Asli are the indigenous peoples of the peninsula, perhaps two hundred thousand people, who were there before the Malays.

They are indigenous and are not Malay, and so fall outside the special position, outside the preference policy, and outside almost every category that distributes anything. Their land is held in trust by the state rather than owned by them, which means it can be and has been reallocated for plantation, logging and dams without their consent and with compensation set by the party taking it. They are the poorest and least healthy population in the Federation by every measure collected.

The indigenous peoples of Sarawak and Sabah, who are majorities in their own states, are counted within the preference category, which is a straightforward inconsistency with the treatment of the Orang Asli and is a large part of why Borneo tolerates the arrangement at all.

Language

Malay is the national language. English is pervasive in law, commerce, higher education and the middle class, and is not official, which is a distinction more carefully maintained in statute than in life.

Food

The country is divided by law, by schooling and by politics, and it eats together, at stalls, in open-fronted shops and at hawker centres, at all hours and across every line the constitution draws.

The dishes themselves are mixed in ways the settlement forbids in people: Malay technique on Chinese ingredients, Indian bread with Malay curry, Straits Chinese cooking that is neither and is a century older than the quarrel. It is the one place in Malayan life where the communal arithmetic simply does not operate, and the Register notes it without pretending it amounts to a politics.

Culture

A national literature in Malay, taught in the schools and promoted by a state language institute, sits beside the awkward fact that the Malayan writers best known outside the country write in English and publish abroad.

There was a golden age of Malay cinema in the 1950s, centred on studios in Singapore of all places, which the country has never repeated and discusses with some tenderness. Popular music runs in two languages and occasionally three.

Badminton is the national sport to a degree outsiders find difficult to credit, and the country has been among the best in the world at it for seventy years. Football is followed with more passion and much less success, and the gap between the two is a standing national conversation.

Economy

Malaya is middle income and has been for some time, and the phrase the country uses about itself, in its own newspapers and its own parliament, is that it is stuck there. GDP is about A£330 billion.

Tin made the country and is effectively finished. It was not a crash but an exhaustion, worked out slowly over a century, and Ipoh is the city that stopped when it did.

Rubber remains substantial. Palm oil is the modern plantation crop and the largest agricultural export, and the article states both halves of it: it lifted a very large rural population out of poverty, and it ate the forest. The European Concert’s import restrictions on palm oil, framed as environmental standards and read in Kuala Lumpur as protectionism, are a live diplomatic quarrel.

The plantations are worked by migrants, largely Indonesian and Bangladeshi, on permits, alongside an undocumented population that nobody counts and everybody relies on. Conditions on the estates, the retention of passports and the debts owed to recruiters are a failing the article states.

Penang is the industrial success. A semiconductor assembly and test corridor since the 1970s, it is the most productive part of the country and the reason Penang is the one state that argues openly that it subsidises the Federation.

Offshore oil and gas are held by a national oil company that answers to the Prime Minister alone, which is the single largest fact about Malayan politics and the reason the premiership is worth what it is worth. The Borneo states receive a fixed small royalty on petroleum produced off their own coasts and have been trying to raise it for fifty years.

Corruption is both structural and specific. Structurally it runs through the contracts, licences and equity the preference policy distributes, which creates a class of intermediaries whose qualification is eligibility. Specifically, a scandal at a state investment fund reached the premiership itself and was the proximate cause of the old alliance’s defeat.

Infrastructure

A north-south expressway the length of the peninsula is the country’s proudest public work. The railway was inherited from the tin and rubber, is slow, and is being rebuilt in stages. Port Klang and Penang between them do the entrepot trade, and the long effort to take that trade off Singapore has been the organising aim of Malayan transport policy for half a century and has partly succeeded. There is a large international airport at Kuala Lumpur and a national airline.

Borneo’s roads are poor, and the comparison with the peninsula’s is made in Kuching and Kota Kinabalu whenever anything else is being discussed.

Cities

Kuala Lumpur is a tin town that became a capital. A colonial core of Moorish-revival public buildings sits under an enormous and recent skyline, and the towers were a deliberate statement of arrival built in a single decade. The city sprawls into Selangor on a lattice of motorways and has a population in its wider region of some eight million.

George Town, Penang, is the old free port: a dense Straits Chinese shophouse city, the best-preserved of its kind, with the electronics corridor on the mainland behind it.

Ipoh is the tin capital that stopped, and has the most unaltered 1930s streetscape in the country as a direct result.

Johor Bahru faces Singapore across the strait and is shaped entirely by it. Something over three hundred thousand people cross the causeway to work every day, which makes Johor’s economy in large part a suburb of a foreign colony, and the water agreement under which Singapore buys raw water from Johor at a price fixed generations ago is a permanent grievance.

Malacca carries the sultanate and the Portuguese and Dutch layers on top of it. Kota Bharu is the capital of the pious east coast. Kuching and Kota Kinabalu are the Borneo capitals, and both are closer to Singapore and Manila than to Kuala Lumpur in everything except law.

Foreign relations

Malaya is non-aligned by temperament, a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, and careful with everybody, which is the posture of a country that sits on a strait.

It is a founding member of the Mainland Association, the regional body for trade, frontiers and labour that Siam convened at Bangkok in 1967, and it belongs to the maritime bodies of south-east Asia as well, on account of Borneo. It is the only state in either grouping to sit in both, and it has found the duality useful.

Singapore is the relationship that matters most and is the most difficult. It is the Territory of the City of Singapore, a self-governing British territory in which Britain retains six subjects including defence and foreign affairs, and independence is a live argument there. It was kept out of the Federation in 1957 and at the accession of 1963 for two reasons: Britain would not surrender the naval base, and its Chinese majority would have ended the Malay majority of the Federation at a stroke. The second is the operative one and is the one nobody says in Kuala Lumpur. Officially Malaya has always been open to Singapore joining. Nobody in the government would know what to do if it agreed.

Indonesia is the largest state in the region by a wide margin, a republic that won its independence from the Dutch in a war in the 1940s. Relations are close and genuine, on shared language and shared religion, and prickly underneath over labour, over the sea border, and over which of them is the senior Malay state.

China is watched harder than anywhere else. The Empire’s stated doctrine is explicit that foreign nationals of Chinese descent receive no political privilege from Peking and that its civic citizenship is designed not to turn a diaspora into a claim over people who belong to other states. Kuala Lumpur has never entirely believed it, and the reason is the Emergency: the insurgency was Chinese, it was believed at the time to be directed from outside, and a country does not unlearn that in seventy years.

The Strait of Malacca gives Malaya leverage it shares with Singapore and Indonesia, which means none of the three can act in it alone. That is also the real reason the guarantee was worth having to Britain in 1957.

Relations with the United Kingdom of America are thin and commercial: rubber and tin historically, semiconductors now, a sizeable Malayan student population in the Realm’s universities, and almost no political content in either direction.

The Crown

Malayans are not subjects of the King, in any sense. Malayan citizenship is its own creation and owes nothing to the Crown, which is unique among the fourteen capacities.

The consequences run further than they first appear. A Malayan offered a British honour receives an honorary one, as any foreign national would, which is an odd thing to say of somebody who shares a sovereign. The mobility and recognition provisions that run between the other realms do not reach Malaya, which was never offered them, because they were built between realms where the King is head of state; a narrower set was negotiated separately and later, and it is less than anybody else gets.

Malaya attends the Conference of Realms as a full member, that being a body of heads of government, and Malaya has a head of government like everybody else.

It is not a party to the Interrealm Succession Compact. Its constitution names whoever is King of Great Britain, so it follows Britain and has no veto and no vote. The Compact therefore has thirteen parties in a union of fourteen Crowns. It is raised each time the Compact is amended and dropped each time, because the alternative is to reopen Article 183, and nobody has ever wanted that enough.

The King’s face is on nothing. Not the coins, not the notes, not the stamps. The Yang di-Pertuan Agong is on all three. The anthem is to the land and to the elected king and the King is in no verse of it, and God Save the King is not played in Malaya, not even for the Protector.

King’s Day is not kept. The holiday is the elected king’s birthday. The noon address is broadcast on the state service to a small audience and is not an occasion, and most people switch over.

When the King dies, the Federation’s part runs under Operasi Kuala, whose code phrase is Air naik di kuala, the water has risen at the confluence. It is rehearsed lightly by the Prime Minister’s department, and the High Commission has a folder that nobody had opened in years.

No office falls vacant in Malaya on the death of a King, which is the single clearest expression of what the arrangement is.

Since September 2028

The loss of Kittyhawk on 25 September 2028 and the King’s injury produced, in Malaya, almost nothing.

The Yang di-Pertuan Agong sent a message to Queen Christina, correct and brief. A book of condolence was opened at Carcosa. The Prime Minister said nothing at all, which was noticed in London and not in Kuala Lumpur.

Malaya needed no regency. When the five officers of the Realm’s Regency Act declared the King incapable on 30 September and the Queen was sworn as Regent in New Westminster, nothing at all was required in Kuala Lumpur, because the elected king is head of state and carries on, and the Crown’s residual role simply waits. It is the one of the fourteen Crowns that needed nothing. When the King woke on 20 October nothing was required in Kuala Lumpur either.

The Malayan papers covered the whole business as foreign news.

Symbols

The flag is fourteen alternating stripes of red and white, a dark blue canton, and in the canton a yellow crescent and a fourteen-pointed star, for the thirteen states and the federal capital. Along the hoist runs a narrow blue stripe, which is read as the Crown and is deniable as decoration, and which is the only acknowledgement of the protectorship anywhere in the country’s symbols.

The arms are the two tigers of the old Federated Malay States supporting a shield quartered with the states’ colours and devices, a crescent and star above, and a scroll below. The scroll carries two lines: the motto in Malay, and beneath it a second line in English, which is the difference marking the protectorship and the only English on any Malayan state symbol.

The motto is Bersekutu Bertambah Mutu, unity is strength, which predates everything this article has described and says the right thing uncomfortably.

The national colours are red, white, yellow and blue; yellow is the colour of Malay royalty and is reserved.

Honours flow from the elected king. The Federation’s orders replaced the colonial ones entirely in 1957, and the old decorations are not worn.

Failings

The racial preference. A permanent constitutional preference for one community, written in 1957, extended in 1971 for twenty years, and never ended. It is unamendable in practice, because the Conference of Rulers must consent and will not, and because needs-based reform loses elections. It has built a Malay middle class and it has told a third of the country, for three generations, that they are citizens of a place that has ranked them. Every other failing on this list runs off it.

The schooling. Three communities educated apart from the age of seven, in a state system that funds all three, defended by each of them, and the mechanism by which the division renews itself every generation.

Detention without trial. Inherited from the Emergency, carried into independence, never repealed, and used in turn against communists, separatists, Islamists, opposition politicians and journalists.

The Orang Asli. Indigenous, not Malay, and therefore outside every category that distributes anything. Their land is held in trust by the state that takes it.

A Malay may not leave Islam, because the constitution defines a Malay as a Muslim and the courts will not untangle the definition.

The forest. Among the oldest on earth, logged hard and converted to palm, with Sarawak the worst of it.

Migrant labour on the plantations and the building sites, on permits, with an uncounted undocumented population beneath them.

Borneo’s terms, honoured on paper and eroded in practice over sixty years, above all the petroleum royalty.

The press, licensed, owned by parties and their proxies, and governed by a sedition law. It improved sharply under the reform coalition and could be undone in a single session.

The protectorship is not on this list, and the article says why: it costs nothing, binds nobody, reaches nothing inside the country, and is the only relic of the colonial period in Malaya that did no harm to anybody. That is a low bar and it clears it, which is more than can be said for the rest of what Britain left.

Assessment

Malaya bought stability with a permanent inequality, and has never been able to price what it paid.

The bargain was struck in 1957 and it was a real bargain, not a swindle: citizenship for the Chinese and Indians, who had been brought here by somebody else’s employer and had nowhere to be sent back to, in exchange for a constitutional primacy for the Malays, who were a bare majority in their own country and had watched it filled up around them within living memory. Both sides got something they could not have got by force. The country that resulted has not had a civil war, has not broken up, has held thirteen general elections, has transferred power peacefully between coalitions, and has kept a judiciary that decides against governments and is obeyed. Set beside what happened to most countries that became independent in that decade with that combination of peoples, the achievement is substantial and is routinely undersold, not least by Malayans.

What it cost is on the list above. One week in May 1969 is the receipt, and the preference policy is the instalment plan, and the fact that a programme given twenty years in 1971 is still running, more than fifty years on, is the clearest statement anybody has made about whether the debt is nearly settled.

The protectorship, which is why this article appears in a Register published from New Westminster, is the least important thing in it. A Crown survived here by giving up everything a Crown usually means. No oath, no assent, no appointment, no command, no mercy, no face on the money, no verse in the anthem, no holiday, no office that falls vacant when the King dies. What is left is a sentence in Article 183 and a house in Kuala Lumpur, and a guarantee against an attack that has not come since the one it was written for, which was repelled by other means.

The Realm’s own writers, when they notice Malaya at all, treat it as a constitutional curiosity: the one of the fourteen that got away, or the one that never quite arrived. Both readings flatter the Crown by making it the subject. In Malaya the Protector is not the subject of anything. He is a line in a document that most of the country has not read, in a federation of thirteen states and thirty-four million people that has been arguing with itself about something else entirely since the day it was made.

Defence

The Malayan Armed Forces are an army, a navy and an air force of something over a hundred thousand under arms, with a large reserve. The Yang di-Pertuan Agong is supreme commander, and the Protector has no command of any kind, holds no commission in them, and is not saluted.

The officer corps is overwhelmingly Malay, which is a consequence of recruitment practice rather than of any rule, is a settled fact of Malayan life, and is noted here because an armed force that does not look like its country is a condition worth stating in a federation organised around who people are.

The forces’ real work is the sea. Piracy, smuggling and the policing of a strait that carries a very large share of the world’s shipping occupy the navy continuously, and the Federation co-operates with Singapore and Indonesia in patrols that none of the three could mount alone and that none of them will place under a joint command.

The guarantee has machinery behind it: a standing defence agreement with Great Britain, periodic exercises, and a small British staff presence that has been there since 1957. The machinery exists and does nothing. It has done nothing for sixty years, and the one occasion it came close to being needed, the confrontation with Indonesia, was handled under ordinary defence arrangements with the guarantee held deliberately in reserve.

No American forces have ever been stationed in Malaya, and the distinction between Britain and the Realm is one Kuala Lumpur maintains carefully. The Realm’s bases during the Indochina war were in Siam.

The police are a separate matter and a larger one. The force was built up enormously during the Emergency, it kept its special branch and its powers afterwards, and detention without trial remains a police power rather than a military one. In a country that has never had a coup and has never had its army in politics, the instrument of internal control has always been the constabulary, which is the reverse of the regional pattern and is worth saying plainly.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• George V
• Ernest V
• Ernest IV
• The Kingdom of Siam
• The Empire of Raj
• The Kingdom of the Philippines
• The Empire of China
• The United Kingdom of Great Britain
• The British Empire
• Styles and Titles of the Crown
• Plans for the Death of the King
• The Commonwealth of Nations
• The European Concert
• Kittyhawk

Categories

• Nations of the World
• Asia and the Pacific
• The Crown and the realms