History of modern Penang

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The history of modern Penang begins in 1786, when the island was ceded by the Kedah Sultanate to the United Kingdom in exchange for protection against threats from Burma and Siam. On August 11, Francis Light, a captain in the British East India Company, took charge of the island, whose capital was called by the English George Town, in honor of George III. Light was made superintendent of the island, which the English valued both for its strategic location on the Straits of Malacca and because of the foothold it gave the East India Company in the Malay Archipelago.

In this context, the British acquisition of Penang was a significant step forward for British interests in the area. However, Light's role in the acquisition of Penang was not wholly triumphant. The heir of Sultan Jiwa Sha, Abdullah Mahrum Shah, maintained close relations with Light, and relied on Light to represent Kedah's interests in negotiations with the East India Company. Light obtained the consent of John Macpherson, director of the company in India. However, the company made no specific promise of military assistance to Kedah, nor did it honor the Sultan's offer of half the profits of sale of tin, opium, and rattan at the port of Penang. Learning that the British would neither defend Kedah nor split these profits, the Sultan attempted to retake the island by force with the help of Lanun pirates. He achieved success at Prai, but British gunboats restored order, and the Sultan was forced to sign a treaty renting Penang to the British for six thousand Spanish dollars.

Light died in 1794, and the Sultan four years later, with his dream of a rival port elsewhere in Kedah unrealized. Light had solidified British governance of the island, inviting Chinese, Indian, Burmese, and Sumatran settlers to move to Penang for trade and farming. However, Light's most momentous decision was to encourage the plantation of cash crops such as sugar cane. This decision soon brought large profits to land-owners, and also created a demographic shift, as non-Malay people moved to the island in increasing numbers to work on plantations. Over the next century, indeed, British dominance would transform Penang's population, so that today Chinese have become a sizeable minority of the island.

Mahrum Shah was succeeded by Diauddin Mukarran Shah in 1798; in the same year, Wellesley took over as Governor-General of India. The next year, George Leith was designated Lieutenant-Governor of Penang. In 1800, Leith agreed to pay Mukarran Shah four thousand Spanish dollars a year for land lying on the west coast of Kedah opposite Penang. This cession allowed the expansion of cash agriculture and improved the security of Penang.

In the following years, a large number of Chinese people from Fujian immigrated to Penang, where they worked as merchants, farmers, and artisans. Chinese immigrants were, moreover, instrumental in the expansion of tin-mining on the island. A smaller number of the immigrants involved themselves in cash agriculture.

In 1805, Penang was made the fourth Presidency of British India, after Bombay, Madras, and Bengal. The same year, Philip Dundas was posted as Governor, and Stamford Raffles as Assistant Secretary. By this time, Penang had begun its decline as a port; the imposition of excise taxes and other duties motivated shippers to avoid the area. During his five years in effective control of the colony, Raffles earned a reputation as a reformer and humanitarian. Because important figures in the company, including Francis Hastings, felt Raffles' measures were impinging on the company's profits. After a trip to England, Raffles was posted to Bengkulu, then a penal colony.

The rise of Singapore led to the eclipse of Penang as an administrative center, and for the remainder of the colonial period the island suffered a deep, though still-profitable, obscurity. At the formation of the Malayan Union in 1946, Penang was one of the members of the union; however, on independence in 1957, both Penang and Malacca continued to have British governors. When Penang joined Malaysia in 1963, it had a state assembly and its own Yang di-Pertua Negeri.

Contents 1 Economic development 2 Ethnic composition 2.1 Chinese immigration 2.2 Indian immigration 3 Racial climate since independence 4 References

[edit] Economic development

From the days of Light's governance of the island, British plans for Penang focused on the development of crops that could be exported for cash. Of these crops, sugar was initially most important; the uncertain state of the slave trade made it useful to seek out alternative methods of growing this important commodity. At the same time, tin mining was developed both in Penang and elsewhere in Kedah. In later decades commerece developed in Malaya tapioca, coconut, palm-oil, tea, coffee, and rubber estates; Hugh Low followed a similar model in Perak in the nineteenth century.

[edit] Ethnic composition

British control over Penang led directly to great growth both in the size and the diversity of Penang's population. In addition to small numbers of European settlers and immigrants from Siam and Burma, two new groups immigrated to Penang from India and China.

[edit] Chinese immigration

In a dispatch of 1794, Francis Light said that the Chinese constituted the most valuable and largest group acting as traders, carpenters, masons, smiths, shopkeepers and planters on the island. From an early date, the Chinese specialized in the production and trade of tin. Some emigrants from the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian involved themselves in sugar-cane and pepper cultivation, in which the native Malays had shown no interest. Others acted as middlemen merchants (functioning more or less in the nature of agency house) for foreign traders engaged in export-import activities. Their contributions lay in shipping merchandise for various foreign destinations. Still other Chinese worked in the importation of ethnice foods which they cooked and sold to other recent settlers.

[edit] Indian immigration

Already in the 1790s, Light mentions Chulias (that is, people from the Coromandel Coast of India) as shopkeepers and farm laborers in Penang. Light estimated that about two thousand men came to work in this manner each year; however, in contrast to the Chinese, these laborers did not settle permanently in Penang. They would, rather, work for long enough to save money and then return to their families in south India. This group of migrants comprised the ‘Adi Dravidas,’ a group of impoverished laborers originating in the hinterlands of the Tamil country and Andhra Desa who, facing insufficient work in their homeland, went abroad for survival.

Another class of Indian migrants was a class of people hailing from the Kaveri delta areas (from the Ramnad district of Madras) known as ‘Nattukottai Chettiars’ who were by occupation money-lenders. Their presence in Penang and elsewhere where plantations sprang up aided merchants, miners, and planters, as these Chettiars were advancing required working capital in the absence of any effective banks. Light also encouraged migration by the Chettiar community as part of his plan to create a cash economy on Penang.

Unlike the Tamil migrants, Telugu migrants from the northern Coromandel Coast came to Penang as families. For this reason, many did not leave when their work terms expired, but rather continued working on plantations or as merchants. Over 15,00,000 south Indians who worked in Malayan plantations, more than three-fourths returned to India, nearly all of them Tamil.

Beginning with Light, Penange boasted a tradition of religious tolerance; all races could pra-ctice their respective religious faith and thus was achieved social stability in a multi-racial society.

[edit] Racial climate since independence

Penang entered independence with a tradition of multiethnic peace and cooperation. However, the British habit of separating ethnic communities led to incipient tensions that have since grown. In particular, the tendency to support Malays in government, and Chinese and India in trade and manufacturing, has led to significant divisions in the island's sociopolitics.

In 1967, in response to an unpopular decision to devalue the currency, the opposition Labour Party called for a hartal, or strike. This strike turned violent, with five people killed in Penang on its first day. Furthermore, although originally multiethnic, the violence quickly assumed interracial overtones, with politicians airing grievances and even calling for more violence. The tension spread to the coast and even to the capital, where timely intervention by the Army was required to prevent a more general spread of violence. When the national situation had calmed, the national government of Tunku Abdul Rahman imprisoned leaders charged with inciting violence, but declined to outlaw the Labour Party.

[edit] References

• Kernial Singh Sandhu. Indians in Malaya-immigration and settlement,'. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1969, 29pg.
• Sinnappah, Anasanatnam. Indians in Malaysia and Singapore. Oxford University Press, Kulala Lumpur, 1979, 19pg.
• Nancy Snider. "What Happened in Penang." Asian Survey 12 (1968), 960-975.