The Formation and Management of
Political Identities: Indonesia and
Malaysia Compared

Graham K. Brown




Working Paper 10
February 2005



Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security
and Ethnicity, CRISE
Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford
http://www.crise.ox.ac.uk/

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The Formation and Management of Political Identities:
Indonesia and Malaysia Compared
Abstract
In this paper, I examine the processes of identity formation in Indonesia and Malaysia
and the strategies undertaken by the respective states to ‘manage’ the influence of
identity politics on the national political arena. I argue that in the pre-colonial and
colonial periods, the processes of identity formation in the two countries were broadly
concurrent, driven mainly by the adoption of Islam across much of the region, the
intrusion of colonial markets and, in the late colonial period, the contradictory
tensions aroused by colonial administration. In the post-colonial period, however, I
identify a marked difference in trajectory. In Indonesia, from independence until the
fall of the New Order regime in 1998, both the Sukarno and Suharto regimes had
sought to suppress horizontal forms of identity through the hegemonic promotion of a
sense of Indonesian-ness and a varying degree of political authoritarianism. In
contrast, the Malaysian state has sought to nullify the conflictual aspects of identity
politics by affording them a central place in the political structure through a form of
‘authoritarian consociationalism’.
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The Formation and Management of Political Identities:
Indonesia and Malaysia Compared1
By Graham K. Brown2
1. Introduction
This paper is divided in to three broad sections. In the first two sections, it traces the
emergence and development of ‘horizontal identities’ in Indonesia and Malaysia3 in,
respectively, the pre-colonial and colonial periods. Its ambit is both historical and
analytical, seeking both to identify factors and processes in identity formation that are
historically specific, such as the particular regional experiences of colonialism and
war, and to extrapolate a more general argument about the processes of identity
politics. The third section, focussing on the post-colonial period, and taking a more
strictly comparative approach, it examines the ways in which the independent
Indonesian and Malaysian states have sought to manage identity politics.
In the first two sections, I take an approach broadly similar to that of Ben Anderson’s
(1991) concept of ‘imagined communities’. I argue that in the pre-colonial and
colonial periods, the processes of identity formation in the two countries were broadly
concurrent, driven mainly by the adoption of Islam across much of the region, the
intrusion of colonial markets and, in the late colonial period, the contradictory
tensions aroused by colonial administration. In the third section, focussing on the
post-colonial period, however, I identify a marked difference in trajectory. In
Indonesia, from independence until the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, both the
Sukarno and Suharto regimes had sought to suppress horizontal forms of identity
through the hegemonic promotion of a sense of Indonesian-ness and a varying
degree of political authoritarianism. In contrast, the Malaysian state has sought to
nullify the conflictual aspects of identity politics by affording them a central place in
the political structure through a form of ‘authoritarian consociationalism’.
1.1. Horizontal and Vertical Identities
The term horizontal identities is used here in a similar way to modern constructivist
definitions of ethnicity as a commonly held sense of group association based on a
relatively (but not completely) flexible set of social, cultural or religious markers. I
prefer the term horizontal identities over ethnicity for two reasons. Firstly, while
modern definitions of ethnicity encompass a broad set of social characteristics, there
remains some confusion over how exactly these criteria should be applied and which
particular characteristics are ‘necessary’ or ‘sufficient’ to define an ethnic group. Is a
group identity based principally on a shared religion, for instance, an ‘ethnic’ identity?
Or is ethnicity to be defined in purely linguistic terms, as is implicitly done in
quantitative models that employ the Ethno-Linguistic Fragmentation index (e.g.
Collier and Hoeffler 2001)? By using the general term horizontal identities, which

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the CRISE Southeast Asia Workshop in Bogor,
Indonesia, in August 2004. I would like to thank Frances Stewart, Rachael Diprose and the other
participants at the workshop for their helpful comments and clarifications.
2 Southeast Asia Research Officer, Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity
(CRISE), Queen Elizabeth House Department for International Development, University of Oxford.
Email: graham.brown@qeh.ox.ac.uk
3 In this paper, I have sometimes used the terms Indonesia and Malaysia for admittedly anachronistic
convenience to designate the pre-independence areas that were later to adopt these names.
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encompasses both ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ identities, I hope to avoid such confusion.
As Ratcliffe (1994: 6) notes, a formulation such as this can be problematic in that
allows for the definition of ‘almost limitless’ identity groups, ‘without regard to the
significance of the delineating factors’. Instead of viewing this as problematic,
however, it can arguably be turned to our advantage, through the key question of
political salience. Asking why certain group distinctions gain or lose political salience
at certain times may provide an important avenue for understanding the dynamics of
the societies in question.
A second reason for preferring the term horizontal identities is that it makes for an
analytically useful pairing with a concept of ‘vertical identity’: a sense of individual or
group identity based not on a set of cultural characteristics but on a hierarchical
position within that society. This distinction between vertical and horizontal identities
draws considerably from Horowitz’s (1985) typology of ‘ranked’ and ‘unranked’ ethnic
systems, but is more flexible in the way that such identities can overlap or co-exist.
Thus, for instance, ‘working class consciousness’ would be an example of ‘pure’
vertical identification, whilst the Indian caste system is the obvious example of an
intermingling of horizontal and vertical identities.
2. Pre-Colonial Period
Prior to the arrival of Islam in around the fifteenth century, political formations in
Southeast Asia were characterised by the ‘mandala’ or, particularly in the Malay
world, ‘negara’ polity – a political centre which exerted varying degrees of control
over a loose and amorphous geographical area, often in the form of tributary
relationships (e.g. Geertz 1980; Reynolds 1995; Wolters 1999). Nothing akin to a
‘nation’, or even a ‘state’, could be read into such structures; rulers across the region
sought to legitimise and solidify their rule not by appealing to some ethnic or
communal identity, but by claiming genealogical ties with great empires, past and
present, often from far away lands. Balinese rulers as late as the nineteenth century
sought to evoke and replicate the image of the great Javanese kingdom of Majapahit
to bolster their rule; in the southwest Sumatran kingdom of Palembang, magical
genealogies tied the royal line with no less than the emperor of China (Andaya 1993;
Creese 2000; Geertz 1980). No court epic of the region was complete without a
prolegomena detailing such ancestry, bestowing the king with the functions ‘to link
the past with the future and to give human life its appropriate place in the cosmic
order’ (Johns 1964: 93). Indeed, the Malay Annals (Sejarah Melayu) – in many ways
the quintessential text of Malay identity – is more properly called the Sulalat al-
Salatin, or Genealogy of Kings (Andaya 2001b). Pre-colonial political culture in Java
and elsewhere in the region, then, was fundamentally vertical and hierarchical, with
the ruler, who ‘personifies the unity of society’, as ‘the core of the traditional polity’
(Anderson 1990: 36), an ethos that found echoes as far away as the eastern
archipelago kingdoms of Ambon (Bartels 1979).
For Benedict Anderson (1991: 36), the weakening of the ‘great transcontinental
sodalities’ such as the Islamic ummat was one of the preconditions for the
emergence of the ‘imagined communities’ of modern nationalism. Anderson,
however, is primarily concerned with the emergence of that specific set of horizontal
identities that formed modern nationalist movements, rather than horizontal identities
per se. In the broader ambit of this paper, it will be argued that the adoption of Islam
provided the basis for the emergence of horizontal identities in the region, albeit
identities not as tightly defined and limited as Anderson’s imagined communities.
Whereas previous court religions had been syncretic and localised, the doctrinaire
and textually based ontology of Islam, together with the religion’s universalistic
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aspirations and lack of hierarchical organisation, created the grounds for a sense of
identity that was horizontal, rather than vertical.
Archaeological evidence, mostly in the form of tombstones, suggests that Muslim
traders had reached Southeast Asia, including Java, as early as the eleventh
century. Political formation at the time were characterised by considerable religious
syncretism; in Majapahit the king was regarded as a union of Buddhist and Hindu
gods; there is also suggestive evidence of Muslim courtiers (Ricklefs 1981: 17). The
Babad Tanah Jawi, an epic account of the later Central Java kingdom of Mataram
(1582-1749), synthesises Hindu and Muslim traditions in tracing the genealogy of its
rulers (Johns 1964: 92).
It is unclear at what stage Islam was first adopted by local inhabitants, and this
clearly varied from place to place, but royal inscriptions found in what is now the east
coast Malaysian state of Terengganu extolling the observation of the Islamic religion
have been dated to the fourteenth century. Lacking a priestly class, the spread of
Islam was mediated primarily through merchants, ‘accustomed to conducting their
business under the protective umbrella of Muslim law’ (Andaya 1999: 170). Indeed,
given the absence of Islamic ‘missionaries’, in the sense of the Christian missionaries
from Europe, it has been suggested that it was the existence of a coherent and
comprehensive body of law relating to commercial transactions in the Islamic
doctrines, along with the potential to improve trading relations with the Arab empires,
that provided the first step in the local adoption of Islamic practices, rather than any
‘spiritual’ conversion (van Leur 1955; Wolters 1970). Perceived commercial benefits
were thus major factors in the official adoption of Islam in the region.
At least initially, the arrival of Islam in Southeast Asia and its adoption by rulers did
little to affect the vertical, ruler-centred structures of power and society in the region.
As Milner (1983) notes, this may seem odd given the essentially non-hierarchical,
community-based philosophy and organisation of Islam. Short of undermining
central dominance, however, Milner argues that the particularly Persian tradition of
Islam favoured at the time, with its emphasis on the Caliph as the ‘Shadow of God on
Earth’, only lent further legitimacy to the rulers of Southeast Asia, many of whom
were soon adopting such titles for themselves. Mystic Sufism also lent an additional
aura of magic to the rulers. Moreover, the adoption of Islam was far from complete,
creating heterodox interminglings of pre-existing beliefs and Islamic tenets, ‘slippage’
in Scott’s (1977) terminology, the repercussions of which were still very much in
evidence in the post-colonial period, as witnessed by the santri-abangan divide in
Java (Geertz 1960). If Islamisation did not affect the rulers’ position in the polity,
however, other scholars have identified an important qualitative shift in the rulers’
relationship with the ruled: no longer was the ruler a ‘god-king’, but the ‘local head of
the ummat’ (Kathirithamby-Wells 1986: 342). Islam thus offered a source of
horizontal identity that transcended kin-group, village, or even negara.
The relationship between trade, Islam and the emergence of horizontal identities in
the region is best demonstrated through the experience of Melaka, the greatest
Islamic empire of Southeast Asia and, for many contemporary Malays, the font of
Malay identity. Following the arrival of Islam in Southeast Asia and the decline of
Java as the hegemonic power in the region, the entrepôt state of Melaka assumed a
dominant position in the fourteenth century. Melaka was founded at the turn of the
fourteenth century by Parameswara, a Hindu-Buddhist prince from Sumatra
apparently fleeing a punitive expedition by the Majapahit kingdom. Parameswara
sought and received Chinese protection for his kingdom, which quickly developed
into a major trading centre. Late in his reign Parameswara converted to Islam, again
apparently for commercial motives, and thus created the first major Islamic royal
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lineage in the region. Like other rulers, Parameswara had his own exalted genealogy
– in this case no less that Iskander Dzu’l-Karnain, or Alexander the Great (Walker
2004). A notable difference between Melaka and previous entrepôts in the region
was its more mercantilist or even ‘free market’ practices, in stark contrast to the
‘administered trade’ of previous kingdoms. In Melaka, ‘the state existed there
because of trade, not trade because of the state’ (Thomaz 1993: 72).
In keeping with constructivist theories of group identity that situate it as a
phenomenon of modernity, careful readings of Malay texts from the pre-colonial
period have concluded that the term Melayu was originally not applied to an ethnic
group identity, but was an elite identity applied only to those of royal blood (Matheson
1979).4 The hegemonic position of the Melaka sultanate in the Malay world in the
fifteenth century dialectically reinforced, and was itself legitimised by, this perception.
If any group identity of ‘Malayness’ is to be surmised in this period, it was premised
primarily on the notion of kerajaan – the condition of being a subject of the Sultan
(Milner 1982; Milner 1995). This was epitomised by the ‘social contract’ of the
Melaka sultanate, which was based upon the bestowment of virtually unlimited
powers on the Sultan – he was even expressly endowed with the right to oppress his
subjects – in return relatively paltry guarantees, a political culture of ‘unquestioning
loyalty’ that reverberates today in Malay political discourse (cf. Chandra 1979;
Kessler 1992).
The conquest of Melaka by the Portuguese in 1511 and the ensuing flight of its rulers
to Johor marked the beginning of the demise of a hegemonic, Sultan-centred Malay
identity. The merchant traders of Melaka spread across Southeast Asia, creating a
new, diasporic Malay identity in places as diverse as Aceh, Siam and Cambodia
(Reid 2001). The regicide of Sultan Mahmud of Johor in 1699, effectively ending the
royal lineage that traced its origins to the Melaka Sultanate, fermented this upheaval.
The rise of other Malay kingdoms, such as the Siak kingdom of Raja Kecik in
Sumatra, and their attempts, resisted by the remnants of the Johor court, to portray
themselves as Malay created a plurality of centres of Malayness: ‘Johor could no
longer claim exclusive rights to determine Malay identity’ (Barnard 2001: 332). In
Aceh too, new ‘standards of Malayness’ emerged, driven by an even closer
adherence to Islamic doctrine and a proud history of resistance to Dutch colonialism
(Andaya 2001a).
By the end of the eighteenth century, then, two interlinked but divergent aspects of
Malay identity were thus established: ‘a line of kingship acknowledging descent from
Srivijaya and Melaka or Pagarruyung (Minangkabau), and a commercial diaspora
that retained some of the customs, language and trade practices developed in the
emporium of Melaka’ (Reid 2001: 300-301). The decline of the Melaka-Johor
hegemony undercut this first pillar of Malay identity, both in Siak and other areas on
the Malay frontier, such as the northwest Sumatran kingdom of Barus, where
overlapping rajadoms meant that ‘the idea of a single ruler… [was] adapted to suit a
particular local situation’ (Drakard 1986: 57). Nonetheless, as we shall see later, the
history, traditions and myths of the Melaka Sultanate retained an important position in
the formulation and contestation of Malay identity, particularly in the Malay
peninsular.

4 It is also worth noting that the modern Malay word for nobility – bangsawan – could be translated
literally as ‘a member of the bangsa’ (i.e. nation), circumstantial evidence supporting the claim that the
bangsa Melayu was an expression of a vertical as much as a horizontal relationship.
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The arrival and adoption of Islam, although apparently spearheaded by the rulers to
attract trade and bestow additional legitimacy to their position, thus provided a source
of community identification within the region, albeit one based not on regional or
geographic identities but on the universalistic Islamic ummat. The decline of
hegemonic kingdoms, most notably Melaka, and the ensuing ‘diasporisation’ of trade
contributed towards the emergence of nascent horizontal identities. Finally, contact
with European civilisation helped create horizontal identities in the region. If nascent
horizontal identities were evident on the eve of colonialism, however, it was
European contact that determined the trajectory of identity development over the
ensuing period.
3. Colonial Period
The experience of colonialism in island Southeast Asia promoted two further
dynamics that drove the emergence and solidification of horizontal identities, which
were in many ways contradictory. On the one hand, the trappings of modernity that
came with colonial administration effectively contributed to the demarcation of ethnic
boundaries through multiplistic legal systems, census classifications and, as colonial
penetration progressed, the ‘ethnic division of labour’. On the other hand, however,
colonial administration created over wide swathes of the region created a common
enemy against whom diverse groups could (though not always did) unite, thus
forging some degree of horizontal identification. These contradictory impacts of
colonialism – ‘ethnic’ versus ‘national’ identity – bedevilled the independence
movements that emerged in the early twentieth century, and continue to resonate in
contemporary Indonesia and Malaysia.
3.1. Early
colonialism
From its earliest days, the Dutch VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or
United East Indies Company) had implemented policies of ethnic segregation in
Batavia, its headquarters and principle operating base in the region, on the site of
what is now Jakarta. Founded in 1619, Batavia was by the 1650s divided into a
walled city and the Ommelanden settlements outside the walls. Javanese and other
indigenous groups were banned from the walled city, but were instead settled in
segregated kampong in the Ommelanden, in a system akin to the concessions of
Shanghai and other trading ports. Each kampong was headed by a kapitan who was
the primary point of contact and control for the VOC administration (Raben 2000).
From the earliest days of Dutch contact in the region, then, the Europeans
demonstrated a tendency towards classifying and categorising the non-European
population. In Batavia, this was driven by military and economic concerns;
elsewhere, political concerns were also apparent. In the Cirebon principality of West
Java, for instance, Dutch reinforcement of nascent ethnic boundaries effectively
isolated the peranakan – assimilated, Islamised Chinese – from their tradition role as
political advisors to the Javanese royalty (Hoadley 1988). In any case, military,
economic and political concerns amounted to pretty much the same thing for the VOC
– expanding and monopolising trade.
The Dutch policy toward non-Europeans, and the Chinese in particular, met with
drastic ramifications in 1740, when a relatively minor incident in Batavia led to a
pogrom of the Chinese resident of Batavia, tacitly encouraged by the Governor-
General, that claimed thousands of Chinese lives and drove the remainder of the
community into an alliance with the rump of the pre-colonial Mataram kingdom in
Java against the colonial administration in a war that further consolidated Dutch
control on the island (Remmelink 1994).
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Final Dutch control over all of Java was established at the conclusion of another
failed uprising, the bloody Java War (1825-1830). The war was fought to resist the
colonial government under the leadership of Diponegoro (sometimes referred to as
Dipanegara), a Javanese noble with phenomenal charisma and millenarian appeal –
the self-styled messianic ratu adil (just king) of Javanese mythology (Carey 1986;
van der Kroef 1949). The importance of the war lay not just in its role in the
establishment of colonial control over all of Java, but also in sowing the seeds of a
future ‘Javanese’ identity. As we have seen, prior to the colonial period, Java was
divided into competing or tributary kingships, which, although often syncretic in their
culture and traditions, never established a cohesive Javanese identity. The millennial
appeal of Dipanegara, with his emphasis on the establishment of an Islamic state,
found resonance in a broad-based peasant movement that supported, funded and
fought the war. As Peter Carey puts it: ‘The coincidence to some extent of the social
and economic grievances of the peasantry and the kraton [court] communities had
enabled the most diverse social elements to find common ground in opposing the
Dutch… The Java War thus throws light on the beginnings of Javanese self-
awareness as a cohesive nation’ (Carey 1976: 78).
The bloody first century of Dutch colonialism in Java thus drove the further
emergence of horizontal identities, as resistance to the colonial power forged new
allegiances and ambitions. M.C. Ricklefs’ study of Java half way through this period,
at the turn of the eighteenth century, is worth quoting at length:
At the start of their close association, the VOC and the Javanese state
were deeply ignorant of one another… The subsequent half century of
misunderstandings, insults and betrayals merely served to entrench
such stereotypes. Cultural identities appear to have drawn even
further apart, differences to have become even more sharply
defined… [T]here may have been a growing sense of Javaneseness
as of consequence of the foreign intervention in Java in this period,
one which was labelled Islamic but which in fact departed from
abstract Islamic definitions… Yet this sense of Javaneseness, if
indeed it was growing and displacing more provincial identities,
appears still to have had regionalist aspects to it and did not, on the
evidence available, attract universal endorsement.
(Ricklefs 1993: 225)
As Dutch interests expanded beyond Java, so similar processes of commercial
interest driving identity formation reoccurred across the archipelago, albeit not as
contentiously as on Java. The virtually insatiable Dutch demand for gold and coffee
at the turn of the nineteenth century, for instance, drove a commercial boom in the
Minangkabau heartlands of Western Sumatra, where these commodities were
abundant. Accompanying this boom was an Islamic revivalism in the region, driven
by the demands for a ‘mutually acceptable code of conduct’ amongst indigenous
groups exposed to expanding commercial horizons, and by the increasing wealth of
the local elites, which allowed ever greater numbers to make the hajj, through which
they increased their awareness of more orthodox Islamic norms and practices
(Dobbin 1977). Thus, just as the consistent tenets of Islamic law had provided a
prime motivation in the adoption of Islam prior to colonial period, so the commercial
expansion of resource rich areas under colonial rule drove the strengthening of an
Islamic identity in the region.
As was argued above, the late pre-colonial period in Malaya, as in some areas of the
East Indies, saw the fragmentation of existing Sultan-centred vertical identities and
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the emergence of a broad horizontal sense of Malay identity, driven on the one hand
by the diasporisation of Malay traders and on the other by the increasing importance
of Islam in cultural practices. If a general sense of Malayness had emerged by the
eve of full British colonialism in the Malay peninsular, however, colonial documents
from the period are replete with reports of deep suspicion and even hostility
persisting between regional groups. In 1890, for instance, the Perak Annual Report
noted that the Malays in the state had ‘an exceeding dislike for and jealousy of all
foreigners (including Malays not of Perak)’ (quoted in Gullick 1989: 3). Similarly,
Malay sayings common across the peninsula at the time apparently demonstrated
regional antipathies, describing ‘the men of Terengganu’ as liars, those of Kelantan
as ‘thieves’ and those of Pahang as ‘arrogant’ (Clifford 1897: 17). As we have seen,
however, such apparently contradictory identities do not necessarily mean that one
interpretation is ‘wrong’, rather than multiple and contradictory identities can coexist.
As Milner (1982: 9) notes, vertical identity persisted into this period: ‘Malays…
considered themselves to be living not in so many states but under individual Rajas.’
Milner’s conclusions are supported by the reports of colonial officers, who described
intra-Malay conflicts as due to their ‘principle of tribal associations under chiefs’
(McNair 1878: 202).
Thus far in this section, we have concentrated on Islam as the source of an emergent
sense of horizontal identification in the region, but Islam was not the only game in
town. In Malaya, the British policy of indirect rule through the Sultans meant that the
position of Islam as the dominant religion, although they were wary of its political
manifestations (Roff 1998). Elsewhere across the Malay archipelago, however,
Christian missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, had considerable success in
finding converts, often among the animist highlanders who had not yet converted to
Islam. Yet while it may not be possible to doubt the religious zeal of the missionaries
who courted converts, there is evidence that for the colonizers, the co-existence of
Islam and Christianity, rather than the outright conversion of the entire population to
Christianity, further served their political and economic purposes. This is most
evident in the central Moluccas region of Ambon in the eastern archipelago, where a
long history of colonialism by both the Portuguese and Dutch had resulted in
substantial Catholic and Protestant conversions. Says Bartels (2001):
The successive colonizers, Portuguese, Dutch, and Japanese, all tried
to manipulate Moslems and Christians… [These] colonizers frequently
succeeded with manipulation of the elites on the basis of religious
affiliation, pitting Moslems against Christians.
The manipulation of horizontal identities based on religious doctrines in Ambon had
lasting effects, which continue to resonate in the communal conflicts in Maluku today
(e.g. van Klinken 2001). But religious differences were not the only legacy of
colonialism. As the colonial powers brought in increasing numbers of migrants to
work their economies, from within and without the region, modern ethnic identities
were shaped and pitted against each other by the ‘ethnic division of labour’.
3.2. ‘High’ Colonialism: The ethnic division of labour
As Ian Brown (1997: 160) notes, not just in Indonesia and Malaysia but across
Southeast Asia, the colonial wave of immigration was marked by a ‘strong correlation
between an individual’s ethnic origin and occupation’ – correlations that extended
beyond broad ethnic categories, such as Chinese or Indian, to ‘sub’-categories, such
as clan (Chinese language group) or caste (Mak 1993; Ramasamy 1984). In
Malaysia, the word ceti (moneylender) derives from the name of the Indian Chettiar
caste, which was predominant in that sector. This ‘ethnic division of labour’ is
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arguably the most important legacy of colonial rule in Indonesia and Malaysia, and
Southeast Asia more generally. Yet, as Brown (1997: 167) further comments, debate
still rages over how far the colonial states were instrumental in ‘creating, reinforcing,
or perpetuating’ this division – the choice of term here, Brown emphasises
parenthetically, being ‘extremely important’.
Key to the argument that colonial states were active agents in the ethnic division of
labour is abundant evidence of racial stereotyping by colonial authorities and
entrepreneurs, as epitomised by the following quotation from a European tin-miner in
Malaya at the turn of the twentieth century:
From a labour point of view, there are practically three races, the
Malays (including the Javanese), the Chinese, and the Tamils (who
are generally known as Klings). By nature, the Malay is an idler, the
Chinaman is a thief, and the Kling is a drunkard, yet each in his own
class of work is both cheap and efficient, when properly supervised.
(C.G. Warnford-Lock, quoted in Hirschman 1986: 356-357)
Needless to say, such stereotypes were hardly realistic, or even consistent; in his
account of Perak, John McNair, a colonial officer in the Straits Settlements at the end
of the nineteenth century, described the Bugis population as comparing ‘most
favourably with the Malays’, but also as ‘not possessing their good points’ (McNair
1878: 130 & 131).
The demonstrable existence of racial or ethnic stereotyping by colonial officials is not
in itself sufficient evidence for the claim that racist ideology was the grounds for the
ethnic division of labour (Hirschman 1986; Hirschman 1987); such an ideology could
also be construed as a post facto justification of ethnic divisions for other purposes.
Important here is the contribution of Collin Abraham, who argues that British labour
recruitment policies in colonial Malaya were deliberately ethnically segmented ‘to
weaken the bargaining power of any one group’ (Abraham 1997: 249). For Abraham,
it was colonial practice that ‘intensified and generalized’ admittedly pre-existing
ethnic stereotypes, which were then ‘manipulated to serve the interests of the
colonial powers’, i.e. resource extraction and profit (Abraham 1983: 20). Thus,
Abraham does not deny incipient ‘racist’ ideology among the colonial powers, but he
sees it as a means to an end – effective labour control and the perpetuation of
colonial dominance.
The promotion of ethnic segmentation in British Malaya was relatively low-key when
compared to the Dutch East Indies. In Malaya, such segmentation was a matter of
practices in labour recruitment and land rights allocations; in Indonesia, ethnic
categorisation was given legal and constitutional status. In the Indonesian case,
however, it is equally clear that the existence of ethnic stereotypes was not the
driving force behind such classifications, but rather the justification for segregation
imposed for primarily political and economic purposes. Fasseur (1994) links the
development of a stratified ethnic system in the East Indies to the Dutch desire to
impose a dualistic legal system, with European law for Dutch and, at least nominally,
for Christianised ‘natives’, and traditional Indonesian law for all others – a system that
soon necessitated constitutionally separate ethnic classifications. This judicial
dualism, ‘inspired by lofty discourses upon the responsibility of the government for
good and speedy justice’, was also driven by practical considerations: The Dutch
simply did not have the human resources in the colony to staff a European-style
justice system for its colonial subjects (Ibid: 33-34).
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