Troubling modernity: The making of colonial Malaya (Thomas De Quincey, Joseph Conrad, Munshi Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir)

The western coast of the Malayan peninsula is positioned midway between Calcutta and the ports of southern China. Initially serving as a way-station for the India-China trade route, and formally annexed by the British with some reluctance, Malaya had, by the end of the century, established itself as the most profitable colony in the British empire. This dissertation examines the character of nineteenth-century imperial control in Malaya and its influence upon the development of modernity in the postcolonial nation-state. I examine the colonial experience as it was refracted by the exigencies of global trade rather than territorial control. The history of Malaya exemplifies the loose, pragmatic forms of British intervention geared towards maximizing profits from trade and commerce while minimizing the burden of formal dominion. Such flexible mechanisms of manipulation were more typical of the Southeast Asian experience of European domination than the institutions of military and political coercion which evolved on the Indian subcontinent. The literary texts that I study respond to the problems centered upon the emergence of colonial modernity in Malaya. Each chapter explores how culture in Malaya may be understood as an effect of trade. My analyses of Thomas De Quincey, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munshi and Joseph Conrad serve to complement a genealogy of modern Malaya that unsettles indigenist conceptions of Malayan history and politics by attending to the heteronomous forces of trade and imperial geopolitics in the nineteenth century. Attending to the specificities of genre and address, I elaborate a style of formal-historical reading that problematizes the relation between “text” and “context”. In each chapter, I provide a close reading of fictional and non-fictional texts, exploring the ways in which literary mechanisms defamiliarize the complex material realities to which they respond. Through a study of the formal features of individual texts and their at once intensificatory and distortive relation to empirically based truth-claims, I show how literature reworks the complex pressures attendant upon periods of transition, thereby providing peculiar insights into social possibility that may not be accessible within the disciplinary imaginings of history and political economy.