The Ideas Behind Racialised Colonial Capitalism | Book Discussion with Prof Farish Noor

Hello and welcome to today's book discussion, and today I would like to talk about one particular book that I think is regarded by myself and many others as one of the classics of post-colonial Malaysian scholarship, and that is The Myth of the Lazy Native by Syed Hussein Alatas, first published in 1977. Many of us are familiar with this book, and this is one of those books that had a tremendous impact on the development of many scholars and academics in Malaysia, myself included, and I think it is one of those books which is probably read by a lot of people. What I'd like to do today is basically highlight two aspects of this book which I think are very important, and these two aspects of Alatas' work reminds us not only of how forward-looking the book was at its time – remember this was published in 1977, it was well ahead of its time – but they also demonstrate how and why this book is still very, very relevant today. Now, as a young scholar myself, when I was at university, this was one of the books that guided my learning and all the way up to my PhD years, and it's had a tremendous impact on my own work as a political historian. The Myth of the Lazy Native, of course, is about the mythology, the myth of ethnic racialised stereotypes that were developed during the era of racialised colonial capitalism, particularly in the 19th century all the way to the 20th century in British Malaya and in many other British colonies, focusing primarily here on Southeast Asia. Now, the term racialised colonial capitalism at that time, in the 70s, was a somewhat novel idea because there was the tendency for many historians to talk about colonialism as a thing in itself, as if it was ontologically distinct. The genius of Aratas was to note the fact that modern colonialism, modern imperialism, particularly from the 18th to the 20th century, was a phenomenon that was complex and that was driven by capital, and hence the term colonial capitalism. The reason why I think this is important, particularly in our part of the world, is that there remains the tendency among some scholars, and particularly in popular media, to present the history of colonialism and empire building in terms of brute physical violence, military violence, as if empire building was simply a case of conquest, extermination, depopulation, and what have you. Now, obviously that did happen. We all know that the history of Western colonisation of Southeast Asia involved a lot of violence. It involved basically colonial wars. But what Aratas shows in his book is that this process of colonisation was driven, and the primary driver of modern colonialism was capital. And that is a factor that I think is hugely important for us to remember, how capital was the thing that drove this process of expansionism. After all, the Western powers did not colonise Southeast Asia simply for the acquisition of land. It was a project that was funded by capital, driven by capital, with the interest, the intention of generating even more capital. So the connection that he makes when he uses the phrase colonial capitalism, I think is hugely, hugely important. And this is one aspect of colonial rule that tends to be neglected when we focus more on the violent aspects of colonialism. Now, it's from this idea then that we can begin to explore the modalities of modern colonial rule in Southeast Asia. Because it was driven by capital, and because the motive was profit generation, generation of profit and maximisation of profit, then the mode of governance that we see across Southeast Asia is very different from that of ancient pre-modern empires in the past. All the skills of modern colonial management are basically the skills that we see today. Management, administration, social engineering, urban planning, these were the tools of empire. And for these tools to work, they require a narrative. And this brings us back to the terminology of Alatas' book. Racialised colonial capitalism connects three different things together. Colonialism as praxis, political praxis, capital as agent, and the way in which a discourse of race and ethnic difference was created to facilitate the workings of colonial capitalism. And what Alatas really shows in this book is that the myth of the lazy native is not the result, was not the result of simply prejudice. I mean, there's always been prejudice. Racism, unfortunately, has always been part of human life everywhere in the world. But in this case, what he studies, what he attempts to show is how racialised stereotypes, negative stereotypes of different ethnic communities were generated with the calculations of capital in mind. Why do you need, why would you need to invent the stereotype of the lazy native, whether it's the lazy Malay, or the lazy Filipino, or the lazy Javanese. And what he tries to explain here is how these stereotypes are instrumental, were instrumental in nature, that they served certain political economic purposes within the broader context of an ethnically, racially divided colonial economy, and how one can divide and rule Asians by attaching to different communities, different so-called racial traits. And that's why when we look at modern colonialism, particularly from the 19th to 20th century, we see how different ethnic groups were basically compartmentalised and put into very neat and often exclusive blocks or categories designated as either lazy or productive, violent or passive, mature or childlike. These are the kinds of modes of categorisation that played a very important role in building or creating a plural colonial economy, which was the basis of, you know, the British colonial economy in British Malaya, as well as British Burma, the street settlements, British India, and what have you. Why is this important today? Well, it's important today because we still live in a world where all kinds of stereotypes abound. They are surrounded, we are surrounded by them all the time, we are exposed to them on a daily basis. And of course, most of us today would be familiar with new stereotypes, that of, say, the so-called violent Middle Easterner, violent Arab, or what have you, which are all instrumental fictions. And likewise, they serve a purpose, they serve political, economic, geo-economic, and geo-strategic purposes. So, whether they are stereotypes about Arabs, or Africans, or Chinese, or Asians, that we are exposed to every day through the media, through news, through movies, or what have you. A book like this, what Syed Hasir Al-Attas is inviting us to do, is to interrogate the genesis of such ideas, and above all, to understand that such ideas do not appear out of nowhere. The myth of the lazy native did not simply drop from the sky, it was concocted. There was human agency involved in deliberately, in a very calculated manner, deliberately choosing to label entire communities as either violent, or savage, or lazy, or unscientific. And that is what we need to remind ourselves of today as well, because we live in a world where we are never free of these visuals, these optics, that date back to the age of empire. It's an important book, and it is a book that I believe ought to be read by many people. It's a book that I think communicates very complex ideas in a manner that is understandable to both academics and non-academics, scholars and non-scholars alike. And so, for that reason, I think it's welcome to see that this book has been republished again, and I look forward to having more discussions about Syed Hussein Al-Attas' work in the future. Grak Budaya is proud to announce that it is now going to start its own series of Southeast Asian studies. And with this announcement, we are also making a call, an appeal, for manuscripts to be sent to us. So if you happen to be a scholar, a student, an academic, a writer who has been working on Southeast Asia, please consider sending your manuscript to us. We are really excited with this new project, and we are looking forward to getting manuscripts from whatever discipline. It could be history, material history, political economy, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, media studies. The scope of the series is rather wide. It covers the whole of Southeast Asia, and ideally we are looking for manuscripts that address Southeast Asia as a whole, rather than specific country studies. So if you happen to be interested in, say, modern media in Southeast Asia, or perhaps the impact of AI on Southeast Asia, or education across Southeast Asia, this is the place to go.