The Peripatetic Peasant and Land Tenure in British Malaya

The idea that Malay peasants have a close attachment to their land is a common place in both historical and contemporary writings about Malaya, and since the 1890s land legislation has been oriented toward bringing into being and preserving a landowning peasantry. The files of the colonial administration, however, contain numerous complaints about peasants disposing of their holdings. Officials and later commentators have tended to view such behaviour as contrary to the natural inclinations of peasants and symptomatic of underlying social or political problems, but when a pattern has been reported consistently for over one hundred years the question must be asked whether it really is, as conventional wisdom would have it, anomalous.