The Dutch East India Company (VOC) secured in March 1602, by charter from the States General of the Netherlands, a monopoly of eastern trade. Throughout its history of two centuries, it sought zealously to maintain and safeguard this monopoly against all interlopers and against any attempts at private trade by its own officers. With its establishment and expansion in the east the Company extended this concept of monopoly to embrace as much of Asian trade as it could master. It developed early the policy of acquiring a monopoly of certain key commodities of Asian trade by controlling the areas of production and hence the supply. It soon went further and declared a total monopoly of the entire seaborne trade of specific trading areas by virtue of conquest, enforced contracts and naval domination. Thus the close monopoly of the Europe/Asia trade and of large areas of their inter-Asian trade constituted a commercial system to which the Company's Directors and its officers in Asia became closely attached and it formed a major plank in its commercial policy in the two centuries of its existence. Through this period, its energies and exertions were largely directed to the acquisition and maintenance of this many-sided monopoly system. Monopolistic policies and practices in trading dominated the thinking and activities of the Company at all levels of operation. The VOC was held as the archetype of such a trading body.

Around the turn of the century, railroads seemed to have a special attraction for the overseas Chinese. In that era, the iron horse was, indeed, the very symbol of the industrial age brought to Asia. Chinese modernizers had long advocated the construction of railroads as a crucial step toward self-strengthening. Many coolies had worked on the great American, Canadian and South African railways and shorter lines had been built in colonial Southeast Asia. Peasants in South China may still have feared the disruptive introduction of Western technology, but more worldly Chinese at home and abroad understood the significance of railroads not only as an improved means of transportation but as a symbol of Wealth and power.

The early postwar years witnessed serious and acrimonious controversies over the constitutional order the British intended to introduce in Malaya (including Singapore). The first set of proposals called the Malayan Union Scheme encountered strong Malay opposition. Partly because of this, the British advanced an alternative known as the Federation Proposals. This in turn was condemned by the non-Malays. Together with leftwing Malay leaders, non-Malay politicians organised an anti Federation movement, consisting of the Pan-Malayan Council of Joint Action (PMCJA) and the Pusat Tenaga Ra'ayat (PUTERA), to oppose the Federation Proposals. This paper examines the origin, leadership and organisation of the PMCJA-PUTERA as well as its agitation against the Federation scheme during the years, 1946–48.

The Federation of Malaya, formed on 1 February 1948, may be considered a major achievement in state-building in the Third World. Despite great stresses and strains, it was to survive intact until 1963 when it became the dominant part of a larger political entity. Its integrity as a politically unified system was threatened in those fifteen years by numerous secession attempts emanating from Johore (in the period 1955–1956), from Kelantan (in 1955) and from Penang (in the period 1948–1951 and 1953–1957). This article will deal with the most important of these, the Penang secession movement of 1948 to 1951.

The demise of elective local government in the State of Penang, Malaysia, is worth examining for several reasons. George Town, the state capital, was the first British settlement in the Far East; traces of elective local government appeared in the city early in the nineteenth century and the subsequent development of local government in the city followed British theory and practice to such a degree that at the time of Malayan Independence in 1957 the George Town City Council was a remarkable replica of a British town council. To study the George Town Council after Independence is thus to study a transplanted western institution which failed to survive within an Asian political system. Of more significance, however, is the light which a study of elective local government in Penang casts upon the fundamental transformations now underway in local government throughout Malaysia. Penang was the only state in the Federation to attain fully developed elective local government. Penang was one of the two states (the other was Malacca) in which all state territory and all state citizens were within the jurisdiction of local authorities. Penang however, was the only state in which every local authority consisted entirely of elected members and the only state in which every local authority was financially autonomous of the state government. Yet in 1966 the George Town Council was suspended and in 1971 the remaining local authorities were suspended as well. Penang became the first state in the federation to have no elective local government at all. It now seems likely that the other Malaysian states will follow Penang's lead (indeed, Malacca did so in early 1972), since it is now clear that the sanguine view of elective local government originally held by state and central officials has given way to one of pessimism and distrust. In July 1971 the Minister of Local Government indicated in Parliament that the central government believed that elective local government should be abolished. For these reasons, and for others which will become apparent in this paper, a study of the decline of elective local government in Penang provides an opportunity not only to test the hypotheses which have already been advanced to explain the demise of elective local government in the State itself, but also to test wider hypotheses advanced to explain the actions of national and state government towards elective local government throughout Malaysia.

Recently the validity of the standard portrayals of plantation agriculture — phrased as they are in essentially descriptive terms revealing little about the functioning of this particular system of crop production — was called into question. It was suggested that a deeper understanding of the nature and mechanisms of plantation agriculture required the explicit recognition that this is not an undifferentiated, unchanging agricultural system, but that there are in reality different types of plantation; in identifying these, it is essential to consider variations in the individual form and range of combinations of selected key elements central to the organisation of production. This led to the conclusion that in view of their structure and modes of operation certain large-scale agricultural enterprises producing for export which adopt rotational patterns of land use whereby specific sites are cleared, cropped, exhausted and then left to revert to secondary growth for varying periods should be seen not as commercial variants of shifting cultivation but as a distinctive type of plantation agriculture. Producing high-quality wrapper-leaf tobacco for cigars, the renowned plantations of the Deli region of north-east Sumatra provide a classic illustration of this point. Although, in the absence of a fully-documented review of its history and organisation, it rarely receives notice, a similar plantation industry also developed in what is now the Malaysian State of Sabah in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Roughly the size of Ireland, Sabah — then known as North Borneo — was administered from 1881 until 1946 by the British North Borneo (Chartered) Company and this tobacco industry was of crucial significance in the economic history of the Company's territory. “Tobacco in the eighties,” wrote Rutter half a century ago, “played an even more important part in the destinies of the country than rubber has in later years. Until ousted by rubber it was the country's foremost planting industry…” This survey of the tobacco industry of North Borneo has a double objective therefore; it investigates the role of the industry in the process of economic development in the State and also seeks to indicate the particular features of this form of plantation agriculture.

In 1934 the Siamese Council of Ministers agreed to participate in an international rubber control scheme without understanding either the dynamics of the expansion process or the extensiveness of the planting of small stands of rubber trees in peninsular Siam. The area estimates and export statistics available in Bangkok caused the government to believe that the quota offered by the International Rubber Regulation Committee was generous, and they consequently signed agreements with the producers' organizations and cooperating countries subject only to the ratification of the People's Assembly. The State Councilors were so confident of perfunctory approval of what appeared to be a technical issue that they delayed submitting the proposal until three months after the effective date of the agreement. But when the debate opened the representatives from the South sharply challenged the government estimates for failing to account for the areas of immature trees or to recognize that low prices had depressed production below current capacity. Neither Premier Bahol's plea that negotiations with countries “which are already civilised require something substantial in the way of evidence, such as statistics,” nor the need to honor the government's commitment dissuaded them.1 A minor political crisis was precipitated as the Assembly rejected the proposal and Siam's first constitutional government resigned.

In a prominently placed article in the March 1970 issue of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Dr. Martin Rudner discusses certain aspects of Malayan rubber policy in 1945-48. The article calls for comment for the sake of historical accuracy and thus of scholarship. Dr. Rudner has written repeatedly on Southeast Asian affairs, and the biographical note in the same issue of the Journal refers to a forthcoming book by him on the subject of this article. Moreover, examination of Dr. Rudner's paper is of more than academic interest in the conventional sense of the term because the writings of academic economists and economic historians are even more likely to influence opinion and thus policy than those of most other academics. Thus even delayed comment on his discussion is in order.