Rice in Malaya: A Study in Historical Geography

R. D. Hill. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2012 [Southeast Asian Classic reprint with new introduction, first published by Oxford University Press, 1977]. xxv and 265 pp., maps, tables, figures, notes, glossary, three bibliographies, index. $30.00 paper (ISBN 978-9971-69-577-4).

As a student in New Zealand in the late 1950s, R. D. Hill fell under the spell of historical geographers Carl Sauer and Derwent Whittlesey, becoming fascinated with agricultural origins and with landscape as palimpsest. Beginning at home with a study of the introduction of European agriculture to New Zealand, when Hill was appointed to the Geography Department of the newly founded University of Singapore in 1962, he turned his attention to rice farming and its historical trajectories. Rice in Malaya, published fifteen years after Hill began his Southeast Asian research, is the fruit of meticulous archival, ethnographic, and environmental mapping. A thoroughly documented, judicious survey of a complex and fascinating regional history, Rice in Malaya is indeed a “Southeast Asian Classic,” and it is good to see it back in print.

Through its focus on the region's staple food crop, Rice in Malaya tracks the rise of the colonial economy in peninsular Malaya between the late eighteenth century, when the first consistent records appeared in local and European sources, to 1910. (The first two chapters, now inevitably somewhat outdated, present archaeological and epigraphic evidence for the introduction of rice farming into the region.) Tracing patterns of growth, abandonment, or change in rice farming and agricultural settlement in Malaya's mosaic of polities and ecologies, Hill illuminates an ever-shifting tangle of political and commercial ambitions, contending loyalties, competing values and resources, manifold visions of moral worth or respectable livelihood, dreams of profit, and threats of hunger, pestilence, and destitution that wove together the lives of peasants, slaves and rulers, shopkeepers and miners, East India Company officers, imperial officials, village headmen, and triad chiefs, together with a host of poor migrants seeking better lives in the counting houses, mines, or muddy plains of a land reputedly rich in opportunity.

Throughout this long nineteenth century, as Britain's imperial interests steadily but not inevitably imposed their sway, Malay rulers and British officials were more or less consistently concerned with rice supplies and with the development of rice farming: The documentation of the sector, although uneven, is rich and varied. Although it never became a major economic crop in Malaya as it did in Siam, Indochina, or Burma, rice was the staple food of all the immigrants, Chinese and Indian, Sumatran and Siamese, who poured into the Malay states through the nineteenth century, as it was of the indigenous Malays (although not of the aboriginal populations). Rice fueled the growth of tin mines and of pepper and sugar plantations, and fed the great trading ports and military posts of Malacca, Singapore, and Penang, as it did the new towns that sprang up in the hinterland as the economy prospered under enterprising Malay rulers or British protection. The year 1910 marked a turning point, however. In 1909 Siam finally ceded to Britain all rights in the northern Malay states of Perak, Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan, and Trengganu, the regions where most Malay rice was grown. But a rubber boom was just beginning, coconut and tobacco were important export crops, local rice farming methods were considered unproductive, and supplies of rice from nearby regions of the British Empire, notably Bengal and Burma, were plentiful and cheap. Not surprisingly, the British colonial government had lost interest in rice growing. By 1909, official indifference was complete, the [Federated Malay States] Director of Agriculture himself being presumed by a District Office “not to … consider rice a crop of sufficient importance to justify much attention being given to it” (p. 197). From then on until independence in 1957, as Hill says, rice farmers were “left largely to their own devices” (p. xii).

Although some of the records available to Hill (e.g., the records of Kelantan, which until 1909 was under Siamese protection) were not produced by or for the British, the bulk of the documentation—and by far the best preserved—consists of the memoirs, correspondence, and official records kept by British colonial officers, some working for local rulers as advisers in the Malay states, others working directly for the East India Company, or, from 1867, the British Crown in the Straits Settlements of Malacca, Singapore, and Penang and their hinterlands. Whenever a piece of new territory came under British control, Hill notes, the records show a flurry of passion for improving or extending rice farming, for transforming unproductive landscapes into “waving fields of corn,” a Biblical expression that inspired administrators throughout the British Empire. After a few years of confrontation with reality (frequently voiced as criticism of “indolent natives”), official enthusiasm would die down and the statistics would dwindle in frequency and accuracy. Fortunately, Hill's thorough ethnographic and environmental knowledge of the spectrum and dynamics of rice farming practice, from upland shifting cultivation to the ploughed and transplanted permanent paddy fields of the plains, helps him fill various gaps in the patchy historical record.

Malaya's rice economy developed significantly over the nineteenth century. But what were the mechanisms of growth? Hill shows us a complex process that owed rather little to imperial power, or at any rate to superior imperial science. Between 1834 and 1911 the population of the Malay states increased fivefold, from around 425,000 to 2,644,000, of which the Malay (largely agricultural) component was 1,400,000 or 53%; in same period the rice farming area roughly trebled (p. 204). From the initial enclaves of the Straits Settlements, the area under Pax Britannica steadily increased until by 1909 every kingdom of the Peninsula had its British Resident advising on political and economic affairs. Over the decades the British, ever mindful of the need to provision strategic urban centers like Penang, devised a series of “scientific,” large-scale projects intended to build a productive rice industry (p. 115). Was the expansion of rice production in Malaya, then, the outcome of British technical improvements?

Without any recourse to the jargon of postcolonial theory, Hill demonstrates that in fact this growth owed much to “native” agency and almost nothing to British agronomy. Instead he proposes a useful typology that distinguishes among three principal models of expansion (p. 205):

• 1. “Ink-blot” growth: An expansion by indigenes of the rice farming area from preexisting nodes, often moving upstream from plains and deltas, and using existing technologies and techniques.

• 2. “Leap-frog” colonization: Foreigners (refugees or migrants from other Malay states, or immigrants from Sumatra or Siam) open up new settlements, often bringing in new techniques and technology. Minangkabau migrants from Sumatra, for example, introduced water-wheel irrigation to Negri Sembilan.

• 3. Some aboriginal groups began to grow rice on their lands, but here no colonization was involved.

These unspectacular processes accounted for most of the long-term increase in rice farming and expansion of the area; they mitigated the pressures of population growth and revived regional economies devastated by war, pestilence, or climatic disaster. Malay rulers or wealthy landlords, especially in Kedah, played a key role in mobilizing capital and labor that allowed large areas to be transformed into rice paddies; more typically, the changes were brought about by the efforts of farmers themselves. British grand plans, by contrast, usually petered out, leaving local Malay rulers, entrepreneurs, or farmers to carry things forward. Thus in Province Wellesley, “the British aim of a secure food-supply [for Penang] was achieved, although more by good luck, in the form of an influx of Kedah refugees, than by good management” (p. 104).

When I reviewed the first edition of Rice in Malaya thirty-five years ago, as a brash young scholar with Marxist ambitions, I was less respectful than I should have been of Hill's interpretive reticence. Rereading the book now I appreciate its richness and resistance to simplification, pondering how it relates to such influential studies of rice farming, history, and society as Scott's Weapons of the Weak (1987) and The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), or Ohnuki-Tierney's (1993) Rice as Self. When it comes to more recent periods in Malaysian history, Rice in Malaya highlights a dramatic rupture in policy and ideology. The British “left rice-farmers to their own devices.” For a constellation of reasons, political, cultural, economic, and geopolitical, since the 1960s, the postindependence government has invested countless millions in Green Revolution technology and agricultural subsidies, elevating rice farmers to iconic status as the quintessential Malay citizens responsible for feeding the nation. The paradox is that these cherished citizens are still peasants, and still among the poorest of Malaysia's poor. For details on the more recent history of rice in Malaysia and its place in the national economy, I refer the reader to Hill's other classic work, Agriculture in the Malaysian Region, first published in 1982 and reissued in 2013 by the National University of Singapore Press, with an excellent final section bringing it right up to date.