On 23 May 1871, the Gambier and Pepper Society representing 240 companies, together with 12 other leading Chinese firms in Singapore, petitioned the Governor of the Straits Settlements to undertake measures to prevent newly-arrived Chinese migrant labourers, known locally as ‘sin-keks’, from being abducted and shipped out of Singapore to the neighbouring territories. Repeating their petition in 1873, they requested for ‘benevolence’ and ‘paternal protection’ from the government on behalf of the migrants. The petitioners claimed the appointment of officials and the establishment of facilities dedicated to supervising the ‘sin-keks’ would enable migrants to ‘brave the stormy ocean and fierce waves’ to arrive at a place where they could ‘find a peaceful home where the whole population was so prosperous that they could sing for joy’.Footnote 1
The benevolent protection Singapore's most illustrious Chinese businessmen had applied for turned out to be the Chinese Protectorate, an office constituted by the ‘rule of experts’.Footnote 2 It was a vital but under-studied colonial institution in the history of Chinese migration and settlement in Singapore and Malaysia. While it was established ostensibly with the objective of preventing abuses in the large-scale migration of Chinese labourers, the Protectorate evolved and acquired multiple functions aimed at governing Chinese migrants and residents in Malaya. The scope of the Protectorate's work and statutory powers was extensive. It regulated labour migration, controlled Chinese secret societies, regulated the vice trade as well as prevented the trafficking of women and young children. In addition, the Protector and his officers were regarded as authoritative specialists on all matters ‘Chinese’. They translated and interpreted for the government, mediated between the government, Chinese community leaders as well as anonymous informers in the community, collected information and/or intelligence and in general, advised the government on ‘Chinese affairs’. They even conducted a quasi-judicial court to resolve civil disputes for ordinary folk. Expertise in Sinitic languages and the politics of translation lay at the heart of the Protectorate's inner workings, which has led historian Rachel Leow to describe the Protectorate as a ‘language technocracy’.Footnote 3
The Chinese Protectorate was first established in Singapore (as part of the Straits Settlements) in 1877. An Assistant Protector was then appointed in Penang in the same year with a full office set up in Penang in 1881 and Malacca in 1911. Even as the British enunciated an imperial policy of ‘indirect rule’ when it progressively colonised the Malay Peninsula from 1874 onwards, they set up Protectorate offices in Perak in 1883, Selangor in 1890, Negri Sembilan in 1914, Kedah in 1923, Johor in 1927 and Pahang in 1938.Footnote 4 Invoking the vocabulary of ideologues of British imperialism, early scholarly writings on the Protectorate characterised its establishment as a milestone marking British Malaya's transition from ‘indirect’ to ‘direct rule’ of the Chinese.Footnote 5 The Protectorate's impressive technocratic reach had apparently defied an empire-wide drift towards ‘indirect rule’, a testament of its value to the colonial authorities in Malaya.
Yet, the legacy of the Protectorate has not been thoroughly examined. In line with Singapore's inclination towards a charitable reading of its colonial past, the country continues to fete William Pickering, the legendary first Protector of Chinese, naming roads and swanky hotels after him. The scholarship on the Protectorate has also remained thin. An older scholarship researching the institution has typically appraised this institution positively within a ‘law and order’ framework, describing its creation as a result of the government reacting to the multiple problems caused by ‘Chinese secret societies’ plaguing the colony. This approach invariably recycles the paradigmatic concern of representatives and allies of the colonial regime with controlling what they saw as an ‘unruly’ yet indispensable community. This scholarly appraisal is problematic since it partakes in rather than interrogates the assumptions of colonial governmentality. Eunice Thio's dated but otherwise detailed article documenting the sequence of events leading to the foundation of the Protectorate exemplifies this approach. Accepting the colonial government's rationale for the Protectorate, she regards the institution as a key instrument for alleviating abuses in the Chinese labour trade which she attributes to the culpability of Chinese secret societies. Thio writes that abuses in labour migration were ‘inextricably bound up’ with the problem of these secret societies;Footnote 6 the Protectorate was established as a solution to the ‘two-fold problem of protecting “Sinkehs” and of further reducing the power of secret societies’.Footnote 7 Thio's approach resonates with Andrew Phang, a legal scholar and judge at Singapore's Supreme Court, who has written about the ‘chaos and lawlessness perpetuated by the secret societies’ during the colonial period in his treatment of Singapore's legal history.Footnote 8 Phang agrees with Thio that the protection of Chinese migrants was necessary given the deep involvement of secret societies in the labour trade. On the other hand, while Maurice Freedman might be less naïve about official motivation behind the Protectorate's creation, he too has adopted the vocabulary of British imperialism.Footnote 9
This article re-narrates the history of the Protectorate's establishment by moving away from a reductionist ‘law and order’ framework. Instead, I relate its establishment to a moment of intersection between ‘racialised governmentality’ and practices of ‘protection’, ‘humanitarian governance’ and migration control. I use ‘racialised governmentality’ in this article to distinguish between ‘governmentality’ in a colonial setting and the conventional Foucauldian understanding of the concept.Footnote 10 Scholars working on colonial governmentality note that Foucault's conceptualisation of governmentality assumes its liberal mode as the unmarked standard, preoccupied as he was with the self-governing individual subject. Postcolonial scholars who critique Foucault for ignoring how colonialism had been constitutive of modern forms of state power, point out that the autonomous individual subject who presumably constituted populations targeted by race-neutral regimes of governance was not the premise of governmentality in a colonial situation. As Partha Chatterjee argues, given that the colonial relationship was defined by the ‘rule of colonial difference’ — with race being the most obvious marker of this difference — the colonised were, first and last, a racialised category.Footnote 11
The workings of the rule of colonial difference were brazenly visible on those occasions when principles of humanistic equality and universal applicability were suspended or denied on account of the racial/ethnic character/habits of the colonised. In his analysis on the legacy of Benthamite utilitarianism, Chatterjee extends his argument by demonstrating that such ‘exceptions’ would be rationally explained and justified through a scientistic theory of comparative government propounded by Bentham during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bentham had provided ‘the basic technical apparatus of concepts and theories with which all imperial practices would henceforth be ideologically justified’.Footnote 12 Briefly put, Bentham transformed ‘governance’ into a technical issue, the efficacy of which would be judged by outcomes. Bentham's schema allowed for significant cultural variation in the world; these were commensurate differences that could be modified with appropriate laws and governmental intervention. The effectiveness of these interventions could then be measured, plotted and compared qualitatively and quantitively, which would enable the derivation of standards and their deviations. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ governance was, therefore, objectively measurable, quantifiable, and comparable across different populations, groups and territories.Footnote 13 Bentham's utilitarian and technical approach to government, Chatterjee goes on to argue, provided the basis for claiming that sovereignty or jurisdictional authority in a particular area could be alienated or usurped and put in more ‘capable’ hands in the name of ‘good governance’. The powers of government should then be vested in ‘skilled persons with specialised training, an instrumental and impersonal rationality, an apolitical sense of responsibility that was relative to specific tasks, and a disciplined judgement that could follow direction and abide by hierarchical procedures’.Footnote 14
Like Chatterjee, Radhika Mongia argues that the genealogy of the modern state is the genealogy of the colonial state; the latter is not derivative of the former. Colonial regimes did not develop their techniques and capacity to govern through targeting autonomous individual subjects but through developing racially differentiated relationships with diverse peoples and groups. Mongia argues that within the British empire, these differentiated relationships were justified mainly in two ways: first, through creating and normalising exceptions to liberal governmentality and second, by resorting to arguments about the need to preserve indigenous and local cultures.Footnote 15 Chatterjee's and Mongia's understanding of colonial governmentality fits with the historical record of how European ‘imperial formations’ occurred incrementally in Southeast Asia.Footnote 16 British-colonised Malaya, in particular, was forged through the creation of different types of polities, using a variety of violent as well as non-violent methods of conquest, occupation and governance over an extended period of time while asserting varying degrees of sovereignty, jurisdiction and control over diverse peoples and swathes of sea and territory.
My narrative is a fine-grained account tracing how racialised governmentality of the Chinese population in colonised Malaya was institutionalised in Singapore with the establishment of the Protectorate in the 1870s. By shedding light on imperial and local contexts of migration control, I show how enduring languages, strategies and practices of protection and humanitarian governance circulating in the empire were deployed flexibly as state formation enveloped Chinese migrants within a dedicated technocracy in a contingent manner complementing the interests as well as racial imaginaries of the multi-ethnic oligarchy in the Straits. The Protectorate's creation echoes an argument on the relationship between protection and empire not often made in studies on migration in Malaya, but it is one that scholars have put forth elsewhere: humanitarian registers of governance had accompanied and abetted British imperial formations along multiple geographical scales during the long nineteenth century.Footnote 17
The adaptation of a humanitarian register of governance in this attempt to address abuses in the Chinese labour traffic drew from empire-wide practices of protecting liberated slaves, indigenous peoples and subsequently, Indian indentured labourers. For this reason, it is striking that there was a coeval and conjoined controversy over imposing migration control on ‘Chinese’ as well as ‘Indian’ labour migrants in the Straits during this period. Underscoring the effects of racialised governmentality, however, this prolonged tussle resulted in two separate bills enacted concurrently in the form of the Indian Immigrant Protection Bill in 1876 and the Chinese Immigrant Ordinance in 1877. The former bill provided for a separate office of the ‘Protector of Immigrants’ to manage Indian indentured labourers in the Straits.
There is merit in attending to ground-up organisations, networks and the infrastructure of migration as well as to the agency and personal experiences of migrants. Much work has indeed been accomplished in this area in existing academic and popular literature predominantly using the frames of ethnicity or understanding migration as components of racialised diasporas. The pitfall of this approach, however, is to see the history of migration in largely communal terms, and in the case of Singapore and Malaysia, as the sum total of separate ethnicised histories of migration in a Furnivallian universe. This is the ‘bounded logic of seriality’ that colonial states had depended upon and national states still depend on to govern and which informs the ‘grounds of comparison’ of much research and scholarship.Footnote 18 This pitfall seems unavoidable even in scholarship practising transnational approaches to migration that assume the certainty of state forms.Footnote 19 For example, addressing Tamilian migration to Malaya between 1870 and 1941, and comparing their migration to the Chinese, Sunil Amrith notes that these were ‘two very different kinds of transnational community’.Footnote 20 He writes that ‘Chinese migrants to Malaya maintained transnational connections mainly outside the state, through the development of a range of diasporic social and economic institutions. Tamil migrants had little option but to engage with the state, on both sides of the Bay of Bengal’.Footnote 21 Thomas Metcalf has a similar description of ‘the regulatory system, linking India and the colonies under the umbrella of the British Empire’, standing ‘in sharp contrast to the wholly commercial recruitment of Chinese, by British agencies and others, for overseas labour’.Footnote 22
In place of ‘difference’ and ‘sharp contrast’, this article discovers a concrete moment of convergence between ‘Chinese’ and ‘Indian’ migratory histories that the bounded logic of seriality has hidden in plain sight. The article reveals the deep involvement of supposed ‘non-state’ agents in one key moment in the constitution of the colonial state in Malaya which had not, until then, developed technocracies dedicated to encompassing the labouring population within its protective fold. The colonial government would now further its reach by extending a supposed ‘Indian’ regulatory system apparently unfit for the ‘Chinese’ on Chinese labourers. How this was accomplished, I suggest, is a story best told not by adopting ethnicity/race as the ground for comparison, but by showing connected histories of racialised governmentality.
‘Protecting’ the Chinese: Tentative beginnings
Historians write that language and the travails of translation lay at the heart of governance in a polyglot colony like Malaya.Footnote 23 Leow has given us a lucid account of British efforts in governing their Chinese subjects as part of an account of how they tried to tame the colony's Babelesque environment. These efforts exposed the fragility and brittleness of the colonial state as it was caught in a ‘dialectic of fear and dependence’ vis-à-vis its Chinese interpreters.Footnote 24 The challenges and tensions this dialectic generated crystallised in public view most clearly on one site — the courtroom. Singapore's English language presses featured a long-running discussion on what they described as ‘lack of efficiency of interpretation’ in the courts. The term was used to describe the challenge of interpreting between several languages and dialects simultaneously in one courtroom in a polyglot environment, but it came to refer specifically to the ineffective-ness of Chinese interpreters who frequently committed mistakes in translation either because they were incompetent or venal. The meticulous court reporter for the Singapore Free Press during the 1840s and 1850s, for example, complained of Chinese interpreters who deliberately concealed their ignorance of dialects spoken by witnesses. He documented their lapses and mistakes, and suggested that their miserly salaries made them susceptible to being bribed.Footnote 25 The accusation that Chinese court interpreters were almost always corrupt was a common refrain. During the 1850s, members of the Grand Jury reported that the interpreters were ‘more or less in the power of the Secret Societies of their countrymen’.Footnote 26 This popular description was targeted at Chinese interpreters who were
Straits born Chinese who are invariably influenced by the Hoeys or secret societies, are neither well acquainted with the language they profess to speak, seldom capable of expressing themselves correctly in the Malay vernacular and never in English.Footnote 27
By the 1860s, a tacit consensus had formed within the Anglophone public that a ‘new and superior class of interpreters’ made up of ‘well-paid European gentlemen trained in a thorough knowledge of the language’ was required to check and counter this figure of the half-literate and venal Chinese interpreter.Footnote 28
In December 1871, the solution wished for by the Anglophone community was realised in the form of William Pickering who was appointed the government's ‘Chinese Interpreter and Teacher’.Footnote 29 By his own account, Pickering had worked himself up from a position as a lowly sailor on board British ships headed to Asia since he was sixteen. Capitalising on his flair for picking up languages, he recommended himself to Robert Hart at the Chinese Maritime Customs where he spent years stationed at ports in southern coastal China and Taiwan. During this time, Pickering managed to learn the Southern Min dialects as well as Mandarin.Footnote 30 Pickering was an ambitious man. Sensing an opportunity to carve out an expansive role for himself as the government's resident Chinese expert, he made sure he did more than just interpret and translate. Pickering's stature rose quickly shortly after his arrival in Singapore. In 1874, he was sent, first to Perak, then to Sungei Ujong, to mediate the disputes between warring groups of Malay rulers which had involved adversarial groups of Chinese miners and settlers. Even before he was appointed Protector, Pickering was behaving and working like one. He advised the government on proposals to train officers and interpreters in the Chinese language and dialects,Footnote 31 wrote official papers reporting to the government on what was happening in the Chinese community, and made policy recommendations on how to govern the Chinese properly.Footnote 32
Hiring Pickering, creating the Chinese Protectorate and developing a language technocracy were surely solutions to the chronic problem of governing a polyglot colony. However, for an institution that came to govern an essential demographic in Malaya, the ultimate establishment of the Protectorate was contingent on a related but different discussion on a weightier and far more controversial issue of imposing controls on hitherto unregulated labour migration to the Straits. The imposition of regulatory measures on migration was extremely contentious for the key stakeholders, particularly for the European and Chinese planter and business communities, which together with British officialdom, constituted a powerful patriarchal oligarchy in the colony whose interests were represented in the local Legislative Council (LegCo). As a result of their divergent interests and positions on migration control, the establishment of the Protectorate turned out to be an extremely convoluted and fortuitous process that took up the bulk of the decade in the 1870s. It was this prolonged process fusing the Anglophone community's chronic concerns with court interpreters, problems of translation, secret societies and general ‘law and order’ problems into a focused discussion on migration control that threw up a ‘solution’ in the form of the Chinese Protectorate.
In the first place, London and the Straits government had not set out to impose a Protector or a bloated bureaucracy on the colony's Chinese migrants. In fact, the government had ignored the first petition from Singapore's Chinese luminaries, which prompted their second attempt in 1873. What ensued after 1873 was a drawn-out process which concluded with the appointment of Pickering as the Protector of Chinese in 1877. What motivated the government to address the 1873 petition was the report of the commission set up to investigate acts of rioting that had occurred within the Chinese community in 1872. Reflecting the racialised lens with which the commission viewed both the ‘problem’ and ‘solution’ to governing the Chinese in the Straits, it recommended that the Straits government should adopt Hong Kong's method of registering all Chinese residents. Taking up the commission's recommendation, the government introduced a bill in September 1873 providing for measures to register and track all incoming migrants with a ticket system. The bill did not mention creating the appointment of a ‘Protector’.
Diluted as it was and fang-less without detailed follow-up measures, this 1873 bill, nevertheless, raised the heckles of the European planter and business community. The bill was so detested that their representatives in the LegCo resigned their seats in collective protest while they persisted in lobbying against the bill outside the Council, organising public meetings, writing to presses and even taking their case directly to the Colonial Office in London.Footnote 33 Their main bone of contention was that attempts at registering immigrants in the name of ‘protecting’ them violated the deeply-held principle of ‘free and voluntary’ migration which threatened to reduce Singapore's labour supply and imperil its status as the trans-shipment hub for labourers in the region. As their campaign dragged on and as we shall see, their advocacy of free and voluntary migration was tempered with the need for some minimal and targeted protection for the migrants. This lengthy and fractious discussion exposed the multifarious meanings of protection which raised fundamental questions on who constituted the proper subject — or object — of the government's protection. Who, what and how, precisely, was the Protector of Chinese supposed to protect?
The Straits government forced through the bill in October 1873, but a series of reports on abused Indian labourers in Penang and Province Wellesley caused the metropole government to adopt a tougher position on regulating Chinese labour migration. Confronted with vehement resistance from British and European planters, agency houses and businesses while waiting for London's final approval, this 1873 bill hung in limbo. Following this debacle, the Straits government, now under Governor Andrew Clarke, contemplated alternative legislation that would check abuses in the labour traffic while avoiding the much-hated system of registration or any overt regulatory measures on immigration. In 1875, Clarke proposed an elaborate plan to divide the town area (and Chinese residents living there) into wards and sub-districts that would be supervised by ward masters and custodians approved by the Governor. Clarke's plan was obviously inspired by time-honoured arrangements of governing Chinese communities in European colonies elsewhere in Southeast Asia.Footnote 34 Governor Clarke left before he could finalise this plan. His replacement, Governor William Jervois cancelled Clarke's plan. Jervois reported to the Colonial Office that Clarke's plan could not prevent newly-arrived migrants from being abducted and he was sceptical that dividing the town into wards and sub-districts would work in Singapore. As Jervois wrote:
[the plan was] inapplicable to Singapore, although such a system may be found to work well in Hong Kong. At the latter place there is but one main section of Chinese viz. the Cantonese to be dealt with whereas in Singapore there are not only Cantonese but Hokkiens, Teochews, Hylams, Kehs and others. Besides these, there are Malays, Klings, Javanese and Natives from other places of the Eastern Archipelago.Footnote 35
Instead, Jervois wanted to implement alternative legislation. To gather more information, he convened a commission in 1876 to investigate the state of Chinese labour migration to the Straits. It was this commission which recommended the appointment of a Protector as the best way to prevent migrants from being abused and that held, at the same time, the most potential for governing the Chinese population effectively.
The imperial and local contexts of migration control, protection and humanitarian governance
Although concrete proposals for establishing a Chinese Protectorate arose later, the issue of migration control was framed and resisted in terms of protection and humanitarian governance right from the beginning. Explaining why legislation to protect newly-arrived Chinese migrants was necessary in the LegCo in September 1873, the Governor and the Attorney-General described Chinese migrants as ‘slaves’, who must be afforded the ‘greatest possible protection’.Footnote 36 The Attorney-General described the migrants as ‘perfectly helpless, and were disposed of, either to work here or to go elsewhere, entirely independently of their own wishes. How they are engaged in China we do not know, but it certainly was an opprobrium to this legislature that any persons should be allowed to come here in the position of slaves’.Footnote 37 This description was immediately disputed by Unofficial members in the LegCoFootnote 38 who painted an entirely conflicting picture of ‘coolies who came here of their own accord’ and ‘who left a country which was overpeopled, and where they could scarcely earn a subsistence, and came to what they believed was a land of promise where they could earn a living’.Footnote 39 This conflicting portrayal of the Chinese migrant struck at the heart of British imperial conscience: what constituted ‘slavery’ as opposed to ‘free and voluntary’ labour migration? What should be done to prevent slavery and protect legitimate labour migration? Confronted with petitions from Singapore's Chinese business community appealing to the imperial conscience and for benevolent protection, the LegCo in the Straits came face-to-face with this fundamental question: were Chinese sin-keks ‘slaves’ or ‘free and voluntary’ migrants?
Alan Lester and Fae Dussart — two scholars amongst others who have mapped the spatio-temporal genealogy of discursive practices of protection in British settler colonies — have demonstrated that the adaptation, elaboration and fine-tuning of both the concept and techniques of protection was mediated through British experiences with slavery and its abolition in 1833. British involvement in the anti-slavery campaign and movement had percolated principles of humanitarianism not just into religious and lobbyist circles or the public sphere of civic action but more crucially, into the work of governing colonies. Following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the attention of anti-slavery lobbyists and the British government turned towards implementing ameliorative legislation that would administer some protection for those still enslaved while preparing them for their impending liberation in the Caribbean sugar colonies. The British borrowed the Spanish example of setting up ‘Protectorates of Slaves’ which it had revived in Trinidad in 1824 and which it then established in all of its Caribbean colonies. The protectorate was then exported to Tasmania and the Cape Colony before returning to Australia and New Zealand. In the antipodean territories, ‘Protectorates of Slaves’ became ‘Protectorates of Aborigines’. According to Lester and Dussart, the institutional origins of the protectorate and its spatio-temporal spread — which was aimed at ameliorating the conditions of slaves, and later at ‘redeeming’ the aboriginal nations for ‘civilisation’ — ‘established the notion of a white male British official acting as the humane intermediary between colonizer and colonized’.Footnote 40
The white and paternalistic character of the protectorate remained in place well into the twentieth century but the movement of this institutional form from the Caribbean sugar colonies to British India and back again to the Caribbean expanded the practice and altered the meanings of protection. Following this trajectory, novel practices of labour migration control taking the form of ‘Protectorates of Emigrants and/or Immigrants’ — evolved with the creation of the Indian indentured system in 1834. As with the case of ‘Protectorates of Aborigines’, the burden of British experiences with slavery weighed heavily, providing the context and vocabulary for articulating what protection meant. Experimentation with alternative sources and arrangements of waged labour began as soon as slavery was banned in 1833 when British planters in the Caribbean lobbied the metropole government to secure cheap labour from India. In fact, the first group of Indian indentured labourers reached Mauritius on 1 August 1834, the date Emancipation came into effect in the empire.Footnote 41 Conceived of as replacement labour for slaves, the exportation of contracted Indian labourers to Mauritius and elsewhere in the West Indies immediately provoked accusations that this was a ‘new species of slavery’.Footnote 42 This impassioned debate between critics of the indentured labour system who condemned it as slavish and those who held it up as an ideal arrangement supporting free and voluntary migration was re-staged on occasions when regulation of labour migration was contemplated in the empire.
In his book Melancholy Order, Adam McKeown has given us a magisterial history of the making and ‘globalisation’ of borders focusing especially on Chinese and Asian migration to British settler colonies. McKeown situates the establishment of the Chinese Protectorate in Singapore within this global history as part of a nineteenth century post-slavery shift towards indentured labour anchored by the myth of the free and voluntary migrant which was in the process of being created. As he observes, debates — including this 1870s controversy preoccupied with regulating labour migration to the Straits — about whether migrants were ‘slaves’ or ‘free’ were frequently ‘incoherent and contradictory’.Footnote 43 He emphasises, however, that these controversies ended up creating pejorative images of ‘Asians as backward and impoverished people, ignorant of their own rights and incapable of mobility without coercion or the assistance of indenture. Given these conditions, most observers ultimately agreed that some level of government surveillance was necessary to suppress private abuses and guarantee some level of freedom’.Footnote 44 Hence, the 1876 commission appointed by Governor Jervois blamed Chinese secret societies (and, therefore, Chinese themselves) for abuses in the labour traffic and recommended the appointment of protectors to watch over the Chinese. This quarrel over imposing migration control, McKeown argues, affirmed the caricature of Chinese migrants as an ‘obstacle to freedom’ so that ‘however conceived, slavery was a characteristic that was intrinsic to Chinese society’.Footnote 45
McKeown's account of conflicting portraits of Chinese migrants and how these ended up confirming their slavish character which necessitated intervention tracks general patterns of migration control on the global scale, but tells a partial story when we encounter the convoluted process of how the Protectorate was created in Singapore. As the debate on migration control played out, and as lobbying by the government's detractors intensified after 1873, these contradictory and inconsistent debates no longer centred around the slavish Chinese character but were superseded by a position favouring some protection, with protection and humanitarian governance interpreted in malleable ways. The arguments advanced by European planter and business groups came to target legislation proposed by the government rather than on the necessity for regulatory measures per se. The conflicting positions of officialdom and its critics belied a consensus on the intrinsic nature of Chinese migrants amongst the Anglophone classes and this was used to argue for determining the scope and degree of regulatory measures rather than stake out stark positions accepting or opposing migration control completely. Underlying this position providing for a degree of official intervention was the language and practice of humanitarian governance whose meanings turned out to be notoriously vague. These multifarious meanings of protection and humanitarian governance were institutionalised with the establishment of the Protectorate which gave rise to a peculiar dynamic of racialised governmentality of the Chinese population that consistently interpellated ‘the Chinese’ as an essentially opaque and ‘un-controllable’ people despite the most valiant attempts to ‘know’ them.
Appointed on 3 June 1876, this was the first commission of inquiry the government had set up to investigate Chinese labour migration in the colony. The commission was composed of three officials including the colonial secretary, John Douglas, the treasurer, W.W. Willans and the inspector-general of police, John Dunlop. It held meetings in Singapore and Penang for eleven days, interviewing 18 men comprising employers, recruiters, brokers and government officials but did not get labourers to give evidence. The report of the 1876 commission was, thus, skewed heavily towards businesses with a stake in continuing the smooth importation of labour. This neglect was only addressed at the very last minute after William Pickering submitted a report containing testimonies from rescued Chinese migrants when the government introduced the Chinese Immigrant Ordinance in the LegCo in February 1877.Footnote 46 Based on the findings of the 1876 commission, this finalised ordinance, passed in March 1877, provided for a Protector of Chinese Immigrants empowered to board ships and check on the conditions of immigrants, the establishment of depots for holding immigrants on arrival, written contracts and the imposition of a levy on immigrants and emigrants leaving the Straits for surrounding ports.Footnote 47
The recommendations of the 1876 commission highlighted the extent to which the colony's Anglophone elites had re-framed the issue of migration control away from the slavish nature of migrants. The report concluded that the process and system enabling Chinese migration to the Straits worked ‘fairly well’, was ‘altogether voluntary’ and ‘surrounded with sufficient safeguards’. As the report explained:
nothing whatever has come before us to lead us to think that the Chinese immigrant, if not a member of a Secret Society, requires any protection after he has been a few days in the Colony … A Chinese coolie is a very different being from an Indian coolie; he is independent, able to take care of himself, and always bound to assist one of his own ‘Seh’ or clan, and equally entitled to assistance from them.Footnote 48
There were, however, some ‘blots on the present system’ as well as instances of abuse, deception and kidnapping. The Commission, therefore, recommended that the Chinese immigrant should be ‘taught to look more to the Government and less to his societies for protection’. One ‘blot’ the report explained at length was mutual ignorance between the government and the Chinese:
the Government knows little or nothing of the Chinese, who are the industrial backbone of these Settlements; and the immense majority of them know still less of Government. We know that a certain number of Chinese arrive every year, and that a certain number go away; but how long they stay, how many come back a second time, what they think about and desire — as to all this we know nothing … we believe that the vast majority of the Chinamen who come to work in these Settlements return to their country not knowing clearly whether there is a Government in [these Settlements] or not.Footnote 49
Not only was the Chinese labour migrant not ‘slavish’, he was in fact ‘independent’ and might be even ‘too free’. Crucially, the commission had attributed his ‘independence’ to his communal nature, that is, he was well-enmeshed in and protected by his kin, clan and triad networks, all of which were opaque to the government. In other words, what the commission had discovered was not the free and voluntary subject of liberal governmentality that McKeown claimed was in the process of being created globally, but the racialised Chinese subject of colonial governmentality identified by postcolonial scholarship.
The contestation over migration control which found the colony a ‘solution’ to the problem of governing the Chinese in 1877 fully reflected this general consensus on the independent-clannish Chinese migrant. Planters, businesses and their representatives used him to oppose the government's legislation while the government tried to make their case with him. For example, when the government forced through the 1873 bill, an Unofficial member in the LegCo, Dr R. Little, chastised the government for thinking that registration and paperwork alone would allow the government to better ‘know’ or ‘track’ newly-arrived labourers ‘more surely than can be done now’. What was ‘done now’ referred to the communal networks of the Chinese because, according to Little, ‘so clannish are the Chinese that any Chinaman of the same tribe can always find out where one of his own “Say” or tribe has gone to by enquirement of his companions’.Footnote 50 A 1877 commentary in the Straits Times unhappy with the finalised ordinance described the Chinese migrant as a ‘John Chinaman’ who
knows pretty well how to take care of himself … He does not want the Government to interfere with him, and does not want to be molly-coddled. That he has suffered from some abuses, it is true but these abuses after all, are due to his own countrymen whom he knows and what do they amount to after all.Footnote 51
In the opinion of critics, the independent-clannish Chinese migrant obviated the need for excessive migration control measures. What was needed to safeguard his free and voluntary migration was targeted legislation aimed at controlling ‘emigration’ — not ‘immigration’ — when new migrants were most vulnerable to being detained, abducted and shipped out of Singapore. The accusation that the government's bills in 1873 and 1877 were heavy-handed was a repetitive complaint of critics who argued that legislation should just target emigration not immigration. Further complicating the problem was the question of whether the Straits government possessed legal or legitimate jurisdiction over Chinese migrants who were mostly sojourners or temporary settlers in the Straits and were not subjects of the British empire. As one Unofficial member protested in the LegCo in 1873, ‘let the Chinese Government protect their men, and see under what footing they leave it. But if the Chinese Government allow their men to come down as they like, I don't see what right we have to interfere’.Footnote 52 Other critics pointed out that just as it was the duty and practice of the Government of India to legislate for the welfare of emigrating indentured labourers, it was the duty of the Chinese authorities, and not that of the Straits government, to advocate for the welfare of Chinese labourers leaving their country.Footnote 53
In 1874, the European-dominated Chamber of Commerce representing major businesses in the colony consolidated their opposition to the 1873 bill and submitted a five-point resolution to the Governor. First, the Chamber claimed that the enactment of the bill would ‘most seriously hamper the introduction of free labour’ and ‘struck at one of the Chief causes of prosperity of the Colony’. Second, the Chamber insisted that legislation was ‘not required to protect or supervise the immigration of Chinese coolies’. Third, the Chamber wanted the Marine Police to be ‘rendered efficient to protect immigrant vessels’. Fourth, the chamber recommended ‘constituting an Emigration Officer empowered to enquire into the nature of the engagements of all Chinese Coolies hired for service outside of the Colony’. Finally, the Chamber called for the abolition of the Secret Societies which it held responsible for abducting newly-arrived migrants.Footnote 54 After the 1876 commission released its report and after Pickering filed his report documenting cases of extortion and abduction of migrants in 1877, even the most stubborn opponent of migration control, W.H. Read, shifted his position closer to that of the government's. Read stated that he was willing to accept some of the regulatory measures of the 1877 bill including appointment of a Protector, written contracts for emigrants shipped out of Singapore as well as licensing for brokers and recruiters. Still, he was against constructing and putting migrants in depots and charging them a fee for the inspection.Footnote 55 By 1877 and after lengthy and intense lobbying, the government's detractors had to concede that some minimal and targeted protection for emigrating and immigrating labourers was desirable.
To officials of the Straits government, the independent-clannish Chinese represented the sum total of what worried the government most about Chinese migrants. They reasoned that his character inhibited the government's attempt to ‘know’ and establish its authority over his community and he would be induced or coerced to join Chinese secret societies as a consequence. ‘Law and order’ problems caused by the Chinese and their communal organisations — including abduction of migrants — were on the uppermost minds of the government's officials. The inspector-general of police, John Dunlop, had pushed for the new appointment of Protector of Chinese in 1875 even before he was appointed to the 1876 commission. The profound disconnect between Chinese migrants and the government reported by the commission repeated what Dunlop had written in this 1875 report:
The Chinese as a community are very ignorant of our laws and of our desire to do justice towards them and are consequently only too glad to join societies where their interests are looked after by powerful headmen … To legislate at present for the Chinese with the limited amount of information we have of the several tribes represented in these Settlements, of the sehs or families belonging to each tribe, of their national and religious customs, habits of character … would simply repeat the blunders of past years.Footnote 56
Pickering's 1877 report elevated Dunlop's anxiety a notch higher. He went as far as to argue that the government would be complicit in perpetuating abuses against the labour migrant if it left him alone because ‘a great deal of the evil is the result of our over-anxiety not to interfere with the liberty of the Chinaman and to abstain from vexatious legislation which might impede free immigration into the colony’.Footnote 57 It was imperative, Pickering urged, that ‘some steps be taken immediately to protect in some way the newly-arrived Chinese from extortion and oppression’.Footnote 58
The independent-clannish Chinese migrant had provoked vague and even contradictory meanings of protection and humanitarian governance. While businesses wanted regulatory measures pertaining to the welfare and interests of labour migrants to be kept to a minimum, the government was anxious that protection — understood in terms of surveillance and control — had to be maximised. These varying meanings of what protecting Chinese migrants meant were at the heart of the dynamic driving the racialised governmentality of the Chinese population. Leow's study shows that the more the Protector ‘knew’ the Chinese through trying to master their languages, the more he found them ‘un-governable’.Footnote 59 This was true of how he protected them as well. Over the years after the establishment of the Protectorate in Singapore and as it stretched its technocratic reach into the Malay Peninsula, the Malayan governments acquired ever-increasing powers of surveillance and control over the Chinese population while simultaneously insisting that they occupied autonomous social spaces and their interests were the concern of their own community and not that of the British metropole or local governments in Malaya. This dynamic driving racialised governmentality consistently interpellated the Chinese as always already ‘outside state-space’ which made them an ‘alien’ presence and ‘un-governable’.
Who, what and how was the Chinese Protectorate supposed to protect?
The literature on imperial protection and humanitarian governance has shown that the nineteenth century saw an expansion of the ideological and practical uses of protection. Scholars recognise that protection — its meanings, practices and ideological genealogies — was malleable and worked across the usual binary categories of ‘protector and protected’, ‘ruler and ruled’ and/or ‘coloniser and colonised’ that we frequently use to conceptualise relationships under colonialism. As Philip Stern argues, protection gave rise to a wide range of relationships between colonial regimes and the peoples they governed and was ‘a key feature of colonial sovereignty that was by its very nature, layered, hybrid and plural’.Footnote 60 The establishment of the Chinese Protectorate was a prime example of the utility and malleability of protection and humanitarian governance in the development of racialised governmentality of the Chinese population. This was a vital labouring population whose residence and status in the colony was changeable and fluid, and over whom the British possessed ambiguous control and jurisdiction. Lauren Benton's and Adam Clulow's insight on the workings of protection illustrates the case of the Protectorate's creation in colonial Malaya perfectly:
Protection travelled well … References to protection flourished especially in zones of ambiguous control, and the improvisation of the term made definite legal status and responsibility elusive, permitting multiple interpretations to co-exist at the same time. The blurring of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ dimensions of protection meant that it was often unclear who was protecting whom or what was the exact nature of the relationship between the protector and the protected individual, group, vessel or polity.Footnote 61
The Chinese Protectorate might have been created to provide protection aimed at the independent-clannish migrant, but the multiple and pliable interpretations of protection meant it was unclear who or what the Protector was supposed to protect. On this point, the role played by Singapore's most influential Chinese planters and businessmen is instructive, but this is also one of the least scrutinised aspects of the institution's history. From what is available — which is not much — it is clear that they did not participate openly or directly in the campaign against the government's attempt to legislate migration control. In fact, the sole representative of the Chinese community in the LegCo, who was also one of the petitioners, Hoo Ah Kay, voted for the government's 1873 bill.
Hoo Ah Kay and the petitioners were not motivated by altruistic or philanthropic reasons alone. In 1874 when the Chamber of Commerce was putting together their five-point resolution, they solicited input from the petitioners, specifically Hoo, Tan Kim Ching and Tan Seng Poh. The Chamber reported that Tan Kim Ching had named Chua Moh Choon as the main culprit responsible for abducting newly-arrived migrants which caused them to petition for the government's intervention in 1871. According to Tan Kim Ching, Chua Moh Choon, who was Teochew-speaking, abducted mostly Teochew men. Giving the Chamber the familiar story of Hokkien–Teochew divide in Singapore, Tan Kim Ching had apparently bragged that
the Sin-kehs kidnapped were mostly Teochews or Swatow men; the Hokkien or Amoy men or their friends knew they would obtain protection from Kim Ching, and few or none of these were kidnapped. Moh Choon would not interfere with men likely to claim his (Kim Ching's) protection.Footnote 62
Tan Kim Ching's ‘testimony’ against Chua, as well as his alliance with the Teochew Tan Seng Poh and Cantonese Hoo Ah Kay at this juncture lends support to Carl Trocki's analysis of the shifting alliances within the Chinese community during the 1870s.Footnote 63 According to Trocki, Tan Seng Poh had succeeded in forging a ‘Great Syndicate’ of all major Chinese opium farmers, planters and financers in Singapore during this period. The Gambier and Pepper Society which was formed in 1867 reflected this broad coalition which excluded Chua Moh Choon.Footnote 64 Not much is known about Chua Moh Choon. Trocki describes Chua as a Teochew pepper and gambier shopkeeper, ‘coolie broker’ and head of the Ghee Hock secret society.Footnote 65 Chua appeared to be involved in Cheang Hong Lim's opium farm syndicate but Tan Seng Poh had managed to co-opt Cheang into his grand alliance. Cheang Hong Lim was also one of the signatories of the petitions.Footnote 66 Still, Chua's Ghee Hock society remained robust and was the only secret society that apparently ‘flourished’ during the 1870s for ‘not only did it probably have the largest membership in 1876 but Pickering claimed it was the best disciplined’.Footnote 67 Tan Kim Ching's ‘testimony’ and Tan Seng Poh's presence at this meeting with the Chamber suggests that intra-group politicking had been a key consideration motivating the two petitions against Chua implicitly. Meanwhile, the Chamber held up the two Tans and Hoo Ah Kay as legitimate representatives of ‘Chinese’ opinion. It wrote to the Governor reporting that Singapore's Chinese community leaders shared the Chamber's position encapsulated in its resolutions recommending minimal and targeted intervention to prevent migrants from being abducted and cracking down on Chinese secret societies to solve the problem at its root.
In addition, Tan Seng Poh and Hoo Ah Kay had testified at the 1876 commission. Their testimonies barely concealed their raw interest in getting the government to prevent abduction of migrants. Both Tan and Hoo framed this particular abuse as part of a larger problem for ‘employers’ as well. They called on the government to implement a ‘simple law’, ‘punishment’ for labourers who absconded or for newly-arrived migrants to be put in a big storehouse to prevent them from absconding or from being kidnapped. Their testimonies reinforced their interest as employers of labourers as they authenticated and played up the image of the independent-clannish Chinese migrant. Tan and Hoo's performance of Chinese-ness, ironically, reflected just how ‘un-clannish’ they were. Replying to the commission's question on whether the ‘Chinamen who come down here’ were capable of taking care of themselves and needed the government's protection, Tan Seng Poh replied:
After they have been here a little time, they are sharp enough but when they first arrive, they are fools. They often jump overboard if they have not paid their passages and get on shore, when someone probably gets hold of them and ships them to Deli. I think if there were some simple law to protect them it would be a very good thing, but not an elaborate law like that introduced by Governor Ord.Footnote 68
Hoo Ah Kay's testimony was even more unabashedly ‘pro-business’ than Tan Seng Poh's. Responding to the commission's same line of questioning, Hoo said:
They find friends as a rule here who look after them, but they are forced to join a society (my own boy is the only exception to this I have met). This is a sort of protection, and in case of sickness, they go to the Kongsee. This is the only existing protection to coolies. The employer needs protection rather than the employed…It would be a good thing if they could be kept (in a Government's depot). A law to punish coolies who run away before they have worked out their passage money would be beneficial. Their temptation is strong.Footnote 69
Recall that the 1876 commission's report also contrasted the ‘Chinese coolie’ with the ‘Indian coolie’. The comparison was not entirely intuitive or coincidental. Tamilian labour migration from southern India to Penang constituted one significant context for understanding how the Straits came to subject hitherto unregulated labour migration under official control during the 1870s. The timing of the Chinese business community's first petition in 1871 was suggestive. Just months earlier, malpractices in labour migration from southern India had surfaced and gripped the attention of the government, business communities and the Anglophone public.
Sometime in March 1870, an Acting Magistrate of the Tanjore district in Negapatnam, J.W. Hathaway, had discovered cases of deception and kidnapping of men, women and children in his district. The men and children were reportedly shipped as ‘coolies’, and the women as ‘prostitutes’ to Penang. Condemning these abuses, Hathaway embargoed labour migration to Penang, which cut off the main source of labour supply to European-owned plantations in Penang and Province Wellesley. Then Governor Ord travelled to Penang to personally investigate Hathaway's charges. Ord apparently took care to interview labourers in several plantations in Penang and discovered there were a few cases where labourers were brought in against their will, but he alleged that none of them provided ‘satisfactory reasons’ for why they did not protest or complain. Ord also reported that most women came with their husbands so it was unlikely that many were kidnapped for purposes of prostitution. Ord then concluded that ‘immigration [from Negapatnam] is purely voluntary and un-interfered with by any one…Natives having friends in the Colony and learning of the advantages which it affords, come over for shorter or longer periods, and in many cases, permanently settle here’.Footnote 70 Ord's report was disputed by the Madras government whose own investigations confirmed Hathaway's charges. Between 1870 and 1872, the two governments locked horns over repealing Hathaway's embargo. It was against this backdrop of publicised abuses in labour migration, embargoed labour supply from southern India, followed by frenzied negotiations between the two governments in Singapore and Madras that the Chinese community submitted their first petition in 1871.
What set Singapore and Madras against each other was the 1864 Indian Emigrant Act which stipulated that colonies and dependencies seeking to import indentured labourers from British India must enact legislation guaranteeing some form of protection for them. The Indian Emigrant Act had first evolved from British experiences of exporting indentured labourers from India to the Caribbean sugar colonies as replacement labour for slaves. This came to serve as a ‘West Indies model’ of labour migration for the rest of the empire. By 1864, the Government of India had codified baseline protection for indentured labourers in a single legislation with the following provisions:
supervision by agents and ‘protectors’ appointed by colonial governments; the establishment of depots at ports where migrants could be inspected and their distribution regulated; medical examinations; investigations by magistrates into the conditions under which the contract was signed; the listing of specific conditions to be included in the contracts; licensing of sub-recruiters; regulation of shipboard conditions and the specification of laws in destination colonies before emigration would be permitted.Footnote 71
The Indian Emigrant Act spawned the development of formal bureaucracies centred on ‘Protectors of Emigrants’ and/or ‘Protectors of Immigrants’, who had to make sure emigrants and newly-arrived immigrants travelled willingly and were not ill-treated, coerced, kidnapped or defrauded.Footnote 72 It was only after Governor Ord promised to enact legislation required by the Indian Emigrant Act that Madras finally agreed to lift the embargo on labour migration from Negapatnam to Penang in June 1872, albeit provisionally.
It should not stretch our imagination to observe that the finalised 1877 Chinese Immigrant Ordinance had cherry-picked from and was a diluted version of the baseline protection required by the 1864 Indian Emigrant Act. As we noted in the preceding section, critics and supporters of indentured labour clashed on occasions when some form of migration control was contemplated in the empire but the outcome of these debates was ultimately inconclusive. What did eventuate was the creation of new fields of official intervention and configuration of novel forms of state power as the metropole and governments in the colonies accrued for themselves the authority to define humanitarian protection, subjecting every stage and aspect of the migration process as well as the lives of migrants under close scrutiny. Protection came to be understood in terms of a disciplinary and regulatory regime that would be carried out by officially-appointed neutral and benevolent technocrats ‘emphasizing a baseline of humane treatment that required pragmatic as opposed to heroic intervention’.Footnote 73 By the time the European business community was done with their lobbying and conceded ground on the necessity for minimal and targeted legislation protecting Chinese labour migrants, they had helped to put into practice such pragmatic, calculating and technocratic protection.
Beyond the opportunistic timing of the first petition submitted by Chinese planters and businesses, deliberations over protecting vulnerable Indian and Chinese labour migrants intersected well after Hathaway's embargo was temporarily lifted. Just as the Straits and Madras governments were engaged in a second round of negotiations over the baseline protection required by the Indian Emigrant Act, news about the ‘moribund condition’ of Indian labourers in Province Wellesley surfaced in late 1873. Between November and December 1873, the local press reported that large numbers of labourers from the Alma and Malakoff plantations in Province Wellesley were arriving at the local Butterworth Hospital in emaciated and critical conditions.Footnote 74 The hospital reported that between 7 November to 4 December, they admitted 35 workers from the Alma plantation, 5 of whom died; between 28 November and 7 December, 48 workers from the Malakoff plantation were admitted, 4 of whom died. Penang's Colonial Surgeon described the condition of the hospitalised labourers as ‘anything but satisfactory. They were generally emaciated and several of them bore very evident marks of ill-usage on their persons, apparently having been beaten by rattan or stick’.Footnote 75
Governor Andrew Clarke appointed commissioners to investigate the two plantations. Reports filed by commissioners investigating the Alma plantation did not find evidence of physical abuse but they found the living condition of workers at the plantation to be unsanitary and many workers were malnourished. The Alma plantation lacked adequate medical care and facilities which could have provided timely on-site treatment for sick workers. The commissioners concluded that workers from the Alma plantation who had died and those who remained hospitalised suffered from a ‘want of proper medical care and attention, which had they been bestowed upon these coolies at an earlier date would have saved their lives’.Footnote 76 The commissioners investigating the Malakoff plantation reported a far more dire and disturbing situation. Not only did they find the living conditions, medical care and food supply for workers to be ‘insufficient’, ‘imperfect’ and ‘very deficient’, the commissioners reported ‘that there is a system of flogging carried on at Malakoff Estate and in its nature and severity affecting the health of the Coolies’.Footnote 77 The commissioners took testimony from several workers, all of whom provided knowledge of the estate's manager and/or supervisors flogging their co-workers, in some instances to their deaths, or had themselves been flogged. An inquest held on the death of one worker as well as older reports on the general health of workers at the Malakoff plantation by the Colonial Surgeon confirmed the systemic and consistent resort to practices of physical torture at the plantation.Footnote 78
The commissioners’ reports detailing the impoverishment, torture and deaths of Indian labourers in Province Wellesley during the last two months of 1873 impinged directly on the Colonial Office as its officers realised the necessity for stricter legislation to protect vulnerable labour migrants regardless of where they originated. Consequently, they judged the protection provided by the 1873 bill for Chinese labour migrants to be inadequate. Chinese labour migration was, thus, viewed through the lens of Indian labour migration in this instance. With reports on the appalling conditions of labouring at the two plantations in Province Wellesley still fresh in his mind, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Carnarvon, described the 1873 bill as a ‘very imperfect one’ and acceptable ‘only as an instalment’ for legislating further protective measures. As he minuted, ‘the recent case at the Malakoff Estate shows the necessity of some real protection to immigrants such as exists in other colonies. I am inclined to think that the best course to adopt will be to relieve the shipping interest but to enforce proper and full conditions for the security of the Cooly on land’.Footnote 79 What Carnarvon had in mind for follow-up legislation was one single bill that imposed stricter measures protecting not only Indian but also Chinese labourers as he instructed the Emigration Board in London to draft an ordinance for this purpose. In March 1874, the Emigration Board completed a combined draft ordinance to regulate Indian and Chinese labour migration to the Straits which was tentatively titled the ‘Immigrant Protection Ordinance 1874’. The Emigration Board had produced the new ordinance by using the ‘West Indies model’ as its standard reference and by combining the two draft ordinances protecting Indian and Chinese labourers sent in by the Straits Governor. Although the Emigration Board fully expected the combined ordinance to ‘require much consideration, possibly a good deal of modification by the Colonial Authorities before it can be brought into operation’, it intended the new ordinance to ‘indicate the general line of policy which H.M. Government desire should be observed for the protection of Indian and Chinese labourers in the Colonies’.Footnote 80
The determination of the Colonial Office to see through a single piece of legislation protecting Indian and Chinese migrants in light of what had happened in Province Wellesley crumbled quickly. Just one month after the Emigration Board submitted the 1874 Immigrant Protection Ordinance, Carnarvon would agree with his staff who now recommended passing legislation to regulate migration from British India first and holding off the discussion on Chinese labour migration. The Colonial Office cited two reasons for this coeval but separate treatment. First, ‘further consideration and interviews with the Straits Settlements Association [representing the European business community in the Straits]’ had persuaded them that ‘it may get into confusion if we do not treat Indian and Chinese Immigration separately’ since ‘the conditions of each immigration are different and peculiar’.Footnote 81 Second, they opined that the bill for protecting Indian labourers had greater urgency since the Government of India could re-impose the embargo. The inability and unwillingness of the metropole government to insist on a combined legislation was itself a feeble reaction to Governor Clarke's fait accompli. Cognisant of the intensity of European lobbying against regulating Chinese labour migration — which the Colonial Office had evidently succumbed to — Clarke had chosen strategically to submit legislation for protecting Indian labourers ahead of and separately from legislation protecting Chinese labourers.Footnote 82 Clarke would take into account the resolutions advanced by the Chamber of Commerce and, as we have already seen, drew up alternative plans accommodating their protest against the 1873 bill.
Conclusion
This is an account of how a regime of governance by experts came to be imposed on what had been unregulated labour migration in Malaya through manifesting points of connection and intersection between the migratory histories of Chinese and Indian labourers. From the macro-perspective of imperial practices of governance, the British Indian indenture system was a historically important empire-wide example of state-organised and state-supervised labour migration that was itself embedded in a longer history of British experiences with protection and humanitarian governance. The historical record in the Straits shows that practices of migration control had threaded through spatio-temporal trajectories of protection and humanitarian governance that moved and metamorphosised in contingent and ad hoc ways as colonial power reached into areas of ambiguous jurisdiction. Rather than firm borders demarcating where migrants could or could not pass through state-imposed control, migration control and its practices were themselves constitutive of boundaries that might have appeared outwardly tangible like lines on the map or were categories of identity with elements that more than met the eye.
The creation of the Chinese Protectorate in the 1870s was an inflection point in the history of how Chinese labourers were enveloped within a technocracy in Malaya. This was accomplished as part of a local history of migration control differentiating ‘Chinese’ from ‘Indian’ labour migrants who were bestowed their own Protector and benevolent technocracy. Viewed from local and imperial lenses, it becomes clear that the development of state control over Chinese labour migrants was made possible through actively reinterpreting and modifying imperial narratives, strategies, practices as well as institutions of migration control, protection and humanitarian governance. As this article demonstrates, the pliability of practices of humanitarian protection and governance in abetting British imperial formations elsewhere during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries proved functional for Malaya as well in view of its dependence on free and voluntary migration of labour, fluidity of migrant movement and settlement, and in the case of the Chinese, uncertain British jurisdiction, not to mention the multi-ethnic power structure encompassing an already influential Chinese oligarchy who first petitioned the government for benevolent protection.
The institutionalisation of protection and humanitarian governance in the form of the Chinese Protectorate was consequential to a dynamic of racialised governmentality of the Chinese population in colonised Malaya. This dynamic contained and was animated by contradictory impulses and fluid meanings of protection: the British saw the Chinese population as inherently free, independent and clannish, which meant that protective measures specific to their welfare and interests could be kept to a minimum whereas protection, conceived of in terms of surveillance and control using a disciplinary and regulatory regime, had to be infinitely maximised. It was this peculiar dynamic that drove British governance of the Chinese population in Malaya, and that resulted in the colonial regime acquiring ever-increasing powers of surveillance, management and regulation over Chinese migrants and residents even as they were seen, at the same time, to be essentially ‘outside state-space’ and impossible to control right through the post-World War Two period.
Inspired by Foucault and Said, we tend to take for granted the omnipotency of Eurocentric race categories and representations of race but it is important to appreciate, as Mitchell Dean stresses, that ‘regimes of practices exist within a milieu composed of mentalities of rule, without being reducible to that milieu’.Footnote 83 Regimes of governance were informed and activated by racialised categories and representations but they did not simply ‘work’ through mechanical reproduction or imposition. Racialised governmentality in practice entailed re-interpretation and improvisation of ‘globally’ relevant repertoires of rule, but as this article also stresses, in a polyglot colony, contestation, comparison and differentiation were necessary if only to plug the gaps between fictive imaginaries of race and contingencies occurring on the ground.
