Category: History & heritage

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[3009] Reviewing The Peasant Robbers of Kedah 1900-1929 and then a modern thought

Central to Cheah Boon Kheng’s 1988 book The Peasant Robbers of Kedah 1900-1929: Historical and Folk Perceptions is the idea of theft as an informal wealth redistribution mechanism during a time of distress in rural Kedah. The thefts are framed as a guarantee for some kind of minimum welfare standard for the rural folks in general and in important specific cases, as a response by the weak against those in authority.

The result of 12 years of research and writing actively influenced by James C. Scott (the author of Weapons of the Weak), Cheah (who died in 2015) painted a picture of petty crimes being a constant concern in the 20th century rural Kedah. The historian reconstructed the conditions of Kedahan kampongs through interviews where written records failed. Written records are wholly inadequate because the Kedah Sultanate, both under first Siamese and later British influence, had limited effective control beyond major towns: the state elites had worries other than recording the lived experience of peasants, at least until they began to exert greater control throughout the state.

In that reconstructed picture, I get the idea that almost everybody engaged in petty crimes. Chickens reared regularly disappeared without a trace. The prevalence of theft however did not mean the lack of shame. In one page, the author wrote that the offending party would quickly slaughter the birds they had stolen, had it cooked immediately and then consumed as soon as possible so to not get caught. Proving such crime was next to impossible while reporting it to the authority was such a hassle that it was not worth the effort to do so. In a rural setting where the jungle was nearby, everybody was a suspect, policing was absent, the state was non-existent and the border was porous, the criminals might as well be a snake or a ghost with an appetite for white meat. The spread and frequency of petty crime worsened during difficult economic periods as distressed households resorted to pilfering for survival. Or as Cheah put it, it was a system of self-help.

Crucially, all this was an intraclass conflict. The rich lived far away from the kampongs in towns and protected by law and order. But the rural normality of crime set the stage for organized banditry at the state level and soon, interclass conflict.

The rising banditry was fueled by a weak state capacity, a changing power structure (from distributed native power to colonial centralized control) and general corruption among rural leaders.

Kedah then was more a mandala than the state we know today: strongest at the capital center but its influence dropped disproportionately fast the farther away a person traveled into the jungles. But even in that weak state structure, Kedah still had representatives in the form of village heads or similar positions. As the British expanded its bureaucratic reach outward beyond towns and centralized all authorities in the state capital Alor Setar, these local rural actors lost power and wealth.

To preserve their influence amid a feudal society, they resorted to criminal activities. They fought the erosion of their power by recruiting local thugs who carried out theft in a bigger way. In this way, the rural elites amassed muscles and capital.

But the local elites needed the local thugs as much as the latter needed the former. The thugs needed the local elites as a shield from Alor Setar, or at least some kind of legitimacy within a feudalist framework.

Here, the idea of wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor becomes tenuous as the local rich preyed upon the poor even as the rural elites did this in rebellion against growing colonial authority (and it should be mentioned, against the sultan too).

As events would have it, the alliance between the rural elites and the thugs employed and protected would not last. Quarrels happened for whatever reasons and the latter turned against the former, stealing for rural and urban elites alike. The victimized peasants celebrated this and this is what Eric Hobsbawm called social banditry: actions taken as illegal by the law but carried out by the oppressed groups as a form of resistance. Some in fact shared their spoiled with poor, making them as Cheah Boon Kheng called them as the Robin Hood of Malaya. Such appears to be the case with the peasant robber Panglima Nayan (and several others) who was eventually killed by the British-Kedah authorities.

But not all cases (in fact most cases) could be labelled cleanly as Robin Hood kind. Stories about these individuals are contradictory and there are forgotten aspects about their cruelty to their own, with their benevolence exaggerated. It is a complicated truth, unlike popular folk tales told in Kedah.

Cheah the historian understood this but still came out to defend his thesis: it does not matter what the truth is. What matters is the perception of the peasants. That perception and stories from the peasants told are their way of rebelling against the authorities. These stories are the weapons of the weak.

Cheah’s defense of the thesis is acceptable and solid in fact. But I am troubled with the brushing off facts in favor of perceptions, if we transport this lens to analyze contemporary issues. Here, I am referring to social media which has inundated everybody with information (regardless of truth) so much that everything become perceptions with increasingly no bearing to facts. Would the employment of perceptions regardless of truth by fringe extremist groups (by definition non-mainstream and so… ignored/oppressed/suppressed/disenfranchised?) qualify as weapons of the weak?

I have not read Weapons of the Weak and I will try to read it soon with that specific question in mind.

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Books & printed materials Conflict & disaster History & heritage Politics & government

[3005] Reading Revolutionary Iran, or an appreciation for glossary

My readings could be driven by current affairs. That was the reason I picked up Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. And that was the reason I recently read Michael Axworthy’s Revolutionary Iran: the Twelve-Day War between Iran and Israel had just concluded. These books always remind us that there is almost always a long history behind contemporary events. Things very rarely just happened on a day.

Revolutionary Iran, first published in 2013, focuses on the 1979 Iranian Revolution. But it also covers a hundred years’ worth of history, starting from the early 20th century (with the fall of Qajar Iran and the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty) up to the controversial 2011 Iranian presidential election. The long sweep of history is written up all with the aim of setting the revolution in its proper context.

As with any kind of similar books (such as much thicker and expansive The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya), the breadth and depth of the discussion are a challenge to casual readers equipped with only general knowledge of the country: there are just too many names, too many years and too many events to remember and make relevant to the whole exercise. These names and events are all interrelated, making reading Revolutionary Iran complicated. One could get lost along the way. That could cause frustration and eventually DNF: ‘did not finish’. The phone is always ready to dumb us down with social media, ever jealous of any of us perusing long-form materials.

The complexity reminds me just how useful a glossary and an index could be. It kept the story in my head straight while going through the pages of Revolutionary Iran.

Referring the glossary and the index could be a pain. Flipping pages back and forth is disruptive to reading flow. It is almost like reading while consulting a dictionary or an encyclopedia at the same time. It almost feels like reading Wikipedia with all of its hyperlinks could have been a more enjoyable endeavor.

But reading Wikipedia has its own pitfalls. Those hyperlinks are rabbit holes to be explored. With an undisciplined mind, one could easily end up reading about Kurdish nationalism or the history of Azerbaijan all of which may have some relevance to the events of 1979, but does not assist us in understanding the nuances of the Iranian revolution any better. Wikipedia’s hyperlinks could provide context, but an overload of information could also drown out of the context. Some who wander are lost.

So, a book, unlike Wikipedia, is a guided tour. It keeps the fluff out by focusing and contextualising the essentials. It is the model-building tool. And the glossary and the index, often forgotten, are little manuals useful if the reader needs help along the way.

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Economics History & heritage Society

[3000] When history is blurry: reading Patricia Crone’s Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam

Mecca has a long history. It is so long parts of its history is blurry and backed by uncertain sources. Pre-Islamic sources at best give imprecise descriptions of the city, if the city described is indeed Mecca. Meanwhile, traditional understanding of Mecca’s history before and during the coming of Islam was only developed much, much later.

The orthodox understanding takes the city as an important commercial and religious center prior to the coming of Islam. This much at least has been impressed upon the minds of many who grew up as a Muslim. The seige of Mecca during the Year 570 (the Year of the Elephant), the presence of the Kaaba and Qurasyhi caravaneers are proofs of Meccan commercial and religious prestige during pre-Islamic period.

In the 1987 book Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, Patricia Crone challenges the mainstream history of the city by juxtaposing non-Muslim sources with traditional Islamic ones.

The first half of the book goes with great length inspecting trade pattern of various goods that concerned Byzantium, Egypt and Syria in the north, Persia and India (including the Malay Archipelago) to the east, and Yemen and Ethiopia to the south. These chapters are really encyclopaedic entries more than anything else and reading them is a little more exciting than reading a high-level mathematical textbook.

But the conclusion is phenomenal in that all the major trade routes between these locations involving major commodities did not go through Mecca. For most goods by 400s and 500s, sea routes were preferred. The advent of sea trading meant Byzantium could now circumvent the Arabs. In limited cases where land travels were necessary, Mecca was miles off known routes. Meccan trade existed only in the sense that the city folks needed provisions and not in a way of an entrepôt or an emporium. Add to the fact that Mecca was too dry to support a large population with no special commodity of its own that others lacked, it is hard to reject Crone’s idea that Mecca was not a major trading center in pre-Islamic Arabia.

The second part of the book, I feel, stands on shakier grounds. Here, Crone argues Mecca was also not a major religious center. She states that there were three other pilgrimage locations nearby that were bigger than Mecca. This is an echo of her more controversial thesis written in a 1977 book, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World. But how does that negate the idea of Mecca as a major pre-Islamic religious center is something that I struggle to process and ultimately unconvinced. This is where other readings will come in handy.

The final part of the book explains two bigger themes that worked in the background: first it is about the state of Meccan (and the wider Arabian) society in the 500s and second, about the unreliability of sources of pre-Islamic Mecca history.

On the first subject, Crone understands Muhammad and Islam as a materialist instead of an idealist phenomenon. That is, the prophet and the religion were primarily a pan-Arabian proto-nationalist movement rising up against Byzantium and Persian influence (instead of the rise of a religion fighting the immorality and decadence of the Jahiliyah period).

On the second subject, these traditional Islamic sources were written long after the rise of Islam—the primary example being Ibn Ishaq—should be considered as an act of storytelling instead of history-writing. Crone argues many of these sources provide contradictory details of the same events. Crone goes on to claim that these Islamic sources place the need to tell ‘the moral of the story’ above the need to record history accurately. That is to say, outside proofs must be considered when (re)constructing the history of Islam.

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Economics History & heritage Politics & government

[2999] The three shadows of the 2000s and an eulogy for Abdullah Ahmad Badawi

Malaysia has not had many Prime Ministers, despite what it may have felt like during the merry-go-round contest that took place from 2020 until 2022. In this age where the idea of modern state is taken for granted, it is easy to forget that the modern country is young.

Even with a short modern history—modern meaning post-colonial—it is easy to claim that Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is one of those Prime Ministers who history are looking back kindly. Kindly, because when he passed away earlier this week, most have only kind words for him. Some wept. Kindly, because of the subsequent Prime Ministers who had far worse controversies and were utterly divisive.

The contemporary kindness appears incongruent to the intense emotions and harsh condemnations many felt and said no more than twenty years ago. Living through Malaysia of the 2000s, it is difficult to ignore the dramatic loss of popular support his administration underwent. I suspect there is a recency bias at work here for a majority of people. We forget.

Or maybe we forgive and forget because Abdullah was a kind man, and people generally return kindness with kindness.

I further suspect that we forgive because we now understand that many of the things that happened in the 2000s making life difficult for Malaysians was beyond his control. Living in the shadows of the 1990s was not easy for many. And living in the shadows of Mahathir Mohamad was difficult for Abdullah. But I think most importantly, we were all living in the shadow of a rising China, which could only be understood by looking back from the future, which is today.

The rise of China was a competition Malaysia struggled to address back then. The result is obvious. In the 1990s, Malaysia had a far higher per capita GDP relative to China’s. Now, it is about the same with China slightly ahead.

The rapid industrialization of China caused some Malaysian deindustrialization in the 2000s. As a result, Malaysia’s income growth of the 2000s was slower than it was in the 1990s. Already used to rapid growth, the 2000s growth slowdown (as I wrote in The End of the Nineteen-Nineties) felt like an era of unmet expectations. The Abdullah government fell victim to that. The unmet expectations fueled various dissatisfaction that were amplified by a newly popular and evolving technology that was the internet. Everything else—including the strong rise of energy prices that eventually led to the massive subsidy liberalization shock—was a second-order effect caused by China’s rise.

Abdullah cannot be blamed for China’s success. The story of China was a long-coming world-history in the making. He tried his best but the fact is, it was a tough condition for Malaysia that many would-be leaders would struggle to address. That condition was only reversed by the quantitative easing of the late-2000s/early 2010s, yet again beyond Malaysia’s control, however Najib would later like to claim.

We understand this—explicitly by those who keep a close tab on the global economy, and implicit by those who do not—and thus we forgive.

And from what we know, he had forgiven us too. Such was a gentleman.

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Books & printed materials Economics History & heritage

[2994] Reviewing How Asia Works

Even when free trade consensus was at its most influential period during the 1990s, industrial policy involving government intervention across Asia was commonplace. For Asian beneficiaries of free trade and globalization like Malaysia, South and Taiwan, they were and are at best mixed economies.

Now that that consensus is collapsing and trade barriers are rising, industrial policy is becoming more and more important as a response to contemporary challenges. The US under the former Biden administration did it. Europe is trying to follow suit. China has doubled down its initiatives. Almost everybody else of importance has moved in the same direction as they try to capture some segments of a shifting and fraying global supply chain caused by competition between China and the US. As far as the China-US competition is concerned, Malaysia has been promoting itself as safe haven for cross-border manufacturers and service providers since at least the first Pakatan Harapan government.

It was this context that convinced me to re-read Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works that hit the book market back in 2013. The book does not touch about contemporary industrial policy concerns like how Chris Miller’s The Chip War does but it provides a historical overview of post-war economic development of selected prominent economies in the Asia Pacific while outlining a general theory of which industrial policy worked and which did not.

The overall framework itself is not controversial: an economy progresses from agriculture-based towards manufacturing and later service-based. That feels like a truism when we look back from a mainstream 2020s lens. In fact, even the leading communists of the late 19th and early 20th century understood this.  So, the general idea has a very long history.

What the author proposes differently is the method which an economy carries out that shift.

For newly independent underdeveloped economies during the post-World War II era, Studwell highlights that economies needed land reforms to soak up loose labor market, boost agricultural productivity and build up national surplus. Land reforms mean redistributing land from the biggest landowners to the peasants, turning tenant-farmers into owner-farmers. This solved multiple post-war challenges: social unrest, extreme mass unemployment, production disincentives associated with rentierism, indebtedness and lack of capital surplus that is required for industrialization.

Economies that managed to commit land reforms the earliest and most comprehensively are the ones to experience robust industrialisation first. Here, Japan is the original success story going all the way back to the 19th century Meiji Restoration and again later following its defeat in the World War. Taiwan did the same after the Kuomintang government fled mainland China and implemented various reforms on the island. South Korea carried this out on the urging of the United States’s occupying authorities. China attempted land reforms and achieved successes until communist excesses led to collectivism in the 1950s. Collectivism undid earlier Chinese agricultural progress and delayed Chinese industrialisation until after the death of Mao Zedong. Thailand for the longest time was in denial about the state of its economy but belatedly (and informally) allowed new land to be opened up north. Meanwhile, Malaysia and Indonesia cheated their way out of land reforms: Malaysia by encouraging land openings through Felda (and not mentioned in the book, new villages as a response to the Communist Emergency) and Indonesia through its transmigrasi program that relocated population from Java to other Indonesian islands (the most important were Sumatra and Kalimantan). Finally, the Philippines did not bother with land reforms (as a colonial power, the US is to blame: US policy here is the direct opposite of its actions in South Korea. But it is also a story of landowning elites capturing the state), leaving the profile of the Philippine economy to that of an inefficient oligarchy.

By the 1990s, land reforms and agricultural successes had a high correlation with industrialization progress. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan were the most successful in terms of how industrialized the country had become. China came second while Malaysia and Thailand perhaps were close third and fourth before the Asian Financial Crisis knocked them off the track. Indonesia was some ways behind two these economies. And the Philippines was the Sick Man of Asia and remained so until maybe the 2010s.

Malaysia and Thailand are the odd ones here. They managed to build up surpluses to carry out industrialization despite relative failures at land reforms. The reason is that they were engaged in export-led manufacturing largely financed by foreign investment that somewhat mitigated agricultural failures (it is jarring to call these two economies as agricultural failures but failures here should be defined by the counterfactual: their agricultural output under full land reforms could have been much bigger than it was in reality, following examples from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan). The jumpstarted manufacturing sector solved some problems local agriculture did not and the most obvious of that problem was mass unemployment. In Malaysia’s case, careful natural resource management also created the surplus necessary for Malaysian industrialization.

The key concept here is exports. To be a successful economy, the country has to have export-discipline. Here, again, the most export-disciplined economies were Japan, South Korea and Taiwan (and China). In Japan and South Korea, the government forced tycoons and corporations to become involved in export-led manufacturing. Taiwan was different in that it used state-owned enterprises as its export vehicles. In places like Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand however, the tycoons were happy to become rentiers and investing their surplus in largely less productive sector such as real estate, banking and other financial services. There were manufacturers but they were happy to confine themselves in the protected domestic economy in absence of a less-than-gentle nudge from the government. Here, the three Southeast Asian economies ran a flawed industrial policy for the longest time: import-substitution in a protectionist environment before foreign manufacturers came in to allow export-led manufacturing to flourish. What the author argues is exports-led industrialization/export discipline in a protectionist environment (but these protected exporting manufacturers competing against themselves). Again, the worst of the lot was the Philippines with its oligarchs.

The next stage of development is the shift towards service-based economy. The pitfall is to liberalize the economy before the industrialization process is complete. All Southeast Asian economies failed this test and made their economy more vulnerable to financial crisis. The most successful, again, were the three (and later four including China in the 2000s) that liberalize when their manufacturing had matured.

But the ultimate message is that a government has to intervene and try. Studwell shows that even those who tried half-baked reforms and industrialization achieved much more progress faster than those who did not try. Malaysia is a prime example of committing to half-baked reforms and industrialization and then ended up much better than most in Southeast Asia. Malaysia could have been a South Korea if the country had done it properly but then again, Malaysia is also not a bad place to be compared to a majority of economies out there in the world.

To not try at all is to be left behind. So, Yoda is wrong as far as industrialization and economic history are concerned.