| Summary/Abstract |
That the complexity of Malayan society, with its ethnically diverse population and its linguistic, cultural and religious differences, could be simply reduced to ‘practically three races’ that in turn bore three simple essential characteristics – idleness, criminality and drunkenness – is telling of how the order of knowledge and power that had dominated and defined the colony had also reduced its native inhabitants to stock caricatures that were permanently fixed and defined. Knowing the colonised native Other meant being in a position of epistemic leverage over that Other, and thus being able to define and frame the Other in whatever terms that suited the ideological needs of racialised colonial-capitalism at the time.
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