Leaving town: Kuala Kangsar's colonial past and the postponed nation in Malaysia.

What is the position of the local in a national history? Urban settlements in the Malay peninsula were formed in the late nineteenth century to service the extraction of industrial commodities. The colonial administration claimed to rule through indigenous elites who were left peripheral to vast economic changes and were marginal to the development of the growing state apparatus. Kuala Kangsar, the seat of the Perak state Sultanate, is one such remnant of the old Malay order grafted to the new colonial society. Tracing the history of the town through ethnography reveals the hesitant possibilities of Malay affiliation amid the challenging politics of colonial Malaya and post-independence Malaysia, a politics interested in postponing the realization of a national society. A Malay rebellion against British encroachment into the peninsula in 1875 made Kuala Kangsar the staging area for colonial troops sent to quell it. First a military post, then regional police headquarters, the growing settlement became the site of the Sultan's palace after British forces reinstated the monarchy in 1887. The first Perak Sultan to rule in the town established a school in 1905 to train Malay civil servants, making the town an important pilgrimage site for the small indigenous elite among its alumni. Perak's sophisticated transport network ran through Kuala Kangsar, and a union of Perak chauffeurs extended their association throughout the breadth of the peninsula. Malays also developed a secret organization in the Perak river valley, and Kuala Kangsar police dissolved the group with the Sultan's assistance. Schools, roads, and the police are colonial remnants that still direct the traffic habits of post-independence society. Ethnographic research traces the remains of these institutions in contemporary Kuala Kangsar, as the Malay College, Malaysia's new expressway, and incidents of violence recall Perak's colonial past but obscure the historical recounting of it. Conventional representations of the peninsula's hybrid experiences since the 1870s neglect Kuala Kangsar's colonial history, and instead focus on the rebellion that left Perak under British administration. Kuala Kangsar's local historiography suggests a continuing legacy of Malaysia's colonial past is a national politics that defers nationalism.PhDAsian historyCultural anthropologySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131129/2/9825376.pd