Introduction
Weights and measures are fundamental to trade, commerce, industry, medicine, and many other fields of past and present society, and from time immemorial, ‘the notion of measure is associated with cheating’.Footnote 1 While ensuring that sellers use fair weights and measures is a matter of immense concern in everyday market transactions, the place of metrology in the history of Malay(si)a is very much obscure despite its significance. Drawing on materials found in the Arkib NegaraFootnote 2 and English and vernacular newspapers, this article reconstructs social meanings, from both colonial and native perspectives, of weights and measures in British Malaya. By bringing together two disparate bodies of literature, namely the colonial history of Malaya and historical metrology, this article enriches the history of British Malaya with the story of metrological reform while countering Eurocentric perspectives in historical metrology.
Historical metrology, whether derived from practical judiciary needs to solve disputes between peasants and the gentry in feudal society, driven by scientific curiosity, or undertaken to defend feudal lords’ interests, is a field of historical study that aims to gain insights from past knowledge of weights and measures.Footnote 3 Despite starting as an auxiliary discipline to history and archaeology, historical metrology began to raise sociological questions since the 1970s, such as what social conditions facilitate or slow down metrological reform or the reasons for the presence or absence of anti-reform movements.Footnote 4 Hector Vera has identified three different dimensions of historical metrology: ‘instruments and techniques’; ‘the measurers or persons who do the measuring and the organizations they work for’; and ‘the broader institutional orders and systems of belief’.Footnote 5 Taking into consideration all these dimensions, historical and social studies of metrology are capable of revealing the social conditions and relations that shape metrological practices and standards of a particular society. However, the social studies of metrology must look beyond ‘the construction [of metrology] by society’ to also investigate ‘the construction of certain societies’, while new metrological practices and standards shape social relations in return.Footnote 6
In general, sovereignty denotes the supremacy of an authority over particular areas. Premised on this understanding, the right of jurisdiction and oversight over the units of measure is ‘a fundamental attribute of sovereignty’, as Kula argues in his classic work on historical metrology.Footnote 7 In the pre-metric era, control over weights and measures was a site of bitter battles and contestations, both between cities and between states and municipality. Contemporary metrological reform, often initiated by state administrators, not only involves ‘assertions of state sovereignty’, but also ‘yield[s] bodies of knowledge that typically increase the capacity of state agencies to act at a distance, and provide forms of leverage over local practices’.Footnote 8 From this perspective, state-imposed metrological reform, with or without the aid of scientists and the support of traders, can be conceived of as statecraft. Nonetheless, as pointed out by many studies, attempts to control, impose, or change metrological practices and standards tend to spark ‘resistance’ or ‘explosive reactions’ as the states intervene in disparate elements and threaten pre-existing immensely diverse measures in societies.Footnote 9
Using colonial metrological reform as a starting point, this article is a historical and social study of colonial society in British Malaya.Footnote 10 Unlike the metric reform in late eighteenth-century Europe, which was initiated by scientists, weights-and-measures regulations were a colonial administrator-imposed reform in late nineteenth-century British Malaya, at a historical juncture when trade activities were dominated by Chinese immigrants.Footnote 11 This article contributes to the colonial history of Malaya by reconstructing various layers of social relations through the study of metrological reform and the ensuing social responses. We view the use of daching and liteng,Footnote 12 customary scales brought in by Chinese traders and widely used across various states in the Malay Peninsula long before regulation came into force, as an area of contact between people of diverse classes, tastes, views, and values, between traders and colonial inspectors, and between immigrants of different ethnic backgrounds. In Kula's words, this helps us to ‘uncover [the] social meaning’ of weights and measures. Such an approach allows us to evade Eurocentric, state-centric, and top-down perspectives, which frequently treat metrological reform as a diffusion of science and technology from the imperial centre to colony and as a method of promoting trade modernity.Footnote 13 We also pay attention to the agency of various historical actors, European and Asian, elite and working-class. As succinctly put forward by James C. Scott, details got lost from ‘the state's narrow frame of reference’.Footnote 14 Nonetheless, we hold the view that it is equally important not to miss two significant perspectives: that metrology is a site of sovereignty assertion and contestation, and that metrological reform is a matter of statecraft. Both constitute the wider context in which various historical actors respond to the issues pertaining to weights and measures. While reading along the grain of both colonial archives and English newspapers is required to reconstruct the views of the colonial administrators, reading against the grain of the same sources and consulting vernacular newspapers are useful for gaining counter perspectives. Rumours, as will be shown later, constitute another significant native perspective. As cogently argued in subaltern historiography, rumours are a genre of rebel communication.Footnote 15
Why did the colonial authority regulate weights in British Malaya in the first place? What was its impact on society? How did the local actors respond to and influence the reform? We shall answer these questions here.
Regulation of weights: colonial and native actors
Despite being a core part of trade and commerce, weights and measures remained unregulated in Malaya until the passing of the 1886 Weights and Measures Ordinance in the Straits Settlements (SS hereafter).Footnote 16 The same law was later duplicated and known as the Weights and Measures Regulations in the states of Perak and Selangor in 1893, which came into effect in February 1894, and were extended to more districts and states in the following two decades. Prior to reform, commercial transactions and taxation were largely conducted with customary weighing methods and units, which varied across different districts.Footnote 17 Archival records of communication between colonial officers in the late nineteenth century suggest that regulations were as much out of taxation concerns as much as they were a response to complaints about the rampant use of false daching in the market.Footnote 18 Lack of uniform weights across districts had caused confusion and revenue loss in import and export duties. In an examination of 40 shops by the superintendent of police in Kuala Lumpur in 1882, many were found to have short measures.Footnote 19 The global debate of standardization and the desire to impose imperial weights and measures in the colony also informed metrological reform in Malaya. In a report on weights and measures, Alfred R. Venning, state treasurer of Selangor, hoped that, with the reform, ‘standard measures of extension, of weight and of capacity in the whole Peninsula may be assimilated to those in use in the United Kingdom’.Footnote 20 Equally important is the timing of the reform, which coincided with the colonial authority's increasing grip on more and more aspects of colonial society, especially the control over what were considered ‘unruly’ elements in the Chinese immigrant community, whose population was rapidly rising.Footnote 21 The formation of the Federated Malay States (FMS hereafter), a federation of four states (Selangor, Perak, Negeri Sembilan, and Pahang) in the Malay Peninsula in 1895, is another sign of British government's widened control over the Malay Peninsula. Initiated at this historical juncture, metrological reform was simultaneously a move to assert colonial sovereignty over matters regarding weights and an act of colonial statecraft.
Before the regulation was put in place, police stations in various districts would procure standard scales of various capacities. The price of a scale ranged from one dollar to over four dollars, depending on its capacity.Footnote 22 The request to furnish police stations with standard weights and scales, however, did not come solely from British administrators.Footnote 23 Some leading Chinese were as concerned about the issue of ensuring correct weights and more efficient methods of weighing tin. In 1891, Chow Ah Yok or Chiew Yoke, a Chinese merchant who was also a committee member of the Kuala Lumpur Sanitary Board, urged the government to keep standard daching in the Central Police Station so that small tin traders, who could not afford to buy one, could have access to accurate scales.Footnote 24 In 1894, a group of over 50 Chinese tin miners even signed a petition to urge the Selangor government to replace daching with the more efficient American-made Fairbanks Scales—a type of platform scale for heavy objects, to weigh their tin slabs.Footnote 25 These were among the cases that indicate that native historical actors were not passive in reforming matters related to weights. After the regulations were passed, several significant changes may be noted. The duty of examining daching was transferred from the police department to the Inspector of Weights and Measures, who worked under the Sanitary Board. Only officially verified and stamped weighing scales were allowed for commercial and industrial use and no traders were permitted to make or sell weighing devices without a licence. But mandatory verification and stamping only applied to large daching, while liteng or small customary scales under one tahil used for retail transaction in the bullion market, and opium and drug shops were exempted. There were three different stories explaining why small scales were exempted: liteng was too small and thus stamping was impractical;Footnote 26 the lack of standard weights under one tahil to test small scales;Footnote 27 and the British government tended to respect native practices, including the use of customary small scales, in its colonies and protectorates.
The metrological reform at once created a new trade of inspecting, selling, and manufacturing weighing instruments. Singapore was already a centre of daching trade, and the very first licensed dealer in Selangor, Vong Sam, approved in 1894, would procure scales from across the Straits of Tebrau.Footnote 28 Despite Vong Sam's desire to monopolize the trade of selling and manufacturing daching in the state, which was revealed in a letter from L. B. von Donop, Acting Chairman of the Sanitary Board, urging the Selangor government to issue a licence to Vong Sam,Footnote 29 there were seven licensed dealers of weights and measures altogether in Selangor by 1896. In 1920, the number of licensed dealers increased to 25. Among the licensed dealers were Chow Kit and Co. and Chan Sow Lin and Co., owned and run by two leading Chinese, who each applied for a licence in 1906 and 1913, respectively. Prior to this, Chan Sow Lin's company was once caught and prosecuted for making weights without a licence. In the pre-war years, a licence to sell weights and measures cost 12 dollars, while a manufacturing licence was 30 dollars.
Daching riot: resistance against metrological intervention
When the Weights and Measures Regulation was about to be enforced in Selangor, A. R. Venning anticipated no serious disturbances to trade, but he did expect some opposition from the traders.Footnote 30 He was not the only one who anticipated this coming. Some of his contemporaries in Europe had already warned that metrological reform was very likely to invite opposition in many parts of the world for interfering in customary practices.Footnote 31 Three years after Selangor's Weights and Measures Regulation was enforced, a riot broke out on the fourth and fifth of March 1897 in protest against the Kuala Lumpur Sanitary Board for its attempt to make all Chinese traders, who dominated the market in town, use government-verified scales.Footnote 32 In the process of maintaining order, a Malay police constable mistakenly fired on the rioters, injuring two and killing one Chinese.
A report written by G. T. Hare, appointed Secretary for Chinese Affairs in the FMS a month before the riot broke out, is by far the most detailed account of the disturbance and its causes, albeit from the perspective of managing social order and upholding colonial sovereignty.Footnote 33 A chain of events a few months before the outbreak led to the disturbance. On 27 January 1897, 20 Chinese medicine vendors in the town jointly sent a petition to the chairman of the Sanitary Board since they had been previously informed by the Inspector of Weights and Measures to bring their scales forward for verification and stamping. They asked that the small customary scales they used be exempted, like their counterparts in other parts of the British empire, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Malacca, Penang, and Perak, which had similar regulations. Although Section Six of the regulation expressly rendered lawful dealings made with customary local weights and Section Seven clearly stated that small scales used in retail transactions of gold, silver, precious stones, drugs, and opium were exempted from regular verification and stamping, F. C. Stapleton, Inspector of Weights and Measures in Selangor, purportedly under orders from the chairman of the Sanitary Board, raided three Chinese shops on 19 February 1897. The three traders—one druggist (Ban Shan Chan), one opium shopkeeper (Sin Hong Li), and one goldsmith (Chheng Seng)—were later summoned, charged, and fined for using ‘false’ daching on 23 February 1897. Led by three Chinese—a goldsmith (Chau Heong), a court runner (Teng Chu Ling), and an opium shop owner (Iap Thien Pao)—a group of outraged traders held a community meeting in the Sin Tze Si Ya Temple on High StreetFootnote 34—a place that then functioned like a town hall among the working-class Chinese immigrants. A decision was made to hand a petition appealing the sentence, dated 25 February 1897 and signed by over 100 traders of all classes, to the newly appointed Protector of Chinese, G. T. Hare.Footnote 35 The petitioners had no objection to large daching being regularly verified and stamped by the government, but they wished for small ones to be exempted. According to their plan, a strike would take place if the Chinese Protector failed to help the affected retailers and hucksters.
Upon meeting the petitioners on 1 March 1897, Hare advised the traders to collect funds to hire a counsel to appeal the decision, promised to investigate and handle the dispute well, and arranged for a meeting with the traders and the Kapitan CinaFootnote 36 on 4 March 1897. As knowledgeable as Hare was about various customary weighing instruments of the Chinese, which had grown out of centuries of use and adaptation by different trades and professions, he was sympathetic to the petty traders affected by the Sanitary Board's new legal exercise. Back then, a liteng from China cost only one to five cents. Hare was of the view that any attempt to force the Chinese petty traders to use government scales would cause much hardship. Immediately after receiving the petition, Hare carried out a thorough investigation. He was of the opinion that what Stapleton had done exceeded the instruction from the Board, and both the Sanitary Board Chairman and the magistrate had interpreted the regulation incorrectly. He suggested that the Board make no further prosecutions until a retrial of the three cases was settled. Despite the fact that the Board's meeting on the morning of 4 March reached a conclusion that was in line with Hare's suggestion, a crowd of about 2,000 people poured into the town, all shops except Loke Chow Kit's were closed, and a riot broke out in the afternoon on the same day.Footnote 37 Several shops, largely owned by the Cantonese, in Petaling Street, Market Street, Rodger Street, High Street, and Sungai Besi were looted, and the worst damaged was Vong Sam's. The value of all the property looted was estimated at some $9,000. Meanwhile, a ‘rumour’ had been circulating that Vong Sam was at the bottom of all the trouble since he had urged the Sanitary Board to prosecute traders who used unverified and unstamped liteng, so that he could secure a Weights and Measures Farm.Footnote 38 In regards to spreading ‘rumours’, both Lat Pao and Penang Sinpoe, two Chinese dailies based in Singapore and Penang, respectively, consciously exercised much self-restraint without sensationalizing the issue during the riot. But just how the ‘rumour’ spread through informal channels could not be evaluated.
In his report, Hare called the riot an act of treason orchestrated by a handful of ‘unscrupulous characters’. He believed that Vong Sam was merely a victim of a widely spread rumour and only a few ringleaders were responsible for the disturbances. It is not entirely clear whether Vong Sam had no intention to monopolize the trade, as Hare had stated. The veracity of the rumour cannot be cross-checked and established due to the paucity of relevant records. What can be confirmed is that Vong Sam had previously expressed his desire for a monopoly when he was made the first licensed dealer in town in 1894. Hare, who had just assumed the office of Chinese Secretary in early 1897, probably had no knowledge of Vong Sam's past. Even if the information regarding Vong Sam was false, it is more rewarding, as argued by Luise White, to read rumour as a reliable historical source that traces ‘the very act of talking about others’. Instead of examining the truthfulness of a rumour, it is much more revealing to see it as a form of information manipulation, through which people create, catalogue, and enforce ‘ideas about deviance and virtue’.Footnote 39 In other words, even if the message was untruthful, it constituted a voice and a view, shared among people who spread the rumour, against collusion between native actors and colonial authorities, and against colonial encroachment on a previously autonomous sector. By condemning acts that harmed the interests of certain sectors in the Chinese community (in this case the monopoly of daching trade and state intervention in customary practice), people who spread the rumour constructed a discourse of immorality and legitimized the action they were about to take. Put into perspective, the rumour about Vong Sam, in the words of Ranajit Guha, serves at once a ‘trigger and mobilizer’ of subaltern insurgency.Footnote 40 Just as importantly, rumours are not an autonomous category, but a deployment,Footnote 41 which creates ‘hierarchies of credibility’.Footnote 42 Hare discredited the rioters’ story by labelling it a rumour, but the contradictory accounts from both parties immediately reveal the agency of the colonized subjects as well as the weaknesses of a colonial state.
How far the larger Chinese community, especially the traders and workers, were complicit was as obscure in Hare's report. As far as Hare wanted to believe that only a few lawless characters were responsible for the strike, a commentary suggested otherwise. While Hare thought the traders were largely victims who had been terrorized by the ringleaders into participating in the strike, the commentary, on the contrary, was of the view that the riot would not have taken place without the support of the larger Chinese community, especially the Chinese employers who let their workers out to participate in the riot.Footnote 43 The fact that the traders in town insisted that they would resume business and the crowd would disperse only when those arrested during the riot were released seems to also suggest the voluntary complicity of many within the Chinese community.Footnote 44 In view of all available records, the possibility that the affected traders might have actively engaged ‘rough characters’, who were probably thought to be experienced, strategic, and skilful in mobilizing the masses, must not be ruled out. Nonetheless, the determination of whether these leading ‘rough characters’ and the rioters who took things to the street were real protesters against unjust state intervention or simply criminals who exploited the tense situation after the daching raid for their personal gain is difficult. It is also noteworthy that most of the shops looted were largely owned by the Cantonese, while those involved in looting were a mix of people who spoke different dialects. To what extent the disturbance was a case where gangsters of one dialect group took advantage of the situation as revenge against their nemeses who spoke another dialect, as implicitly hinted at in Hare's report, is difficult to establish too.
Obviously, several strands of social forces were in play prior to the riot. Each might have influenced the strike in its own way. The Chinese immigrants were not a homogeneous community, but divided along the lines of trade, class, dialect, and other differences. Some were friendly to the British, while some others were less so. The strike could be seen as a defence of one's community's interests or treason against the colonial state, depending on where one stood. For the affected Chinese traders and their supporters, the raid against unverified small daching was an encroachment on a previously autonomous field of customary practice and the strike an uprising against unjust state intervention. The colonial state actors were just as heterogeneous. While some administrators were more concerned with asserting colonial sovereignty over daching matters, others were more sensitive to customary practices and sympathetic to the hardship of the immigrant community. But in the moment of violence against colonial sovereignty, the need for maintaining order and restoring authority became a shared concern among many colonial administrators. Armed Sikh police forces were called in to put down the riot. Instead of punishing and antagonizing the entire Chinese community, the colonial authority resorted to singling out names and banishing a few ‘unruly’ characters.Footnote 45 It was a calculated strategy to scare the community by punishing just a few characters.
Even though the Selangor government managed to restore order and its authority, it dropped its attempt to control small customary scales used by goldsmiths, silversmiths, opium dealers, and drug sellers for over four decades without mandating regular verification and stamping. The exemption by no means implied that traders who used fraudulent small scales were immune from investigation and prosecution. According to the regulation, once a complaint was lodged against a trader for using fraudulent scales, regardless of size and capacity, they would be investigated. If found using weights that were less than declared, they would be prosecuted. Many newspaper reports on cases of fraudulent scales used in the exempted trades affirm that this was the case. Meanwhile, Inspector F. C. Stapleton, who was thought to have acted beyond his power in the raid, was transferred to Perak immediately after the riot. In his report, Hare admitted that ‘the government has been out manoeuvered by the ringleaders’.
Daching as a metaphor of illegibility
At the turn of the twentieth century, the British continued to expand their influence over all aspects of Malaya and gradually do away with the self-government status of the Chinese immigrant community. The office of Kapitan Cina and the revenue-farm system were abolished in 1902 and 1909, respectively, both of which marked the end of the autonomous status of the Chinese community. From time to time, the government continued to pay periodic and surprise visits to shops and businesses that used weighing instruments. Traders who were found cheating were arrested, and those who possessed unverified and tampered daching prosecuted and fined 25 dollars for each false device. Weights-and-measures regulations remained a contested area, even though there were no further riots. Instead, concerned members of the public would pressure the government to be more rigorous in regulating fraudulent weights, including the small ones used in retail transactions.Footnote 46
While old issues regarding daching remained, new ones were raised. The issue of ‘short weight’ continued to capture the attention of many, but people began to ask how to differentiate erroneous daching measurements caused by deliberate tampering from inaccuracies resulting from overuse and misuse of the scales. The former should be punishable, but not the latter.Footnote 47 The discussion was inconclusive because it was rather difficult to make a distinction between these two different cases. Instead, a suggestion was made that both the seller and the purchaser be present at the site where the scale was located to monitor the process of weighing and thus avoid dispute. This immediately brought up a different issue: how knowledgeable were the buyers at reading a scale? Since most Chinese traders were inclined to use customary daching imported from China, the Chinese markings on the scale-beam were rendered ‘mystic’ in the eyes of many European administrators and consumers. Both Chinese characters as well as daching with Chinese markings immediately became metaphors for illegibility, which was directly associated with cheating and anachronisms. While the intention to ensure correct weight was noble, the debates of accurate weight were, however, often racially tinged and ideologically charged. Some Europeans began to discredit Chinese-made daching on the grounds that they were marked with only Chinese characters, and thus prone to abuse and inaccuracy.Footnote 48 As one European commented, ‘the public [were] entirely at the mercy of Chinese dealers who [were] not over-honest with their antiquated scales of picul and daching’.Footnote 49 In response, colonial administrators in some districts suggested that characters other than Chinese should be added to these daching.Footnote 50 Language diversity, as rightly observed by Rachel Leow, had always posed a challenge to colonial governance in polyglot British Malaya. The Chinese language, and especially its proliferation of dialects, was perceived as a form of ‘disorder’ that reigned in the form of illegibility and incomprehensibility, which subsequently called for taming.Footnote 51 However, it is worth noting that the only Chinese characters on a daching were those signifying the manufacturer's brand, while the graduation marks consisted of only lines and dots on its beam. Bringing up illegibility of Chinese characters in the daching debate was merely used to justify the phobia of Chinese-made scales. How far the suggestion to add non-Chinese characters was adopted is not entirely clear. In the meantime, it was also proposed that daching should be replaced with the ‘better understood English scales’. In 1922, 150 British-made Salter spring scales of three different capacities of 14, 18, and 50 pounds, respectively, were procured by the Negeri Sembilan government.Footnote 52 Even though it was commonly understood among many colonial administrators that spring scales were more prone to slack and rarely accurate unless new, the self-registering nature of a spring scale rendered it legible to Europeans.Footnote 53 Unlike daching, the spring scale was associated with ‘modernity’, which was often wrongfully conflated with ‘accuracy’.Footnote 54
Chinese traders were obviously at the receiving end of racial discrimination, since the issue of erroneous scales was constructed as a ‘Chinese problem’, but this is not at all an indication that stories of cheating were entirely a colonial fabrication. This is not to romanticize customary practices and traders of any class or ethnic group, since deceitful transaction was not uncommon, but not limited to traders of one particular social group, instead involving merchants of diverse backgrounds. This is affirmed by countless cases of dishonest traders of different ethnic backgrounds documented in not just English newspapers, but in the vernacular dailies too. As much as the colonial administrators wanted to ensure correct weights and protect the consumers, insufficient manpower and inadequate funds for travel allowances to conduct examinations of commercial scales in remote districts challenged their aspirations to extend the reach of the state surveillance—a problem that became even more severe after the Second World War.Footnote 55 This reality on the ground contradicts the image of the omnipresent colonial authority and reveals, in Rachel Leow's words, ‘the brittleness and fragility of colonial rule’.Footnote 56 The problem of inadequate manpower and resource persisted until governance moved away from using coercive and police force and towards a more consumer-centred approach in the 1920s, when suggestions were first made to place official standard scale in every market so that customers could check the weight of their purchases.Footnote 57 With the new approach, regulations naturally departed from criminalizing vernacular weights and measures to educating the public and schoolchildren to becoming more daching literate. But the feasibility of this measure was greatly compromised, again, due to inadequate funds. How far the regulation of weights and measures could go relied very much on the revenue collected from examination and licensing fees. The colonial authorities had been careful not to raise these fees, since they felt it was likely to invite strong opposition and create another disturbance. Consequently, the issue was dropped for nearly two decades until 1940, when N. R. Jarret, the Food Controller of Malaya, discredited the Chinese daching on the grounds that tampering was rather common among retailers. He urged the FMS government to install official spring scales in various markets to allow customers to measure the weight of their merchandise. He reasoned that the measure was ‘in the interest of the poorer and more ignorant classes’.Footnote 58 It was not until after the Second World War that the measure was widely experimented with in the markets of different states and much welcomed by some consumers.Footnote 59
Politics of standardization and advocacy of the metric system
Standardizing weights and measures across national as well as internal borders was another issue that gripped the colonial administrators, while their counterparts in Europe were debating similar issues. There were two different but related dimensions of standardization. The first dimension was about how to standardize. The second pertained to which standard or system to adopt: the British imperial system or the French metric system. The adoption of the metric system, a decimal system of measuring advocated by scientists that originated in France following the 1789 revolution, resulted in resistance in its place of origin and elsewhere, since it was viewed at once a technology of economic coordination by its advocates as well as a revolt against customary practice by others.Footnote 60 Not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was it more widely accepted throughout Europe. But in 1907, a bill to replace existing weights and measures with the metric system, which was meant for global integration, was rejected by the British parliament, making it the only country in Europe in which the metric system was optional. The failure to push for the metric system and global metrological integration in the imperial centre, however, did not deter similar efforts in the colonies.Footnote 61 In colonial India, British administrators had initiated metrological reform in the form of unifying different customary measurement units as an instrument of governance since the mid-nineteenth century. The idea of organizing Indian weights and measures on the international metric system was first proposed by W. H. Bayley of the Madras civil service in 1857, but there was no strong advocacy until the 1930s, when Indian nationalists and scientists conceptualized it as a technology of industrial and economic advancement. Nonetheless, gradual conversion to the metric system only started in post-independence India in 1956.Footnote 62 Unlike their counterparts in colonial India, local actors played a relatively little role in similar reforms, which were largely taken up by colonial administrators in colonial Malaya. Perak pioneered the issue of federalizing or standardization, when Henry Robilliard, Inspector of Weights and Measures, suggested federating standard weights across the FMS based on Perak's model in 1909.Footnote 63 The reform was as much a standardization movement as it was an interstate competition within the FMS. The issue, however, was dropped for a few years until it was picked up again by W. L. Conlay, Deputy Commissioner of the FMS and Chief Police Officer of Perak, in 1915.Footnote 64 Conlay's proposal was that only one set of standard weights was to be used for the entire FMS (and preferably for the SS too), against which all other subsidiary weights were to be compared each year.
Despite the discussion on standardization, no amendment was made until 1921. Two major changes have taken place since then. First, the Director of Museum Department was made Custodian of Weights and Measures for the entire FMS and the department was where standard weights and measures were stored. Previously, each district kept one set of standard weights. Custodianship was later transferred to the Survey Department in 1926.Footnote 65 Second, the optional use of the metric system was legalized.Footnote 66 Whether in Britain, India, or Malaya, the metric system was then highly recommended by some commercial and mercantile groups who had a stake in facilitating global international trade.Footnote 67 However, weights and measures, like many other social practices, was a field that people related to in terms of their values, tastes, and emotions. The metric system was received with cheer and contempt. While the rich progressives embraced it, the traditionalists took it as a threat to their customary practices and national pride. The resistance against the adoption of a metric system was also informed by Franco–British competition. A total conversion to the metric system was perceived as an attack on national pride. Allowing optional use of the metric system while at the same time keeping the customary ones was a practical and strategic way to reconcile contradictory expectations. It was not until 1972 that the metric system was fully implemented in Malaysia. Despite all these changes, the catty (or 斤, pronounced ‘jin’, equivalent to 600 grammes) and tahil (or 兩, pronounced ‘liang’, equivalent to 1/16 of a catty) are still in use in everyday conversations and market transactions today—an indication that pre-metric practices are still alive in the memory of many Malaysians. Their continued usage tells about the un-governability of customary practices.
Conclusion
As framed at the outset, metrological reform can be an entry point to deepen our understanding of colonial Malaya. Implemented at a historical juncture when the colonial government was consolidating its grip on Chinese-dominated commercial activities and many other aspects of Malaya, weights-and-measures regulations were a new tool of governance meant to ease taxation, curb the use of erroneous scales, and integrate the system with that used in the imperial centre. The reform was simultaneously welcomed and resisted. While certain segments of Chinese society were taking advantage of the reforms, such as rich towkays who made use of the Fairbanks platform scales to improve efficiency in the tin trade and the licensed daching dealers who profited from the daching trade, many small traders felt oppressed. The 1897 daching riot together with the pre-riot rumours constituted a loud message from small traders and some segments of the Chinese community to the government that certain parts of the reform were unjust and not welcomed. Even though the veracity of the rumour cannot be determined, the message itself reveals the views of the rioters. The riot was a manifestation of a highly heterogeneous colonial society, which was divided along ethnic, class, dialect, and trade lines. On the surface, the riot seems to be a result of tension between colonial administrators who set rules and their Asian subjects who were restricted or inconvenienced. But the involvement of Chinese merchants in the daching trade suggests a different layer of social relation: that certain Chinese benefited from colonial governance at the expense of others. Therefore, differences existed not only between European colonizers and their colonized subjects, but also among the latter, who had been differentially affected by the same reform.
In the twentieth century, weights-and-measures regulations remained contested. The debates over the pros and cons of different types of scales were often racially inflected and ideologically charged. Despite the fact that ‘modern’ and ‘accurate’ British spring scales were more prone to inaccuracy than steelyards, Chinese daching were taken as ‘anachronisms’ and ‘inaccurate’. The illegibility of the Chinese language was brought up to discredit daching, which indicates that metrological reform was also an arena in which language and identity politics played out. In the second quarter of the century, the central concern of the colonial regulation of weights and measures moved from easing taxation, taming traders, and facilitating trade expansion to protecting consumers. Thus, the measures to ensure correct weight changed from raiding and criminalizing the use of fraudulent daching to educating the public on how to be more daching literate. Placing spring scales at the entrances or exits of a market to allow consumers to check the weight of their merchandise was an innovative consumer-centred approach. The feasibility was, however, compromised due to inadequate funds. In terms of standardization, while the metric system was important for global trade integration and expansion, the colonial government had strategically chosen to allow the optional use of the metric system, instead of fully replacing the customary ones. Thus, old or native customs were maintained, while facilitating international conversion.
Even though this study has as a focus metrological reform in British Malaya, this article not only sheds new light on the understanding of colonial society in Malaya, but also contributes to the wider conversation about historical metrology, which has been largely Eurocentric. Last but not least, as far as the empirical materials of this research are concerned, there are some indications that interstate competition influenced regulation and interstate personal networks were a factor in the daching trade, yet the materials are yet to give a comprehensive picture. How did the competition between colonial administrators of different states within the FMS shape the regulation in each state? How did policy ideas flow between and within the SS, FMS, and the Unfederated Malay States?Footnote 68 How did interstate merchant networks form the daching trade? These are themes that call for further study.
