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Benevolent technocracy: The Chinese Protectorate, migration control and racialised governmentality in colonised Malaya

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2021

Siew-Min Sai
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Abstract

The Chinese Protectorate was first established in Singapore in 1877 with the limited objective of preventing abuses in Chinese labour migration, but it evolved multiple functions dedicated to governing Chinese migrants and residents in colonised Malaya. The Protector possessed extensive statutory powers and he was regarded as the official authority on all matters ‘Chinese’. This was an important yet under-studied colonial institution in the history of Chinese migration and settlement in Singapore and Malaysia. This article narrates the history behind the establishment of the Protectorate in the 1870s when ‘racialised governmentality’ of the Chinese population was institutionalised in colonised Malaya. The article underscores the significance of imperial and local contexts of the Protectorate's creation, arguing that it was a product of flexible adaptation of empire-wide practices of ‘protecting’ and governing liberated slaves, indigenous peoples and subsequently, indentured Indian labourers ‘humanely’. It is notable, therefore, that there was a coeval and conjoined discussion of migration control of Chinese as well as Indian labour migrants in Malaya during this period, but this history is hidden from plain sight by popular approaches studying labour migration as components of ethnic diasporas migrating from a single point of origin.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 441 - 463
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Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2021

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank Hong Lysa, Victor Zhuang and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments which made key lines of arguments clearer. Victor Zhuang and Justin Ng helped with obtaining materials that were otherwise inaccessible to me. I am grateful to them for supporting my research. Needless to say, I bear sole responsibility for the article's contents.

References

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27 ST, 1 June 1861.

28 Ibid.

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34 Straits Governor Andrew Clarke to Colonial Office, 29 Apr. 1875, CO273/80/6377, TNA. Straits Governor William Drummond Jervois to Colonial Office, 31 Aug. 1875, CO273/81/11167, TNA.

35 Straits Governor William Drummond Jervois to Colonial Office, 31 Aug. 1875, CO273/81/11167, TNA.

36 Proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements for 1873 (Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1874), p. 140.

37 Ibid.

38 ‘Official members’ in the LegCo were unelected bureaucrats whereas ‘Unofficial members’ were made up of British subjects who were influential members of the Straits — usually business — community. Unofficial members were appointed by the Government, all of whom were Europeans with one Unofficial seat in the LegCo reserved for the Chinese community.

39 Proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements for 1873 (Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1874), p. 143.

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44 Emphasis in original. Ibid.

45 Ibid., p. 88. Contradictory images and narratives about ‘Chinese character’ in British imperial knowledge and informational networks were not new and are well-documented and studied in existing scholarship. One recent attempt at engaging this scholarship focuses on Singapore as an important migration node for generating empire-wide racial thinking about ‘the Chinese’. See Neal, Stan, Singapore, Chinese migration and the making of the British Empire (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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48 My emphasis. ‘Report of the committee appointed to consider into and take evidence upon the condition of Chinese labour in the colony’, Proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements for 1876, p. ccxliv.

49 Ibid.

50 STOJ, 23 Oct. 1873.

51 ST, 24 Mar. 1877.

52 Proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements for 1873, p. 145.

53 STOJ, 23 Oct. 1873.

54 Chamber of Commerce to the Colonial Secretary of the Straits Settlements, 4 Sept. 1874, CO273/80/6377, TNA.

55 ST, 17 Mar. 1877.

56 ‘Report of the Inspector General of Police for the Year 1875’, Proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements 1876, p. ccxxiii.

57 ‘Report by Mr Pickering in Kidnapping Sinkehs’, Proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements for 1877, p. iii.

58 Ibid.

59 Leow, Taming Babel, pp. 23–56.

60 Philip Stern, ‘Limited liabilities: The corporation and the political economy of protection in the British empire’, in Benton et al., Protection and empire, p. 115.

61 Benton et al., Protection and empire, p. 2.

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67 Trocki, Opium and empire, p.157.

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69 My emphasis. Ibid., pp. cclix–cclx.

70 Straits Governor Harry Ord to Colonial Office, 24 Feb. 1871, CO273/45/3119 TNA. David Chanderbali has provided a blow-by-blow analysis of these events in Indian indenture in the Straits Settlements (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2008).

71 McKeown, Melancholy order, p. 75. For a detailed discussion of the Indian Emigrant Act, see Kumar, Ashutosh, Coolies of the empire: Indentured Indians in the sugar colonies, 1830–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 55–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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73 Emphasis in original. Rachel Sturman, ‘Indian indentured labor and the history of international rights regimes’, American Historical Review 119, 5 (2014): 1445.

74 STOJ 31 Dec. 1873; Singapore Daily News, 23 Dec. 1873.

75 Colonial Surgeon of Penang to Lieutenant-Governor of Penang, 4 Dec. 1873, CO273/71/1204, TNA.

76 ‘Report of the Committee Appointed to Visit and Report Upon the Condition of Alma Estate’, 15 Dec 1873, CO273/71/1204, TNA.

77 ‘Report on the Condition of Coolies at Malakoff Estate’, 8 Dec 1873, CO273/71/1204, TNA.

78 Ibid.

79 Carnarvon was referring to the argument advanced by European planters and businesses that immigration controls would reduce labour supply to the Straits and harm Singapore's status as a hub for the trans-shipment of labour in the region. Straits Settlements Association to Colonial Office, 14 Feb. 1873, CO273/78/1889, TNA.

80 Emigration Board to Colonial Office, 14 Mar. 1874, CO273/78/2854, TNA.

81 Straits Governor Andrew Clarke to Colonial Office, 9 Apr. 1874, CO273/75/5205, TNA.

82 Ibid.

83 Dean, Governmentality, p. 28.