Malaysia has achieved a distinctive record of development. Over nearly four decades, the country has undergone a dynamic development process culminating in a substantial transformation of its economy, political system, social organization, and civic culture. Malaysia today ranks foremost among developing countries in its human development attainments, according to available indicators.

From the vantage point of the 1990s, some students of development may have difficulty recalling that Malaysia was once a relatively poor and deeply troubled country. At independence in 1957, the prognosis for Malaya (as it was then) was decidedly bleak. The country had an untested, fragile parliamentary government,...

In several significant respects, the restoration of British rule following the wartime Japanese inter-regnum made for alterations in the course of modern Malayan history. Politically, the reintroduction of British authority was designed to centralize and modernize government administration, hitherto divided among the Malay States and Straits Settlements, into a cohesive Malayan Union.¹ For society, the war experience generated a resurgent national feeling among the indigenous Malay community, while transforming the orientation of Chinese and Indians from transience to permanent stakes in Malaya. Yet if British policy had set its sights on certain political and social changes, considerations of economic policy...

Malaya’s conquest by the Japanese during the Second World War provided the British with the opportunity to reconsider past practices and plan a radical reorganization of the post-war Malayan colonial system. Working from London during the occupation, the colonial authorities produced a scheme involving the merger of the territories and populations of British Malaya into an integrated, unified Malayan Union, as a preliminary step towards eventual self-government.¹ Taken in the context of earlier developments, the Malayan Union proposal constituted a substantially new departure for the country’s administrative constitutional and social growth. Yet, if political modernization comprised the avowed thrust of...

The closing decade of colonial rule brought profound economic and social changes in Malayan rice agriculture.¹ In a process set in train by wartime dislocation and accelerated by the policies and practices of the early 1950s, the former pattern of subsistence agriculture had begun to give way before the encroaching commercialization of rice production. At the same time, integrative communal political mechanisms were evolving in response to a parallel movement towards representative, responsible government. Interaction between the agricultural and political processes of change crystallized in a transitional agrarian structure, mixing traditional and entrepreneurial forms. The ensuing allocation of resources in...

The emergence of a competitive political system in independent Malaya, having its balance of electoral power located among the rural Malays, imparted new urgency to agricultural development. Clearly the conservative, uninspired treatment accorded foodcrop agriculture under the colonial regime could no longer be continued by a development-oriented Alliance government specifically committed to Malay economic advance. Indeed, for many in the Alliance, Chinese as well as Malays, the ultimate test of their inter-communal partnership was to be its capacity to cope successfully with rural Malay poverty as the quid pro quo for Chinese political rights. Yet if developmental aspirations abounded, their...

The 1950s constituted a turning-point in the history of Malayan rubber. This was marked by a changed world rubber market, along with incipient changes in Malayan economic aspirations and policies. Internationally, the creation of a large synthetic rubber industry in the main consuming country, the United States, posed a challenge to the competitive position and long-run prospects of Malayan plantation rubber. While coping with this challenge, the rubber industry, as the mainstay of the Malayan economy, had to simultaneously satisfy emergent claims for domestic development. Indeed, Malayan rubber was itself confronted with two coterminous developmental issues: its own internal development...

Contemporary inquiry into the development process has drawn attention to the role of creative innovation as an engine of economic progress. Innovation in underdeveloped economies has generally been characterized as originating in the activities of “marginal men” or “leading” enterprises.¹ By virtue of certain ascribed characteristics, these marginal or leading producers are typically seen as innovators in the mobilization of capital, the application of new techniques or the searching out of new markets. Underlying this notion of innovation is an assumption that economic creativity is the restricted province of a specified minority, with the central problem of development therefore being...

Since Malaysian independence over two decades ago, rubber production there has undergone a significant and far-reaching structural transformation, in social as well as economic dimensions. This transformation represented the outcome of policy responses to changing world market conditions for the export of natural rubber, which coincided with a political transition to independence and parliamentary government. In its response, government policy since the mid-1950s released many of the earlier administrative constraints on the spread of new rubber planting.¹ The ensuing entrepreneurial reawakening led to large-scale replanting and new planting with high-yielding rubber. This increasingly widespread wave of technological innovation was accompanied...

Since 1950 Malaya/Malaysia has experienced a succession of six five-year development plans. Over this period, planning emerged as the institutional centrepiece of national development strategy. Through the medium of planning, successive Malaysian governments defined and applied their economic, social and political development goals. The Malaysian mode of planning represented a particularly tractable instrument for the policy direction of an otherwise open, market-oriented economic system. Yet, planning experience had to cope with the usual constraints of underdevelopment, compounded in a way by Malaysia’s historical legacy of exaggerated dualism and dependency. In addition, in the Malaysian case, planning had also to accommodate...

Malaysia’s planning organization has become the institutional centrepiece of that country’s development effort. Indeed, Malaysia ranks as one of the non-Communist developing countries where planning is most highly institutionalized. Malaysian planning evolved as an effective policy mechanism for directing the authoritative allocation of public resources towards declared developmental objectives.¹ Despite this attachment to national planning, Malaysia remains a staunchly market – oriented, open, and predominantly private enterprise economy. Nevertheless, as the role of planning expanded, private sector activity became increasingly subject to policy interventions predicated upon the politically determined goals of development planning.

Rubber and, to a somewhat lesser extent, tin...

The evolution of Malaysian agricultural policy since independence in 1957 gave expression to changing official attitudes, social interests, and public expectations concerning rural development. As the dominant perspective changed, new planning norms and development goals were imputed to agricultural policy. These new policy directions were evident in the shifting pattern of resource allocation for the agricultural sector over successive Malaysian development plans.

Planning constituted the institutional centrepiece of the Malaysian development effort. Although Malaysia maintains a market economy, planning has served as a significant and increasingly comprehensive instrument of economic management. Malaysian development planning has undergone three successive historical phases...

The introduction of modern education in British Malaya followed as a by-product of colonial rule. Colonial administration carried in its wake considerable European investment in trade and primary industry along with a substantial influx of Chinese and Indian immigrants to the new towns, tin mines and rubber estates. If the indigenous Malay agricultural community lay largely outside these economic developments, they were at least due special political treatment by virtue of the principles of protectorate and indirect colonial rule upon which the British rationalized their presence in Malaya. Thus, even more than other instruments of colonial policy, education was obliged...

The creation of a modern, national, integrated institution of education in Malaysia was a post-colonial undertaking. The conception of education in British Malaya had been narrowly confining, both socially and scholastically. Indeed, through to the end of the colonial period, education was segregated into separate and disjointed linguistic-ethnic streams: English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil, with impoverishment of resources their common lot.² Following the Second World War there had occurred a dramatic rise in enrolments; however, ongoing organizational discontinuities and constraints resulted in a downward trend in enrolment ratios during the last years of colonial rule.³ The advent of representative government...

The Second World War marked a significant turning point in Malayan labour history. Hitherto, the main objective of labour policy had been to encourage an adequate inflow of immigrant workers for Malaya’s expanding economy, with the Labour Department acting as “protector” of labour from the more obvious social and economic evils.¹ Such labour legislation as was enacted originated in the British Indian government’s concern for the welfare of its expatriate labour force in Malaya. In 1940, however, the Straits Settlements passed a Trade Union Ordinance enabling labour organization for purposes of collective bargaining and economic self-betterment. Although no trade unions...

Malayan labour and trade union policy at the eve of Merdeka (independence) bore the indelible imprints of past crises and uneven development. Prior to the Second World War trade unions were outlawed in British Malaya, where labour policy limited itself to protecting workers from the more blatant social and economic evils as a means of encouraging immigration of needed manpower.¹ By the end of the war and Japanese occupation, however, the hitherto transient Chinese and Indians had become transformed into a domiciled labour force, conscious of their organizational power and prepared to defend their interests.

Initial post-war attempts at trade...

Malaysia has come a long way in its development over three and a half decades of independence. According to most indicators, at the time of the transition to independence in 1957 the country’s economy, social organization and political system still suffered from many of the traditional afflictions of a poor and deficient society. Even after a decade of post-war rehabilitation and progress, the machinery of government was still fragile, the democratic political leadership untested, and the Communist insurgency remained rampant, while ethnic divisions weakened the national fabric, human and social inequities abounded, with the economy chronically depressed and structurally constrained....