The social history of the Chinese community in Singapore and Malaya in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cannot be fully understood if aspects of class structure and social mobility are not examined. Of course, the social relations of the Chinese were principally determined by kinship and dialect ties, but they were also affected by class affiliations. Class status, like kinship and dialect relations distanted Chinese immigrants from one another. This paper seeks to examine the nature and structure of Chinese classes, class relations and the channels of social mobility in the Chinese community in Singapore and Malaya during the period between 1800 and 1911. The findings of this paper may be applicable to other overseas Chinese communities in the same period outside this region.

Economists and economic historians have not devoted much time or effort to the analysis of premodern economies. Most scholars have tended to concentrate on the United States and Western Europe during the twentieth century. While a few persons have examined the economic development of premodern Europe (1000–1700 a.d.), almost no one has chosen to write about economic organization in the countries of Asia and Africa before 1800.

The pressing preoccupation of the British administration in the early decades of the nineteenth century to clip the wings of the malicious Indian shroffs (Bankers) and their manoeuvres and secret dealings was in sharp and in a sense valid contrast to their earlierperceptions of the Indian shroffs and their Hundi empire. By 1807, Mr Rickards, senior member of the Bombay establishment, was urging the Governor-General in Council to establisha General Bank whose operations would extend throughout India, facilitate remittances andcredit transfers from one part of the country to another, and above all ‘free the mercantile body from losses and inconveniences suffered in the exchange and from the artifices of shroffs’. Their ‘undue and pernicious influence over the course of trade and exchange’ could no longer be treated with forbearance, and the urgency of remedy was stressed. It was both strange and ironical that such advice should stem from a quarter where in the crucial years of political change and transition in the second half of the eighteenth century, the cooperation and intervention of the indigenous banking fraternity and their credit support had proved vital to the success of the Imperial strategy. The experience was admittedly not unique to Bombay and the English East India Company (hence-forth E.E.I.C) and in a sense the guarantee of local credit and the support of service groups for a variety of reasons, was clearly envisagedas a basic ingredient to state building in the eighteenth century.

Between 1800 and 1950, the Bengali gentry experienced—over five or six generations—dramatic changes in fortune. The broad outline of the story of landed society in Bengal is well known. There emerged, in the first generation, families from widely varying background who owed their fortunes to the Permanent Settlement. In the next two generations they successfully integrated themselves into the rural world as an influential class of gentry with a well-marked-out life style. The fixity of revenue demand, the extension of cultivation and the perfected machinery of legal coercion contributed towards the development of high landlordism by the mid-nineteenth century. The end of the century, however, brought with it a gradual crumbling of the basis of landed society which gathered momentum with the Great Depression and the second world war, forcing an increasing number among the last two generations to seek supplementary or alternative means of livelihood.

M. D. Morris re-opened the debate on late nineteenth-century Indian economic history with a brace of powerful, though conjectural, revisionist articles in 1963 and 1966. He questioned the then prevailing orthodoxy which viewed the late nineteenth century as a period of increasing population pressure on the land (exacerbated by the atrophy of handicraft production), of holding fragmentation, declining per capita food availability, and inimical commercialization of agriculture. This interpretation had seen the position of a narrow mercantile and creditor elite improving, but the position of the mass of the rural population deteriorating, as evidenced by the terrible famines of 1876–80 and 1896–1900. Morris, influenced by D. Kumar's findings, contended that pressure on the soil did not increase excessively; that the influx of imported cloths merely skimmed off the broader increase in textile demand; and that agricultural output per capita increased as a result of extensions to the cropped area, political peace, growing regional specialization, and the increased sowing of valuable, high yielding cash crops.

The jute mills of Bengal had witnessed communal violence as well as bursts of working men's unrest even in the late nineteenth century. In the eyes of the employers, however, they were merely localized and disorganized flashes of protest, which could be typically nipped by the arrival of the Scottish mill manager and his entourage of Nepali darwans. A quick arbitration by the sahib under the peepul tree, liberally laced with pidgin Hindi abuse, was followed by the protector's judgment. Some would be happy with the verdict, others would remain aggrieved while the bara sahib, after a few words with the European assistant and the native sirdar, would imperiously stride back to his office, acknowledging numerous salams on his way. With such powerful ma-baaps, the mills rarely felt the need to report what they considered were piffling matters to the local police or the district magistrate. Thus, in February 1886, the Indian Jute Mills' Association could rule that ‘all hands whose work stopped during the days the mills were closed [for short-time working] should cease to be paid for that time’ without the slightest fear of serious protest from the labouring people. And in the late 1920s, in spite of the Rowlatt satyagraha, the Khilafat and the non-cooperation movement, the Chairman of IJMA could note with great satisfaction that ‘for many years the jute mill industry has been more or less immune from industrial disputes’.

To what extent was the underdeveloped world caught up in the vortex of the Great Depression? Did the crisis of 1929–33 leave a particular imprint upon the course of the economic history of the Third World during the inter-war period? Can the years spanning this quinquennium be fairly regarded as constituting a distinctive phase within the broader perspective of much longer-run trends? These questions, together with a whole host of related issues concerning the experience of particular areas, communities and industries, have recently been brought into much sharper focus than has hitherto been so. Although this reawakening of concern can be partly put down to the usual workings of the ‘scholarly cycle’, a far more satisfactory explanation may be found in relating it to the current round of public and academic discussion on the impact of the present-day depression. It is surely no coincidence that since the late 1970s there has been a considerable upsurge of interest in the events of that time; indeed it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the subject is forcing its way up the agenda of research priorities at a rate that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Over the last few years an increasing number of scholars have been busily engaged in the twin task of purposively re-examiningand reassessing a segment of intellectual territory that was once taken very much for granted and virtually shunted off to the sidelines. Thus by the end of 1986 at least three major international conferences will have been convened on the subject, and no less than fifty separate papers will have been presented.