ABSTRACT
While all people from the English-dominant nations who work 'overseas' as language teachers, researchers, administrators, teacher educators and so on, or indeed any of us anywhere involved in research, need to address such questions, there are some ways in which such work can be usefully contextualized. The society was deeply split along class and ethnic lines; parts of the Malay aristocracy and some of the new Indian, Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Malay middle class were closely linked, economically and culturally, to colonial rule; there was a growing Chinese and Indian merchant class in the bigger cities; and meanwhile in the rural areas, the Tamil plantation workers and Chinese and Malay farmers lived in poverty. As the former colonial powers gave up their colonies, they were intent on negotiating economic and political terms that would remain favourable to them.
