ABSTRACT
The ongoing reigns of Raja Rubber and Tengku Tin The transition from colonial to nation state did not involve any substantial shift in the basis of the Malaysian export economy. The decolonised Federation remained highly dependent upon the rubber and tin industries, in which foreign (principally British) interests maintained a dominant stake. Manufacturing industry may have been powering ahead at Petaling Jaya thanks to the pioneer industries legislation of 1958, but, in March 1960, FMSCC president H.I.Thornton-Jones (of James Warren) pointed out that Malaya was still highly dependent on rubber, not least because the Federation had overtaken Indonesia to resume its role as the world’s largest producer of the plantation product.1 In the first year of merdeka, the rubber industry continued to employ about a quarter of the working population of Malaya (over 600,000 people), contributed in export duty and income tax one-quarter of the total revenue of the federal government, and accounted for over 60 per cent of export earnings. Over one-third of world natural rubber production was derived from the peninsula alone. Tin was second as a source of export earnings and revenues. The British and Chinese miners produced nearly 20 per cent of the value of exports, and about 13 per cent of revenue. The dredges and gravel pumps were not big employers of Malayan labour; under 40,000 personnel, little more than 1 per cent of the economically active population of the Federation, worked in the mines. Nevertheless, Malaya produced about one-third of global tin supplies, and was also the single largest producing country.2 Notwithstanding diversification of the Malaysian export base, particularly with the addition of Sabah’s and Sarawak’s timber and petroleum, and the beginnings of EOI by the end of the 1960s, rubber and tin provided about 62 per cent of all receipts from pan-Malaysian commodity exports in 1965 and still 53.8 per cent in 1970.3 In support of the ‘neo-colonial’, dependency thesis, it would indeed appear that the omnipotent British agency houses had imprisoned Malaysia in colonial modes of production.
