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Plural Society and the Colonial State: English Law and the Making of Crown Colony Government in the Straits Settlements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2015

Jack Jin Gary LEE
Jack Jin Gary LEE*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of California—San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA
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Abstract

In this article, I explain the establishment of Crown Colony government within the racially diverse colonies of the British Empire through an examination of the reconstitution of the Straits Settlements as a Crown Colony in 1867. My central argument is that the reconstitution of the Straits Settlements as a Crown Colony rested on colonial officials and subjects’ shared understandings of the fragmented and unstable character of racially diverse societies. Such understandings were analogous to J.S. Furnivall’s concept of “plural society” and were generated by the negative images of “native” populations and the precarity of colonial rule. Despite the reception of the common law and its institutions in the colony, these beliefs ultimately justified colonial officials’ repudiation of liberal principles of government and law despite intransigent protests by a minority of officials and subjects. In the Crown Colony of the Straits Settlements, this meant the institutionalization of a constitutional framework and laws that granted the Governor authoritarian powers over the legislature, judiciary, and society to maintain the social order.

Keywords

colonial stateCrown Colony governmentStraits Settlementsplural societypolitical liberalism
Type
State and Personhood in Southeast Asia
Information
Asian Journal of Law and Society , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , November 2015 , pp. 229 - 249
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press and KoGuan Law School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0533, USA. The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and both co-editors, Lynette Chua and David Engel, for their constructive comments and suggestions. He would also like to acknowledge Carolyn Wee of the NUS Law Library, Andrew J. Harding, Norman P. Ho, Ivan Lee, Kwai H. Ng, John D. Skrentny, Kevin Y.L. Tan, and Arun Thiruvengadam for their thoughtful feedback or for pointing out key sources that have helped develop this argument. In particular, the author is grateful to John McLaren for pointing out the significance of Sir Peter Benson Maxwell. All faults are, of course, the author’s. Thanks are also due to the Regana Mydin and Haikel Rino Selamat of the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at NUS for their support in the course of writing. Correspondence to Jack Jin Gary Lee, Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0533, USA. E-mail address: jackjin@ucsd.edu.

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