This chapter seeks to examine the emergence of the concepts of the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’ in colonial Malaya between 1920 and 1940. These concepts were not present during the period of precolonial rule when the Peninsula was dominated by the kerajaan (kingship) system. They were introduced to the Malay educated elite alongside British administrative and commercial activities in Malaya. At the same time, these educated Malays were also exposed to modern developments that had first unfolded in Islamic countries like Egypt and Turkey that had contact with the West before them. This can be seen in the fact that the concepts of the social and the economic were sometimes reflected in a dual language of English and Arabic as these educated members of the Malay population struggled to make sense of their meaning. This shows us that these concepts were not simply transmitted directly between British colonizers and the colonized, but rather through global waves of knowledge that had transformed earlier communities in their path. Educated Malays were among the first to be exposed to these new forms of knowledge, and some took it upon themselves to transmit it to the larger Malay population through the public sphere. In that sense, they played the role of middlemen in negotiating these new forms of knowledge and transmitting their message to the larger Malay population.