The Politics of the Forest in Colonial Malaya

Abstract

The notion that tribal peoples are destructive of the forest environment is not a new one. The political struggles that fostered it are only just beginning to engage the attention of historians. This essay is a preliminary exploration of the experience of the indigenous minorities—the Orang Asli—of peninsular Malaysia during the period of colonial rule. It examines their relationship to the society outside the forest. The politics of the forest it addresses are not narrowly environmental. Indeed, what follows is based on the assumption that the relationship of the aborigines to their environment was transformed, not so much by the changing ecological conditions of the forest as the colonial economy expanded, but by the changing political circumstances of the frontier as the Orang Asli were drawn into a widening orbit of relations with external powers. ‘Orang Asli’ means literally ‘original people’. It is a polite term that took on a legal status from the 1950s. Before then, in common parlance, the aborigines were ‘Sakai‘—a derogatory term synonymous with ‘slave’. The term Orang Asli encompasses three basic types of communities: the Negritos, nomadic hunters and gatherers of the northern forests; the Senoi —whose two main subdivisions, the Temiar and the Semai, together make up the larger part of the Orang Asli population of the central highlands, following more settled forms of swidden agriculture; and the proto-Malays of the south, fishermen and cultivators with a more similar economy to neighbouring Malays.1Their shared history has become an issue of great sensitivity in modern Malaysia, and Malaysian politicians have in recent years bitterly questioned the legitimacy of western criticism of the present circumstances of the Orang Asli. To explain why this is so, I want to examine the preoccupations of British administration during the period when it was trustee of the forests of the peninsula and directly responsible for the welfare of their inhabitants. Three themes dominate the discussion that follows.

Shallow roots: The early oil palm industry in Southeast Asia, 1848–1940

“…In Pahang only 2.5 per cent of the land was occupied by 1921, at least in the sense of 'occupation' meant by colonial record-keepers. 32 Highlands and swamps seemed to provide natural limits to the expansion of plantations.…”

Trends and potential expansions in the environmental histories of British Malaya

“…Extending our survey to include the somewhat rare events in which British Malaya appears in wider discussions of environmental history, we observe similar themes of developmental history and colonial socioeconomics being repeated here as well. Richard Grove et al's edited volume Nature and the Orient: the Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia , for example, contains a chapter by T. N. Harper () on colonial forestry and its effects on indigenous groups of the Malay Peninsula, while Beinart and Hughes () Environment and Empire dedicates one to rubber and the Malaysian environment, this being a study on the origins of rubber and how its widespread planting changed both the physical and social landscape of the region. Of worthy mention here is also Peter Boomgaard's () Southeast Asia: An Environmental History .…”

The Effect of the Ownership and Usage of New HumanCapital Change on the Economic Empowerment AmongstOrang Kuala in Malaysia

“…However, in the 18th century, economic activity was threatened by Bugis Sulawesi and large-scale migration of Malays from Indonesia in the mid-19th century [10], they tried to be involved in the current economic activity. This threat increases when the Malay community of Singapore and the Chinese from the West were penetrated the same market [10].…”

“…This threat increases when the Malay community of Singapore and the Chinese from the West were penetrated the same market [10]. At last, Orang Kuala were no longer be able to compete with their competitors in the sea base economic activities.…”