Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1786–1941 by Lynn Hollen Lees (review)

The history of British Malaya is a well-worn subject for scholars. With Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects, Lynn Hollen Lees, a professor of European social history, offers a fresh perspective on the material by moving it beyond a simple political history and placing it within a framework rooted in transnational movements in which a multicultural hybrid society with multiple allegiances is created alongside the various streams of colonization that are imposed upon the Malay Peninsula. The result is a work that follows the traditional tale of various ethnic groups migrating to the region, and the role of British administration in overseeing the complex milieu of peoples and environments, but views the material from a perspective that incorporates theories and practices reflecting global approaches to subjects such as labour, imperialism and modernity, thus allowing readers to consider the story in a new light.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the nineteenth century, describing the expansion of British colonial rule in its various forms throughout the Malay Peninsula, and the corresponding growth of plantation agriculture and the rise of new urban centres, such as Ipoh. This begins, strangely enough, with a focus on Penang and the Penang Sugar Estate—whose archive the author had access to—instead of Singapore, where most of the energy and ideology for the spread of British power originated, particularly in the post-1874 period on which she focuses. While this may be a result of the sources she used to gain greater insight into the period and working within the modern political boundaries of Malaysia, it results in a diminishment of the role that Singapore played in such endeavours. Although such a perspective is problematic, this section, as well as the rest of the work, provides an interesting survey of the various threads of interaction between newly arrived immigrants, British administrators and overseers and the economic and social milieu in which they lived. This is accomplished in the next three chapters, in which Lees shifts her focus to the social world of plantations, and then their role in the growth of new urban centres and the ‘layered sovereignty’ of various powers enacting controls over the lives of the populace. She ends the first section with a consideration of the nascent urban society that developed in various towns and cities following the spread of plantations and new labour regimes.

The second section of the book details many of these same developments in the twentieth century, leading up to the Japanese Occupation. The chapters in this section centre on the impact of the rubber boom and subsequent modernization in the towns, the cosmopolitan urban culture that began to permeate these towns, and issues related to urban governance. Lees ends this second section with a consideration of the multiple allegiances of the various ethnic groups, before an epilogue discusses how colonial rule is remembered in modern Malaysia.

Much of this material is familiar to scholars of the region. Lees, however, presents it in a new manner, befitting her status as someone who is coming into the archives with different questions and understandings, which were developed in her primary area of specialization far from Malaysia. For the most part this is a positive, but it would have helped the work if, when she moves beyond the archive, the author was not so reliant on secondary works or textbooks on the subject, with A History of Malaysia by Leonard and Barbara Watson Andaya being apparently her primary text to support her arguments. While such texts are excellent works of scholarship, they create an unnecessary additional layer of secondary material between the author and the topic of the monograph. A greater use of other, more recent research would have also helped. An example of works that would have benefited, and even supported, the argument includes the work of Su Lin Lewis, Chua Ai Lin or Jan van der...