Australians in the Peninsular Tin-Belt

• In Event: Merchants, Agents, Technology, and Force: Empire and Natural Resources in East and Southeast Asia, 1800-1945

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the regulation of resource management in British Malaya was guided by a mix of secular utilitarianism and racial ideology. Through political intervention as well as deliberate land and resource policies, Chinese immigrants were allowed, in fact, encouraged, to displace Malayan or Southeast Asian resource entrepreneurs. Rather than bringing machinery, the first Australian mining companies in Malaya merely took advantage of generous concessions based on White privilege, and then worked the concessions by engaging Chinese tributers, thus replicating an arrangement familiar to Australians who had prior contact with Chinese mining fossickers in the gold-fields of Australia. But within a short period, real technological evolution happened as a result of a series of human encounters, which upturned the expectations of racial hierarchy - Chinese capitalists employing Australians with exposure or experience in mining. In Siam, where the main concern was to protect national resources from British expansionism, Australians were seen as preferred agents for sourcing mining technology. In contrast Cornwall miners in Malaya repeatedly imported inferior Australian technology, thus losing out to Australian-Chinese collaborators. While equating race with a set of physical, social and cultural characteristics, many contemporary commentators and subsequent historians have under-observed the phenomena of transnational networking and knowledge exchange among Chinese emigrants internationally. With regard to the relationship between the Australians and Chinese, this paper focuses on the cultural encounters and social experiments that necessarily accompanied technology transfer and innovation.

Author

• Salma Khoo, Penang Heritage Trust