Rice in Malaya

4. The Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: The Northern Malay States

52 Rice in Malaya 4 The Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: The Northern Malay States In this and the two succeeding chapters the northern centres of rice-growing are discussed. These include Kedah and Perlis on the west coast of the Peninsula and Kelantan and Trengganu on the east. Penang and Province Wellesley were out-growths of the Kedah region and are treated in Chapter 5, while Perak, in part a minor traditional centre and in part a major area of pioneering, is considered in Chapter 6. The following chapters are concerned with the southern centre of cultivation in Malacca and Negri Sembilan and finally the remaining portion of the Peninsula in which rice-growing was not the sole or major economic activity. These accounts are inevitably unbalanced with respect to time. As the British gained control over each state, there was a rush of publications informing a presumably gratified public of imperium’s latest acquisition. Later materials, where these have survived, were almost exclusively documents concerned with routine administration. Thus we know more of the geography of Penang and Province Wellesley in the 1820s than in the 1870s but little of Kedah, with Perlis, Kelantan and Trengganu, until the first decade of the twentieth century. The initial colonization of Penang and the Province by rice farmers derived from Kedah, but Kedah was not to be adequately described until nearly a century later. During the period four major regions emerged. The first was the northern region centred upon Kedah but including the colonized lands of Penang and Province Wellesley. To the east, Kelantan, by the turn of the century prosperous and advanced in administration, contrasted markedly with the social, political and economic turmoil of Trengganu which was rather more urban and 52 The Northern Malay States 53 industrial craft in character. Perak, excepting the southern tin-mining areas, was much less important agriculturally than Kedah but offers a fine example of development under British rule. The second and southern region included the plains of Malacca, largely non-Minangkabau in technique, tradition and law, contrasting with the Minangkabau lands of the Negri Sembilan. The third region comprised the “marches”, areas in which rice-growing was of little importance or which were being colonized during the century. This included southern Perak, the whole of Selangor and Pahang, together with minor outliers in Johore and Singapore. The fourth region was that of the hill peoples. This region was known only in part during the nineteenth century and the reconstruction of their agricultural economy partly rests upon a backwards projection of more modern source materials. In any one of the states comprising these regions, the area occupied could have been rather limited since according to Newbold (SFP 26.1.1837) the total population of the Peninsular states, including Patani, was only about 475,000. Table 1 Malay Peninsula: Population Estimates, 18341 State Population Per cent Kedah (incl. Perlis) 50,000 11 Penang 40,322 8 Province Wellesley 49,553 10 Perak 35,000 7 Selangor 12,000 3 Malacca (incl. Naning) 34,333 7 “Negri Sembilan” 27,080 6 Johore 25,000 6 Patani 54,000 11 Kelantan 50,000 11 Trengganu 30,000 6 Kemaman 1,000 Pahang 40,000 8 Singapore 26,329 6 Total 474,617 100 Sources: SFP 26.1.1837; Newbold, 1839. 1 For comments on the reliability of these estimates see Hill, 1973, 146n. 54 Rice in Malaya Generally, four zones of settlement lay between the sea and the mountains . Along the coast and up the estuaries, scattered in and amongst the mangrove, were settlements of aborigines, the “strandloopers”, together with the bagans, villages of Malay commercial fishermen, the settlements of pirates and of mangrove-cutters. Inland, upstream of the point at which the riverwater was reasonably fresh, was the zone of agriculture, often with a screen of tree crops and in the north, bamboos along the river-banks, beyond which were the wet rice fields, usually in contiguous blocks. Inland again and upslope were the hamlets of Malay shifting cultivators separated from each other by tracts of forest from which timber and jungle products were extracted. Beyond these yet again, beyond tanah Melayu, the land of the Malays, were the orang bukit, the aboriginal hill peoples, living a largely self-contained and self-sufficient life. The northern region was bifurcate in form, extending from the Perak valley in the south-west, through the recently-colonized...