460 Part VI: European Empires in Asia
seeds from the Amazon had failed. Trying again, a trader in rubber in Brazil
and a botanist from Kew Gardens outside London gathered 70,000 seeds and
hired an empty steamer to rush them to England before they deteriorated. In
England they were sped by a special freight train to Kew where greenhouses
were cleared to make room for them. As soon as they germinated, 1,919 rubber
seedlings were rushed to Ceylon for planting, and from there—at a more lei-
surely pace—they were carried to Malaya (Hepper 1982). Eventually half the
world’s natural rubber was produced there.
The rubber plantations and tin mines required cheap labor; the Malay pop-
ulation filled some of this need but was more inclined to keep to its traditional
adaptations of rice agriculture, and so Chinese and Indian laborers were
imported to work the plantations. Between 1891 and 1901 over 58,000 Indians
came to Malaya; the Chinese population grew to almost 300,000. This growing
ethnic complexity, along with the economic and political transformations, cre-
ated social turmoil that concerned the Malay sultans, who were frequently at
war among themselves, as much as Chinese and European traders who could
only benefit from a government that would keep order without interfering or
taxing too much. Britain was urged to intervene.
The sultans of the Malay states of Perak, Pahang, Selangor, and Negri
Sembilan were persuaded to form a federation in 1896 with its central adminis-
tration in Kuala Lumpur, then just a small Chinese tin mining town. The sul-
tans of the Federated Malay States (FMS) retained their titles and their
authority over adat, Malay custom, while practical administrative control was
in the hands of a British official known by the unalarming term “Resident.”
Things got off to a bad start when the first Resident, a “tactless and impatient
Victorian,” was deservedly hated and eventually murdered, but his successor,
Hugh Low, was a good administrator who operated in the black, kept the
peace, and made prosperity possible. For all the growing prosperity, however,
the loss of real power by the sultans of the federation and the control of Britain
was a warning to the sultans who remained outside of the FMS. Five of these
unfederated states became known as the Unfederated Malay States, each oper-
ating independently unless some crisis required joint action. Each of them had
an appointed British official, not a Resident but merely an “Advisor.” The
Straits Settlements, the Federated Malay States, and the Unfederated Malay
States maintained their separate identities until the Japanese invasion.
Meanwhile, a curious form of colonialism rose on the north coast of Bor-
neo. In 1838 a rich Englishman named James Brooke sailed his private armed
yacht to Sarawak on a scientific exploration. There he found the Sultan of Bru-
nei backed against the wall by Malays and Dayaks who were rebelling against
his rule. In the seventeenth century, these sultans had ruled all of Borneo and
also the Sulu archipelago of the Southern Philippines, but were now reduced to
Sarawak. The sultan got Brooke to help him out against the rebels, and after
they were crushed, Brooke was made Raja of Sarawak in 1841. This was the
prototypical White Rajah of many a grade B film and novel. He and his succes-