British colonial administrators offered good government as their justification for ruling Malaya. Frank Swettenham, who spent his career in the Malayan Civil Service and served as resident-general for the Federated Malay States between 1896 and 1901, said that the Colonial Office had sent ‘trained British Civil Servants to advise the [Malay] Rulers in the art of administration and to organize a system of government which would secure justice, freedom, safety for all, with the benefits of what is known as “Civilization”’.Footnote ¹ But how did they attempt to achieve these lofty aims? Christopher Bayly argues for the existence of a strong British state abroad by the early nineteenth century.Footnote ² Yet bureaucracies and legal regimes had to be built in new colonies and the scope of government negotiated in some fashion with local authorities. Moreover, standards for ‘good governance’ rose during the nineteenth century under the pressures of political liberalism, professionalization and state-making, whose influences reached beyond the metropole to colonial territories.

It would be a mistake to accept Swettenham's view of an unproblematic export of British government to Malaya. Not only were the official aims of colonial rule virtually impossible to fulfil, but British governance came late to the Malay peninsula and its initial presence was weak. Even at the height of British power on the peninsula in the 1920s, colonial administrators contended with competing authorities and accepted their imperfect ability to translate high-minded aims into realities. The limitations of colonial rule are easiest to see in Malayan cities and towns, where even in small-scale communities officials found it difficult to ensure ‘justice, freedom, and safety for all’.

This article examines governance in Malayan towns during the late colonial period in order to assess its methods and effectiveness at the height of British power in the region. I will argue that the British state used two different methods to discipline urban populations. By the late nineteenth century in Malaya, the Colonial Office had implemented British-style sanitary regimes in combination with the harsh policing typical of crown colonies. Reliance on the ‘sanitary city’ as a mode of governance was useful for practical purposes, as well as public relations. The British were adept at modernizing urban infrastructures, relying on new technologies to give visible evidence of the benefits of imperial rule and to discipline the daily lives of colonial subjects. Patrick Joyce argues for the ‘technosocial solutions’ used to control British urban populations in the nineteenth century.Footnote ³ So too in the empire, where a sanitary strategy effectively reconciled ambitious colonial aims and the limited range of British power. Colonial urban governance relied on discipline and delegation to sustain itself, provoking both resistance by, and negotiation with, its subject populations.Footnote ⁴ British governance depended upon informal power sharing with local groups because the British presence in Malaya remained weak.

My article has three parts: I begin with a brief survey of forms of urban governance in Malaya and the population to which they applied. Next, I turn to the operation of town Sanitary Boards, their aims and acceptance. The final section of the paper focuses on crime and police activity in Malayan small towns to examine an alternative British disciplinary strategy.

Governance and urbanization in colonial Malaya

Towns were central to the expansion of British power in Malaya. Penang (1786) and Singapore (1819) were founded as ports, linked by ship to other sites of colonial rule and to the few older waterside Malay towns, such as Malacca and Kuala Trengganu.Footnote ⁵ In the Straits Settlements, direct rule was virtually identical with urban administration. Later in the nineteenth century, the rapid expansion of plantation agriculture and tin mining supported the growth of inland towns, linked by roads and rivers to the sea. By 1921, the census counted 27.7 per cent of the population of ‘British Malaya’ (Federated Malay States and the Straits Settlements) as urban.Footnote ⁶ In the Straits Settlements, moreover, 56.9 per cent of all residents lived in the towns (settlements with more than 1,000 people), whereas the proportion was 22.4 per cent in the Federated Malay States. The proportions dropped precipitously in the Unfederated Malay States, areas of restricted British influence and limited economic development, where only 6.6 of the Kedah and 4.2 per cent of the Kelantan population lived in urban districts.Footnote ⁷

Most of these Malayan towns had fewer than 5,000 residents. Each of the federated states had one large city whose population exceeded 10,000 people, and virtually all other urban places had no more than 5,000 inhabitants. Only in Perak had towns of intermediate size developed before World War II. In that state, the early development of mining permitted Taiping and Kampar to become sizeable settlements, while the growth of rubber cultivation and British administration brought Ipoh and Teluk Anson well above the 10,000 mark. But with these exceptions, the typical town on the Malay peninsula before the British were chased out by the Japanese was very small in size.

The settlements that grew lay at the crossing points along roads or rivers, and they became easy places for an expanding imperial government to locate police stations, district offices, courts and hospitals. All served as market towns for the surrounding plantations, mines and Malay villages (kampongs). Transportation links clearly encouraged growth which led to added infrastructures and buildings. As markets, service and administrative centres, they were the public face of the British Empire in Malaya for the mass of the rural and small town population.

Europeans not only composed a minute proportion of town populations, but their absolute numbers were so small that even in the 1920s only in a few places could Europeans constitute a critical mass for the creation and maintenance of social institutions. Even though many Europeans passed through the small towns, they did not live there. Over half (52 per cent) of the European population of the Federated Malay States resided in rural areas, mostly on plantations, whereas in the Straits Settlements, most Europeans settled in the cities of Singapore, Penang and Malacca. In inland towns, Europeans were very thin on the ground. Sizeable European communities could be found in the medium-sized towns (Ipoh, 427 of 36,860; Taiping, 285 of 21,111; and Telok Anson, 42 of 10,859, and in two commercial, administrative centres (Batu Gajah, 76 of 5,093, and Kuala Kangsar, 41 of 3,369), but their proportion did not rise over 1.5 per cent of the total. If Malayan towns with fewer than 5,000 people in 1921 are examined, very few of them had more than 10 European residents. Malayan towns were multicultural, multilingual communities of recent immigrants where the British presence was muted. Their core populations were Chinese (chiefly Teochews, Hakka and Hokkien) and Tamil supplemented by Malays, Eurasians and others operating under British rule, but only formal and intermittent British supervision.

Table 1:

Ethnic composition of selected small towns in Straits Settlement and Perak, 1921

Source: Nathan, Census of 1921, tables X and XI, 170–1.

During the early nineteenth century, the British government had few people and little money available for urban governance in Malaya. Makeshift and ad hoc arrangements characterized the administration of Penang. Administrators chose to rule local populations indirectly by appointing a headman to be responsible for the actions of his group. In Penang in the early nineteenth century, Kapitans for the Chinese, Malay and Muslim Chulia communities held courts to resolve petty civil and criminal disputes, as part of their responsibility for keeping order, and the system spread into Province Wellesley and the Malay States, continuing into the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁸

Malayan towns had other, less visible forms of governance, which shaped daily life in a variety of ways. In Malayan towns, Chinese systems of authority developed under the veneer of British control. Studies of Chinese immigrants to Malaya have documented the early formation of kongsis (brotherhoods with economic functions), clan and dialect groups. These quickly became large-scale organizations, uniting migrants with the same language, hometown or surname. In extreme cases, kongsis stood in for the state, governing their members, and even taking on the function of self-defence. Other societies, modelled on Triad groups in China, took on similar functions and became so threatening to British rule that they were outlawed in 1890.Footnote ⁹ This pattern of indirect rule was followed not only in the directly ruled Straits Settlements but also in the towns of the Federated Malay States, where British officials were, in theory, only advisors and sovereignty remained in the hands of Malay sultans.

Over time, British control of the region deepened, as bureaucracies grew along with the supply of multilingual civil servants. As it grew relatively stronger, the colonial government banned secret societies in 1890 and slowly developed its ability to tax and to enforce legislation, thereby curbing the power of tax farmers and local headmen.Footnote ¹⁰ Nevertheless, when town administrations are closely scrutinized, it is clear that large amounts of power continued to reside in non-British hands.

Late nineteenth-century imperial government operated in Malaya from two centres – that of the district and that of the local settlement. Each Malay state had a small number of urban district offices, each of which supervised surrounding territory.Footnote ¹¹ Urban government in Malaya between 1880 and 1940 lay in the hands of salaried officials, who spread throughout the peninsula as the British expanded their authority in a piecemeal, haphazard fashion. The governor of the Straits Settlements appointed municipal commissioners to run the principal towns of the colony – Singapore, Penang and Malacca. A short-lived experiment (1887–1913) to permit men with property to elect half the commissioners ended when the government claimed that there were too few ‘men of leisure’ to construct a group capable of detailed administration and that voters took too ‘small [an] interest’ in the elections to make choices representative. Thereafter, the governor appointed a Municipal Board which was to be advisory only. Leaders of the towns’ ‘representative communities’ (meaning Chinese, Hindus, Eurasians and Muslims) joined Europeans to discuss policies, while salaried officials ran day-to-day operations.Footnote ¹² In the Federated Malay States, Sanitary Boards, appointed by the British resident, ran the municipalities. Normally, the chief district officer chaired the group, assisted by lower-ranking civil servants and by a token number of ‘non-official’ members chosen from wealthier Chinese and Malay residents in the area.Footnote ¹³

The British delegated administrative control of smaller towns to Eurasian and Asian men. Local directories listed colonial officials and, usually, the places where they were stationed. From the evidence of their names, the police constables, the assistant overseers in the Public Works Departments, the apothecaries in hospitals, the office clerks and the bailiffs and interpreters in the local courts were Tamil, Chinese, Malay or Eurasian.Footnote ¹⁴ After 1880, a growing number of colonial officials worked in Province Wellesley – in local post offices, hospitals and police stations. Europeans, however, remained in the minority, assisted by growing numbers of multilingual Asian assistants. The town of Nibong Tebal became the site of a district office, run in 1896 by Reginald Prescott Gibbs. T. Subiah assisted him with the aid of two Malay clerks and several interpreters. Chee bin Mahamood served as forest ranger, The Eu Quee as bailiff, and Sheck Latiff as shroff (money changer and coin tester). The town's police sergeant was Muslim, as was his assistant.Footnote ¹⁵ Many of the police were Sikh, brought in from India. The European presence in towns other than district capitals was paper thin, and even at the district level it operated through a multicultural population with complex local ties and allegiances. Anand Yang's comment on northern India, that local control systems were ‘beyond [the British] circle of power’, also fits British Malaya.Footnote ¹⁶ British rule empowered Asian residents, whose administrative powers were augmented by their control of paperwork and translation. In the towns, they could combine local knowledge with authority delegated by the largely absent British rulers.

In Papan, Perak, the penghulu (chief official) between 1882 and 1909 was a Mandailing Muslim, born in Sumatra. Raja Bila was the face of British authority in the town. He acted as a judge in local civil and criminal cases, collected taxes and tin duties, raised corvée labour, publicized government regulations and through his property holdings controlled local access to water, remaining in contact with British magistrates and district officers by letter. He ran his office with the aid of a clerk, Haji Mohammad Nur, who spoke at least one Chinese dialect, probably Cantonese or Hakka. His power as a colonial administrator rested on his position as the head after 1877 of the community of Sumatran Mandailings, who had migrated to the area to mine tin and to grow rice. Bila acted as the patron and advisor to the group, which assembled for Friday prayers in the mosque next to his house. Over the years, Bila loaned money, helped with legal difficulties and mediated disputes. While his salary and his daily duties derived from the colonial state, his authority came as much from his position within the Mandailing community as it did from the British.Footnote ¹⁷

Even in the Straits Settlement where the British governed directly, they informally maintained the Kapitan system by appointing such men and their sons as justices of the peace, giving them authority to try certain types of local cases.Footnote ¹⁸ Kee Lye Huat migrated to Province Wellesley from South China in 1852 to work as a labourer on a sugar plantation. He prospered and married the sister of a wealthy Teochew planter who was a leader of the Gee Hin Secret Society. Kee bought land in Sungei Bacup near Penang, building a series of shops and a large family compound, which remains today the residence of one branch of the family and houses the family's ancestor tablets. Kee served both as Kapitan China and as a member of the Penang Chinese Advisory Board, and his sons had positions as justices of the peace. His brother-in-law, Khaw Boo Aun, was solidly established in Nibong Tebal and Bukit Tambun. His strong power base came not only from his plantations and landholding but also from his role as a revenue farmer in northern Perak, his directorship of the Teochew regional and dialect society (the Hang-kang-keh-beow) and his leading role in the Ghee Hin secret society. By the time of his death in 1906, he had also become a justice of the peace and a member of the Penang Chinese Advisory Board.Footnote ¹⁹ Chinese families consolidated local influence through wealth and leadership of town-based Chinese community associations and temples, as well as through official appointments given by the British. Such men brokered relations between their kinsmen and the British government, holding much local influence. For them, the way to continued power was clear. They built community organizations for their dialect groups while they became part of the colony's elite through the acquisition of revenue farms, government offices and advisory appointments. Their children learned English, helping the family to move between European and Chinese cultural worlds. They should be seen as interpreters and intermediaries, rather than ‘collaborators’.Footnote ²⁰ Such men became essential participants in the governance of the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States.

Colonial administrative structures in the towns, therefore, operated in tandem with a variety of other organizations not under British control. Administrative and, to a limited extent, judicial powers were divided, and the British had, in effect, delegated a major share to other groups. Colonial governance, therefore, was multilayered, reflecting pervasive tensions between rule through direct discipline and the consultative, participatory mode that indirect rule supposedly entailed and that liberal states adopted in their home territories.

Sanitary Boards

From an early date in Malaya, city government was identified with sanitation. Imported, ‘modern’ infrastructures made towns the showplaces of colonial rule. Even small centres stood out from villages and plantations because of piped water, street lights and macadamized roads. When a Municipal Board was set up in Singapore in 1856, its major jobs were to cleanse, light, water and drain the town, while eliminating ‘nuisances’ and poor housing. In debates over the board's scope and control, residents equated good government with public cleanliness.Footnote ²¹ From 1893, larger towns in the Federated Malay States were also actively supervised by Sanitary Boards consisting of district level colonial officials (civil servants, engineers and doctors for the most part) and a small number of appointed representatives of local ‘communities’.Footnote ²² Improvement Boards ran small towns too. At will, governors could create Rural Boards, which would run specified districts using the same legislation in force under the Straits Settlement Municipal Ordinance. The Colonial Office in 1911 identified sanitary control as ‘the mainspring of municipal action’ in the Straits Settlements.Footnote ²³ Sanitation and governance were tightly linked in practice and in the minds of colonial officials.

A stream of enabling laws, consolidated in 1913, and revised in 1926, gave the appointed Municipal Boards sweeping powers over public spaces, private buildings and public behaviour. These laws were modelled on the English Public Health Act of 1875, the Municipal Corporations Act of 1882 and the Local Government Act of 1894, as interpreted within the framework of English case law.Footnote ²⁴ It is worth exploring the style of governance mandated by these legal frameworks. The chief differences between English and Straits municipal laws lay in lack of responsibility in the colony to an electorate. Board members owed their appointment to the governor or the resident, not an elected authority, and there were only limited rights for appeal of decisions. Those who objected could petition for a change, but if they lost the decision there was little recourse.

Sanitation brought with it a broad mandate. Officials inspected, licensed, taxed and regulated in the interest of health and safety, as they defined these terms. Not only were their powers wide, but they exercised them zealously, as the surviving minutes of Sanitary Boards record.Footnote ²⁵ Sanitary inspectors had extensive authority to cleanse, demolish and remove, and they could design improvement schemes for entire areas.Footnote ²⁶ The watchful eye of town government in theory extended everywhere – from rats in houses to the food in the market to noises and traffic on the streets.Footnote ²⁷ Their aim was to create sanitary environments without dirt or pollution. Chronological lists of laws passed in the Federated Malay States make clear that this model of the sanitary, regulated town shaped state legal codes, as well as formal municipal ordinances. Individual states had dozens of laws regulating urban street hawkers, slaughter houses and bakeries. Night inspections, fines and fees were used to control production, commerce and behaviour on the streets.Footnote ²⁸ Malayan towns of all sizes were to embody a British vision of health and sanitation, defined in Chadwickian terms, and residents were supposed to embrace this vision, behaving accordingly.

This sanitary impulse took two forms: (1) direct control of urban spaces and behaviour; (2) the broad provision of public services in the interest of public health and safety. On the one hand, Municipal Boards set high standards for maintenance of the townscape by inhabitants, who were to be watched and fined if they did not comply with government edicts. Arcades and drains in front of houses had be kept clear, buildings had to be repaired and not be overcrowded, and markets as well as manufacturing were heavily regulated. On the other hand, the colonial government took upon itself the duties of water supply, street cleaning and lighting, as well as sewage removal. Maintenance of a clean, healthy town became a public service done for, rather than by, residents. By the late nineteenth century, such services were considered municipal necessities, and they spread in the first half of the twentieth century in the Federated Malay States and Straits Settlements to even small settlements of 1,000 people, which lacked European residents.

The work of the North Kinta Sanitary Board gives a good sense of how such administrative groups operated on a regular basis. In the spring of 1911, the four British officials who actually attended the board's regular meetings spent most of their time worrying about housing in the town of Ipoh. They debated lot sizes, approved shop house plans and decided to force the clearing of a blocked lane behind buildings on Hugh Low Street. They voted to clear out the rough huts built by vegetable gardeners on town roads but permitted the erection of street food stalls in various central areas during the day and approved a site for a new Chinese temple. Working on town services took most of the rest of their attention: board members authorized the building of a new bath house and public latrines, signed a contract for street lighting, changed the arrangements by which shop house owners stored their garbage and waste for town collection and expanded water services. In their May meeting, they ordered floor mats as required items for licensed rickshaws, set occupancy limits at the Chinese and Japanese hotels, approved efforts to limit crowding in Treacher Street houses and ended rat extermination efforts in the town because so ‘few rats were found’.Footnote ²⁹

The fusion of public health and town administration visible in Malaya can, of course, be read as a mode of discipline linked to a central state: medical science in the service of central power – with the extra refinement that in the empire, the disciplined were the colonized.Footnote ³⁰ In his discussion of the tactics of governance, Michel Foucault distinguishes, however, among different forms of urban discipline. Initially, laws and police power set norms and forced individuals to internalize rules of conduct designed to safeguard public health, public spaces and public order. In a later stage of manipulation, Foucault argues, the liberal state used techniques of mass population control and the operation of economic markets to produce the desired behaviours.Footnote ³¹ As Foucault suggests, imperial states by the nineteenth century had different methods of governance, some of which were directly repressive of individuals and others of which manipulated behaviour indirectly. The sanitary regimes in force in Malayan towns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries illustrate very well this tension among strategies of colonial rule. The sanitary impulse had two faces: (1) surveillance along with sanctions; (2) the provision of services with broad access to them.Footnote ³² Even if all of the sanitary provisions can be seen as disciplinary, the methods were quite different. While shopkeepers in many Perak towns faced fines if they did not keep the arcades and drains around houses unobstructed and in good repair, they and their families came to depend on public provision of water, as well as collection of household rubbish and nightsoil. By the 1920s, their children could be vaccinated by travelling doctors or nurses, while public health campaigns, in conjunction with mosquito and rat control teams, worked to block the spread of malaria, plague and tuberculosis. Over time, the state increased the scope of its activities.

But how effectively implemented and enforced were the sanitary codes? The elaborate detail of municipal regulations begs the question of the ability of a tiny colonial bureaucracy to monitor and to deliver high-quality services, and it says nothing about the reception of those regulations in the towns. Brenda Yeoh argues that the Chinese population of Singapore resisted colonial control of urban spaces by contesting municipal regulations.Footnote ³³ In the small towns, no information exists to indicate which municipal regulations were usually ignored and who typically flouted them, but available sources cast doubt on the efficacy of enforcement. Lenore Manderson points to widespread use of streets as garbage dumps and inadequate urban services in Kuala Lumpur and towns in the Unfederated Malay States. She challenges the notion that town Sanitary Boards were able to curb the filth produced by crowded, poor populations.Footnote ³⁴ In 1896, the Annual Report for the Straits Settlements complained of the deterioration of the roads in Province Wellesley, the unhealthy state of the district, the lack of funds for proper lighting and scavenging in the villages.Footnote ³⁵ The Perak Pioneer, an English-language daily newspaper printed in Taiping, complained repeatedly in 1911 about the incompetent work of the local Sanitary Board: it pointed to broken, clogged street drains, filthy, public latrines and ‘nauseating’ stenches. The town's own work force was not doing its work.Footnote ³⁶ Whether these complaints are read as a sign of rising public standards, or as a signal that town dwellers failed to internalize the rules of the ‘sanitary city’, the Sanitary Board seems to have failed to clean up the town and to enforce actively the letter of the law. In the district of Sitiawan, Perak, during the depression year of 1931, sanitary inspectors, who watched over a total of about 4,100 people, brought a total of only 114 cases before the courts, over three-quarters of which concerned issues of cleanliness in the food market, street stalls or licensed commercial premises. Only 10 cases involved fines of house owners for non-compliance with sanitary codes, and only 5 cases of obstruction of public spaces were brought before local courts. Average fines were under $2.00 per offence. The range of concerns, as well as the extent of intervention, seems narrow. Moreover, the board said that they were not able to enforce building standards or easily to collect fines. Because of bad economic conditions, they said they would ignore conditions in ‘squalid’ squatter settlements in the district; yet these had existed for many years.Footnote ³⁷

The normal activities of Sanitary Boards in the State of Perak bear only limited resemblance to heavy disciplining of individuals. Their concerns seem more heavily slanted to patronage via service contracts and building permits than worries about the quality of results. Their most intrusive activities comprised the licensing of hawkers and rickshaw pullers and the inspection of licensed premises and markets. For the most part, they licensed new construction and worried about standards.

Major resistance campaigns, as reported by Yeoh in Singapore, seem to have been absent in smaller towns. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the surviving sources are scanty. Few records have survived of the day-to-day actions toward, and responses of, town populations. Also, remaining files from Sanitary Boards in the region date from the twentieth century, when efforts to clean up the towns through public action was in full swing. At that time, harassing householders and vendors took second place to providing services through city workers who were monitored and could be fired. Moreover, there is evidence both in local newspapers and in Sanitary Board files that after 1900, some town residents accepted the sanitary regime as both ‘normal’ and desirable, and they were willing to work under the government's guidelines. In the surviving records for Sitiawan and the Kinta Valley towns, there is no evidence of mass objections via the press or public meetings to Sanitary Board rulings. In contrast, boards sometimes heard from people who wanted more, rather than fewer, services. They asked that drains near their businesses be cleaned or that water supplies and street lighting be increased. Some asked for state aid in building schools or recreation grounds. In public meetings to discuss board regulations, audiences demanded and got postponements and compromises, which they accepted.Footnote ³⁸ Sanitary rule in the towns included elements of negotiation, as well as imposition and acceptance, as well as avoidance.

Neither the costs nor the benefits of an English-style sanitary code was equally distributed. Sanitary Boards had much patronage power: they employed, permitted, licensed and inspected. Each year they decided who would get contracts for town lighting and sewage removal and who would be able to build houses on newly surveyed lots. Even sellers of meat and vegetables in the town market or streets had to apply regularly for licences. As a group, the board set land valuations and decided when a ‘substandard’ house needed to be demolished. Carts, rickshaws and automobiles required licences before they could be used on public roads, and vehicles had to meet local standards for maintenance and equipment. Board employees – the inspectors, clerks and coolies – gained most directly from sanitary governance, but local contractors, property owners, transportation workers and food sellers needed the board's business or its licence in order to function freely. Those who gained the board's approval moved on to the right side of the law, an advantage in places where people were known and easily visible in town public spaces.

Those who lost out came, for the most part, from the lowest ranks of local society. Kinta Valley rickshaw pullers and cart drivers found that operating costs for their vehicles rose when owners had to pay for new aprons, mats and lights, and these costs were probably passed along in the form of higher rents. They could be arrested or fined by police worried about obstruction of the streets. Coolies lost cheap housing when owners were forced to decrease crowding in hostels and when the board ordered the demolition of huts and sheds on back streets. Under the pressure of licensed vendors, street hawkers lost the right to sell or faced higher licensing fees.Footnote ³⁹ Prostitutes could be confined in public or private ‘lock’ hospitals, if thought to have a venereal disease.Footnote ⁴⁰ James Warren's research makes clear the heavy surveillance of prostitutes and rickshaw pullers in Singapore.Footnote ⁴¹ The drive for a clean and orderly town pushed the poor into even more marginal positions, as they were excluded from trades, ousted from housing and public parks and prosecuted for vagrancy. The lack of effective town services also hit them the hardest: their buildings were dark and crowded, often lacking piped water, adequate latrines and good ventilation. Colonial governance reinforced class inequalities in Malayan towns.

Policing the towns

Even if governance in Malaya had its indirect forms, its colonial setting brought heavy emphasis on police power. Visitors to a small town could not miss the police station, sited on a central crossing or on one of the main streets. Constables patrolled main streets and the market area. By 1931, the number of employed constables reached 4,349 in the Federated Malay States (one policeman for every 394 inhabitants), and the effective rate was much higher in the towns where the constables were based.Footnote ⁴² Their authority was wide. Legal codes gave police authority over a long list of common offences against persons and property, and they had jurisdiction over brothels, gambling halls, toddy shops and opium dens, as well as over behaviour that disturbed public order and non-compliance with municipal regulations. Political crimes, such as membership in a secret society or the publication of seditious material, came under the purview of Special Branch detectives. Crime in its many guises worried colonial officials, and they worked hard to track and suppress it.

Annual reports reveal unease in the face of illegal activity, rather than confidence in its mastery. In 1886, the superintendent of police in the Straits Settlements complained that the Chinese Baba and Malay headmen were less willing than 15 years earlier to influence their countrymen to keep the peace. To compound the problem, he claimed that police constables could be bribed for a few cents. In 1901, the resident general of the Federated Malay States admitted that less than one third of the cases of murder, highway robbery, gang robbery, housebreaking and simple robbery that had taken place in either 1900 or 1901 had been followed by an arrest or ‘discovery’.Footnote ⁴³ Although authorities in the Straits Settlements boasted in 1931 that their ‘war of attrition’ against ‘gangsters and members of unlawful societies’ was moving along satisfactorily, they also conceded that ‘in spite of increased police efficiency and the influence of economic conditions, threats and actual disturbances have been by no means infrequent’. Fewer than 30 per cent of murder cases and 13 per cent of gang robberies led to an arrest and then conviction.Footnote ⁴⁴

On a more mundane level, however, the police had the legal authority and probably the energy to keep town streets in order. The level of serious crime in the colony seems to have been relatively low. Annual crime reports mention very few cases of riot or large-scale disturbances, and when young men appeared in the magistrates’ courts it was generally for quite minor violations of municipal ordinances. In returns for the Magistrate's Court in Teluk Anson in 1930, young Chinese and Malay men caught riding a bike without a light, making too much noise, being drunk and disorderly or mistreating an animal were hauled into court and fined. Vagrancy or ‘suspicion of being a bad character’ was a more serious charge, and either led to a jail term if a substantial fine or bond was not paid.Footnote ⁴⁵ At least in Teluk Anson, a strategy of cracking down on minor offences to keep more serious ones at bay seems to have been followed. Control of behaviour by men on the streets was a major activity by town police.

Gang robbery was one crime that demonstrated to police and to the general population the fragility of law and order in the colony well into the twentieth century. Around 1890, when most travel was on foot, by bike or by bullock cart, the ‘main roads between Ipoh and Batu Gajah and Ipoh and Kampar’ were ‘dotted with temporary block-houses built of attap where Sikh police were stationed to deal with the highway robbery menace’. Although better roads and motor cars decreased the threat to travellers, over 200 gang robberies were reported in the Federated Malay States in 1914. Outbreaks of gang robbery in Perak between 1915 and 1920 demonstrate a continuing risk in small towns. A Cantonese, Chan Lung, with about 20 well-armed followers ran a protection racket in Perak. When not paid enough, his gang attacked Chenderaing, in October 1915, cutting the telephone wires and looting local shops. The sole sentry in the town was shot, as was another constable who arrived too late to help him. Next the gang struck successfully in Menglembu by cutting gas tubes leading to the street lights and then moving in for the kill. Small police detatchments were outgunned. Eventually police raids and a high reward offered to informers led to the capture of Chan Lung and his rival thug, One-eyed Leong, but it took several years during which the town raids continued.Footnote ⁴⁶

Considered even worse than gang robbers by colonial authorities were the many Chinese ‘secret’ societies, which by 1890 the state had the power to drive underground temporarily but never to eliminate. Competing societies, brought into Malaya by immigrant labourers from South China, were held responsible for riots that periodically erupted among rival groups in Singapore, Penang and the tin-mining districts of the peninsula.Footnote ⁴⁷ The government saw them as criminals who threatened the state and wanted to block their activities and diminish their power over Chinese migrants. In addition, the British feared the international links and the politically subversive potential of the societies. Currently, scholars describe these groups in different terms, stressing their use of Chinese ritual forms to give legitimacy and their functions of protection and community-building.Footnote ⁴⁸

Colonial authorities in the Federated Malay States fought hard against, and finally outlawed, secret societies in the 1890s only to find them reviving around 1905 and again in 1912, despite repeated banishments of convicted leaders. In 1912 in Perak, the government reported that the Wa Kei Society (‘Peace by Land and Water Society’) controlled ‘traffic in women and girls and [was] likely in the future to do a good deal in the way of the illicit promotion of gaming houses’. They broke up the society in the town of Rasa, but they suspected that branches existed in every other town in the state. A group called the ‘360’ was widespread in Kinta valley towns, and the Hui Lan Kui had an organization in the town of Gopeng. Others were centred in Taiping, operating under the umbrella of a Chinese free dispensary and a commercial school. In 1922, the Protectorate of the Chinese reported that ‘Triad Societies in the neighbourhood of Sitiawan and Kampong Koh [had] always been a source of trouble to the Protectorate and the police.’ They were hard to control because no evidence could be obtained in the police courts, ‘as the giving of such evidence would inevitably lead to the oppression if not murder of the witness. Such societies’, an observer writes, ‘are dangerous and secret. Their object is originally self-protection, so that in any emergency the member may obtain help and money from the society.’ Raids and banishments continued through the 1920s and 1930s until the Japanese invaded. Political societies worried British administrators increasingly in this period with prosecutions of men with alleged Communist or Kuomintang connections added to ongoing concerns about Triad leaders.Footnote ⁴⁹

Not only Chinese were involved in secret societies. Red and White flag societies drew on Malays as well as Chinese. Active in Penang and Province Wellesley during the mid-nineteenth century, they reappeared under the names of the Kerelak Association and the Perak River Secret Society between 1919 and 1935, spreading throughout Province Wellesley and Perak. Authorities claimed that they had 10,000 members, 70 per cent of whom were Malay. Alleged links to gang robberies and Triad associations added to official fears.Footnote ⁵⁰

The societies pitted one group of town residents, often a particular ethnic group or trade, against another. Street fights and struggles over turf resulted, with outsiders caught in the middle. Police struggled to maintain order using arrests and banishments, but the courts had only temporary success in dissolving the societies. John Douglas Dalley, the superintendent of police in Kuala Kangsar, said in 1932,

British power within the towns was limited, therefore, not only by the intermittent revival of secret societies and the presence of criminal gangs but by the problem of enforcing the law within a setting where many people had stronger ties to social organizations linked to their ethnic group than they did to the colonial state.

By the early twentieth century, the Chinese and Malay populations of small towns in western Malaya were fractured by political loyalties, as well as by class, language group and regional origin. A not inconsiderable number accepted British rule and wanted more services and more protection from colonial authorities, rather than their removal. They were willing to toast the king and celebrate Empire Day, identifying themselves as British subjects.Footnote ⁵² Many men and women of middling status saw advantages in British control of the region. Of course, this did not block their continued loyalty to kinsmen, religious authorities, Malay sovereigns or the Chinese government. Identities were multiple in a region where most inhabitants had family, language and religious ties to areas outside the peninsula.Footnote ⁵³ Under these conditions, political attitudes were not tightly linked to ethnicity. The British had secured at least the tacit and often the active co-operation of the large number of Asian state employees and of the much larger groups who used state courts and state-run railways, attended state-run schools and benefited from town-supplied services. Such loyalties were spread by schools, clubs and the media, as well as by the public rituals of colonialism.Footnote ⁵⁴ Because towns represented modernity as well as colonial rule, urbanites who liked the new economy and cosmopolitan culture tended to accept British authority before Malaysian nationalism became a viable alternative.

Towns were central sites for colonial governance in Malaya, places for the promised delivery of cleanliness, peace and order. It is clear, however, that the Malayan colonial government did not have sufficient control over local populations or enough resources to create ‘justice, freedom, safety for all’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Even at the high point of imperial power, their ability to control street crime and to discipline local populations was limited and colonial authority was regularly delegated to Asian men with authority within their own communities. The British, however, could provide an expanding urban infrastructure of roads, bridges, schools, water supplies and medical services, which were used extensively by urban populations and which improved public health substantially by the 1920s. The sanitary city was a key part of colonial governance in Malaya, building off the strengths and finessing the weaknesses of imperial power at the local level.