Decolonisations Compared by Nicholas Tarling

Author:Nicholas Tarling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Malaya

The treaty of 1824 provided that the Dutch should abandon Melaka and not intervene on the Malay peninsula. That did not necessarily mean that the British would establish themselves in the peninsular states. What happened was influenced by what the local authorities did and by the later apprehensions of German activity, evidenced in Sulu and New Guinea. It was also affected by the politics of the mainland.

One of its long-standing features was rivalry and warfare between the successive Burmese kingdoms and those of the Thais. Whichever was dominant tended to claim authority over the northern Malay states on the peninsula. At the time the British Company settled on Penang in 1786, the Thai state was rebuilding itself after the shattering destruction the Burmese monarch had inflicted on Ayuthia in 1767. It sought to force the northern Malay states to resume the status of tributaries. The hope of help had been a reason for the Sultan of Kedah’s cession of Penang to the British Company.

It was unwilling to assist. It sought a peaceful relationship with Siam, partly because at that time that state itself paid tribute to China, and the Company did not want to fall out with a state that supplied tea through its port at Canton, and partly because it did not in any case want an extension of territory beyond India. In 1816 the Thais instructed the Kedah ruler to procure the submission of neighbouring Perak and in 1821 themselves invaded Kedah. The withdrawal of the Dutch under the treaty of 1824 seemed to remove a further obstacle to Thai expansion, and merchants and officials in what were now the Straits Settlements urged intervention.

The Company’s Supreme Government in Calcutta preferred negotiation. Its negotiator, Henry Burney, had little to offer, however, and his treaty of 1826 established a kind of tripartite Anglo-Thai-Malay relationship, though Pattani was not brought into the discussion, and it thus remained under the Thais. Nor was the Sultan of Kedah restored: indeed, the British undertook not to permit him to attack or disturb the state, now under the Thais. For its part Siam undertook not to obstruct commerce in Kelantan and Trengganu, nor to attack Perak and Selangor. Perak could send tribute to Siam if it so chose.

The local authorities in the Straits sought to produce a better outcome. They persuaded the Sultan of Perak not to send tribute, and in 1832 they deployed a warship off the north-east coast when it seemed that the Thais were about to establish their authority.

Kedah’s case was different. The local authorities found it impossible to prevent Malay attacks on Kedah, and in 1842 they procured an arrangement under which the Sultan was restored as a Thai vassal.

More formal British intervention on the Peninsula followed only in the 1870s, but its format, and to some extent the very fact that it took place, were affected by what the Straits authorities had done in the meantime in the southern states of the Peninsula. That was affected by the example of

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