Malayan Civil Service, 1874–1941 Colonial Bureaucracy/Malayan Elite

Abstract

When the British first became involved officially in the Malay States in 1874 they were represented there by a very small and oddly assorted group of men quite separate and different from, and only loosely controlled by, the official colonial establishment in the Straits Settlements. By the time of the Japanese occupation this had grown to a group which was very large by normal British colonial standards and had become much more homogeneous, conformed much more closely to general Colonial Office type, and also ruled in the Colony. It is the aim of this paper to trace this development, with an eye to the part played by the M.C.S. (as the Malayan Civil Service was always called) in Malayan history during the early twentieth century. I would myself contend that the corporate role of the M.C.S. was so important that this period of Malayan history, and especially the events of the 1920s and 1930s, cannot be understood without it. But I shall not here have time to explore this role fully, merely to indicate the sphere in which it was important and how it came to be so. The main themes will be the growth in numbers, the emergence of a distinctive esprit de corps, and the efforts, largely successful, to maintain a certain degree of independence–or at any rate internal self-government–which sometimes led it into disputes or open clashes with Whitehall, with the High Commissioner in Singapore, or with the rest of the European community in Malaya itself.