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  1. Home
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  3. Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects
  • Cited by 16
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
December 2017
Print publication year:
2017
Online ISBN:
9781139814867
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139814867
Subjects:
Area Studies, British History after 1450, Asian Studies, History, South-East Asian History
Information

Book description

Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects examines the stories of ordinary people to explore the internal workings of colonial rule. Chinese, Indians, and Malays learned about being British through the plantations, towns, schools, and newspapers of a modernizing colony. Yet they got mixed messages from the harsh, racial hierarchies of sugar and rubber estates, and cosmopolitan urban societies. Empire meant mobility, fluidity, and hybridity, as well as the enactment of racial privilege and rigid ethnic differences. Using sources ranging from administrative files, court transcripts and oral interviews to periodicals and material culture, Professor Lees explores the nature and development of colonial governance, and the ways in which Malayan residents experienced British rule in towns and plantations. This is an innovative study demonstrating how empire brought with it both oppression and economic opportunity, shedding new light on the shifting nature of colonial subjecthood and identity, as well as the memory and afterlife of empire.

Reviews

'Originally conceived as two separate manuscripts, Lees' monograph uses Ho Enseng’s earlier notion of empires as hybrid spaces as a launching point to compare rural and urban lifeworlds under colonialism. Employing British Malaya as a case study to interrogate the ‘internal workings’ of colonial power, the author convincingly demonstrates that relationships between rulers and the ruled were as complex as they were conflicted. … The questions she asks will interest social historians working on imperialism, urbanization, migration, labour, and commodity production: questions regarding the extent to which colonialism nurtured social mobility, cross-cultural learning, and new belongings within diasporas.'

Geoffrey K. Pakiam Source: Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia

'Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects is a rich and valuable history of colonial Malaya.'

Sanjay Krishnan Source: Victorian Studies

‘Lees’s Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects is a rich and valuable contribution to the historiography of British colonization in Southeast Asia … This monograph is a must-read for scholars interested in British colonial rule in Southeast Asia and the nature of British subjecthood.’

Raymond Hyser Source: H-Environment

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