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Imperialism and `medieval' natives: The Malay image in Anglo-American travelogues and colonialism in Malaya and the Philippines Daniel P. S. Goh International Journal of Cultural Studies 2007; 10; 323 DOI: 10.1177/1367877907080147 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ics.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/10/3/323

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ARTICLE INTERNATIONAL journal of CULTURAL studies Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore www.sagepublications.com Volume 10(3): 323–341 DOI: 10.1177/1367877907080147

Imperialism and ‘medieval’ natives The Malay image in Anglo-American travelogues and colonialism in Malaya and the Philippines ●

Daniel P. S. Goh National University of Singapore

A B S T R A C T ● The location of Orientalist racial difference and Ornamental class familiarity in imperial discourse can be combined to understand the nuances of colonial representations. Revisiting the Malay image, I argue that the medievalist convention of portraying the native as situated in intermediate evolution between savagery and Western civilization was crucial for imperialism. The Malay image shifted from the representation of orientals exhibiting incommensurable difference in early European travelogues to civilizable medievals in early nineteenth-century British writings. British authors also vacillated between representing Malays as model and degenerate medievals with different racial and class symbolic valences. The vacillating representation influenced colonial state building in the late nineteenth century. I show this by looking at the travel writings of British and American colonial statesmen who supported contrastive colonial policies. ● K E Y W O R D S ● colonial representation ● ethnographic discourse Filipino ● imperialism ● Malay ● medievalism ● Orientalism ● Ornamentalism ● travel writing

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The Malay image between Orientalism and Ornamentalism David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism has reopened the question of the relationship between imperialism and cultural representations of colonized 323 Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 16, 2008 © 2007 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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peoples. Cannadine argues that the recognition of aristocratic likeness in the ruling classes of native societies was decisive for British imperial policy, that ‘the British Empire was first and foremost a class act’, taking precedence over ‘collective racial othering’ (2001: 10). Thus, Cannadine reasserts a tradition of sociological interpretation of colonial representations linking imperialism to modern state building and the martial worldview of the European ruling classes (Schumpeter, 1951; Robinson and Gallagher, 1968) that has been submerged in the literary emphases of colonial cultural studies. This article aims to bridge the opposing terms – difference versus familiarity, race versus class, text versus state – raised in Cannadine’s challenge by studying representations of the ‘Malay’ in British and American travel writings of the nineteenth century. In fact, these oppositions have already been tackled in Alatas’ (1977) analysis of how the racial construction of Malays as intractably lazy distorted local economic realities and justified the establishment of colonial plantation capitalism in the Malay Archipelago. But Alatas’ analysis does not exhaust the multiple dimensions defining colonial representations and their ideological effects. There are at least three reasons for revisiting the Malay image. One, despite the constant signification of indolence, epochal discursive shifts changing the racial meanings can be observed. Two, while racial meanings justified colonial class projects, interpretations of native class society also affected racial meanings. Three, these representations were formative of the colonial state and not just of colonial capitalism. While Alatas (1977: 17) asserts that the Malay image ‘remained basically the same’ during the long centuries despite the interruption of the ‘second phase of colonial expansion’ in the late nineteenth century, I argue exactly the opposite; that is, the Malay image shifted because of the second expansion. The late nineteenth century saw the great dislocation of local states as Western powers began expanding and consolidating their empire through colonial state formation. In the Philippines, Spain was building a modern colonial state when the Filipino nationalist revolution interrupted the process and American imperialism usurped it in 1898. In Malaya, increasing British colonial control over the Malay states culminated in the 1895 federation of four Malay states. I argue that the varied portrayal of Malays as ‘savage’ or ‘oriental’ by continental travelers shifted to the representation of Malays as ‘medieval’ in the early 1800s in pioneer British colonial writings, which was then further elaborated in the late 1800s in the travelogues of British and American colonial state builders. The perception of class similarity did not preclude nineteenth-century writers from seeing the natives also as racially inferior. Both class and race determined colonial perception. Framed by the ‘medieval’ image, Malay society was seen as similar to metropolitan society but belonging to an anterior stage of socioeconomic development because of perceived Malay racial inferiority. Representations of the ‘savage’ and ‘oriental’ are well delineated in the academic literature (Said, 1978; Berkhover, Jr, 1979; McGregor, 1988; Chatterjee, 1993; Liebersohn, 1998), but studies of the representations of the natives as


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Imperialism and ‘medieval’ natives

‘medieval’ often do not clearly distinguish Medievalism from Noble Savagery or Orientalism. As a historiographic and literary convention, Medievalism represented natives as having attained a feudal level of civilization between ‘savage’ tribal and ‘modern’ industrial societies. Unlike Noble Savagery, where the natives were seen as distant in evolutionary development, Medievalism represented the natives as ready for political modernization and incorporation into colonial states. Unlike Orientalism, Medievalism represented racial difference on the basis of commensurable proportions rather than incommensurable difference. ‘Oriental’ societies were seen to have developed in their own time, place and logic, but ‘savage’, ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ societies were seen as located on the same path of evolutionary development. Medievalism was related to two cultural movements that mapped the imperial universe of heterogeneous lifeworlds. The first is Darwinism, which in its nineteenth-century version fused moral philosophy, scientific naturalism and ethnographic sociology. The second is Gothic Revivalism, the ghastly medievalist representations of which reflected the management of imperial anxieties concerning continental competitors and restless natives and functioned to construct British national identity (Brantlinger, 1988; Schmitt, 1997). Medievalism naturally resonated with Gothic Revivalism, but Darwinism was the dominant influence in the representation of natives as medievals. In the racial anthropology of Darwinism, the heterogeneous social and cultural worlds of humanity were reduced, proportioned and ranked against the common denominator of modern Western society, using actual or ideal Western attributes as the standard to judge native society and character (Fabian, 1983; Spurr, 1993). The consequent sociological ranking was then explained by pointing to Western attributes thought to be racially missing in native character. In this way, the medieval and savage ‘slots’ were constructed to represent the relative worth of a native group in terms of its evolution along the linear history of progress traced by Western civilization (Trouillot, 1991). Darwinist Medievalism was more rationally attuned to colonial state building than metropolitan identity formation. The ‘medieval’ was important to the ideological belief that putting racially immature natives into political training was a viable enterprise. The innovation in colonial cultural studies has been to treat eclectic travel texts – narratives of travel to foreign lands written in a scientific, literary or sentimental manner – as purveying ethnographic authority on the peoples observed (Pratt, 1992; Gilbert and Johnston, 2002). The implication is that the construction of native groups as objects of ethnographic knowledge can be analyzed as linked to colonial projects aiming to reorganize native societies (Steinmetz, 2003). For this article, in line with the relationship between Medievalism, Darwinist naturalism and colonial state formation, I focus on the travel writings of naturalists and colonial officials. I begin my analysis with a synopsis of early continental writings, which paved the way for the writings of two British East India Company officers and renowned naturalist, Alfred Wallace. The early British writings presented a Malay image that was double-voiced, vacillating between the


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positive ‘model medieval’ and negative ‘degenerate medieval’ images. The medieval was judged on his progress towards modern civilization, which entailed the possibility of ‘degeneration’ towards savagery. I analyze the latenineteenth-century travel writings of three British and American colonial statesmen to show that this vacillation had important implications for colonial state formation.

From early European Orientalism to nineteenth-century British Medievalism Early European writings focused on the inhabitants of dominant Malacca as archetype for the Malays. At the time of the Portuguese conquest in 1521, Iberian and Italian travelers saw Malaccan Malays as white, cultivated and stately. In this early Orientalist image of Malays as civilized Muslim rivals, the travelers emphasized their fierce pride and martial culture, as well as their malicious and untruthful character. The portrayals of natives of the islands east of Malacca were more varied. Explorers saw Borneo Malays as honest civilized peoples and described the pagan primitives of Borneo and the Philippines as peace-loving noble savages. But this was matched by descriptions of natives of the Moluccas as ignoble, bestial and warlike heathens who were barely civilized by Islam (Lach, 1965). In 1641, the Dutch dislodged the Portuguese from Malacca. In the eyes of the northern Europeans who now took the place of Latin authors, the Malay image had darkened but retained its Orientalist character of civilized difference (Lach and Van Kley, 1993). German and Dutch writers described the Malays of Malaya, Sumatra and Java as yellow, tawny, brownish or mostly black, and as the most cunning, ingenious, lazy and proud who could not be trusted despite their elegant and polite mannerisms. Similarly, Dutch writers negatively contrasted Borneo Malays to the positive image of tribal Dayaks as noble savages. Spanish authors portrayed pagan Filipinos as noble savages worthy of civilization and protection from the violent, piratical and oriental Moros of southern Philippines. The eighteenth century saw the height of European global exploration. The travel images inevitably influenced the emerging natural philosophy of scientific taxonomy, particularly in Blumenbach’s reclassification of Carl Linnaeus’ 1758 four-race division into a five-race division in the 1795 edition of On the Natural Variety of Mankind, with the addition of the Malay as the fifth race. Blumenbach saw the Caucasian as closest in representing the original human form in appearance and symmetry. Asserting the unity of the species, Blumenbach proposed that post-migration environmental conditions caused the ‘degeneration’ of the original form into four racial sub-species. With the American occupying the intermediate degeneration from Caucasian to Mongolian in terms of flattening of physical features, Blumenbach proposed the Malay as the intermediate degeneration to Ethiopian in terms of enlargement of physical features. This authoritative taxonomy strongly


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influenced British naturalists (Bendyshe, 1865). Indeed, Blumenbach’s placement of the Malay between Ethiopian and Caucasian planted the very idea of intermediacy, while the concept of degeneration, though in reference to aesthetic symmetry, sowed a temporal imagination in the fertile emergent field of natural history. It was a short step from natural intermediacy and temporality to the ‘medieval’ Malay image, which combined both biological and sociological notions, race and class, in an evolutionary perspective. The British made inroads into the Archipelago in the late eighteenth century, establishing bases along the Straits of Malacca. This gave rise to writings that reshaped the European images of perfidious orientals and noble savages (Quilty, 1998). Two East India Company officers, Thomas Stamford Raffles and John Crawfurd, were instrumental in reshaping the Malay image. Raffles administered British-occupied Dutch East Indies during the Napoleonic War and later founded Singapore. Crawfurd also served in Java during the British interregnum and later administered Singapore. As Maier (1988: 41) notes, both men were ‘merchant-scientists’ who took ‘demi-civilised’ Malay societies seriously and wrote their histories for them. Crawfurd’s History of the Indian Archipelago significantly composed the varied native images into simple binaries of Malay-Papuan, superior-inferior, civilized-savage, brown-black. Crawfurd proposed the thesis that the Papuans and Malays originally inhabited the Archipelago. Crawfurd said little of the Papuans, describing them as dwarf Negroes who had never ‘risen above the most abject state of barbarism’ (1820: 26). On the Malays, he disputed their representation as perfidious orientals and portrayed them as model medievals whose progress was halted by bad Dutch colonial policies. In dismissing radical oriental difference, Crawfurd painted Malays as similar to white men in having the natural capacity for supposedly Western attributes of industry, intelligence and truthfulness. Disagreeing with continental portrayals of Malays as indolent, Crawfurd reported that he found Malays to be as industrious as other people when in a secure social environment. Agreeing with Dutch portrayals of Malays as intellectually defective, Crawfurd argued however that this was due to lack of liberal education. He compared Malays favorably with other orientals, observing that their mental faculties were ‘weak from want of exercise and culture, but not distorted and diseased by the habitual influence of false refinement and erroneous education, like most of the other nations of Asia’ (1820: 47). Against the image of scheming orientals, Crawfurd portrayed Malays as ‘honourably distinguished from all the civilised nations of Asia by a regard for truth’ (1820: 50). In his History of Java, Raffles disputed that Malay conversion to Hinduism and Islam could be seen as progress. Instead, Raffles (1978: 57–8, 232–4) argued that Malay societies were progressing in their social life and were developing indigenous state forms when Hindu kingship and Islamic codes confused Malay development. The confusion prevented the formation of a strong kingship, placed despotic rule over the rule of law, created a tendency for civil wars, and promoted piracy and slavery. In his posthumously published letters,


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Raffles (1991: 61) wrote that the Sulus of Southern Philippines were ‘a bold and enterprising race’ which had become ‘extremely vicious, treacherous, and sanguinary’ because of their adoption of Islam. Furthermore, he argued that this degeneration was exacerbated by illiberal and monopolistic Dutch and Spanish colonial policy. But Raffles’ portrayal of degeneration risked undermining his liberal hope for Malay civilization. He therefore argued that the recent Islamic conversion did not totally corrupt the inner Malay character. Wholly uncorrupted by Islam, the industrious and peaceful Dayaks were evidence of innate Malay goodness to Raffles. On the Javans, Raffles detected the positive attributes of the true Malay lying beneath surface degeneration. Although Malay government was a ‘pure unmixed despotism’ (Raffles, 1978: 267), the Javans retained old patriarchal virtues and tribal customs that softened ‘the intolerance of the Mahometan system’ (1978: 235). This was especially true for the peasants, who were ‘simple, natural and ingenuous’, while the upper classes tended towards ‘violence, deceit and gross sensuality’ (1978: 248). Fortunately, Raffles wrote, Javans did not imbibe the Muslim attitude of superiority and prejudice against unbelievers. Thus, retaining ‘their unsuspecting and almost infantine credulity’, they were ready to acknowledge European superiority (1978: 245). Above all, Malays could be industrious and intelligent given liberal conditions, which the Dutch failed to provide. Although both were liberals in political orientation, Raffles and Crawfurd differed significantly on the Malay. Crawfurd saw model medievals repressed by non-British colonialists but Raffles saw medievals whose degeneration was due to their absorption of oriental despotisms. Likewise, both men favored different approaches to the establishment of British colonialism in the region. Crawfurd favored the settling and free intermingling of English colonists with model Malays under a liberal government, while Raffles inspired the practice that was to become British indirect rule in Malaya, by sending British Residents to degenerate Malay courts to establish colonial government (Bastin, 1953). Decades later, naturalist Alfred Wallace wrote The Malay Archipelago, which offered ethnographic evidence for Blumenbach’s taxonomic placement of the Malay. More than a classic in scientific naturalism, Wallace’s work stood for a third conservative political viewpoint linked with the representation of Malays as natural degenerate medievals. Using the theoretical framework of evolution by natural selection, Wallace developed Crawfurd’s proposal that the two distinct aboriginal races were the Malays and Papuans. From his observations, Wallace postulated an ethnological line dividing the Malayan and Polynesian races. The position of this line east of the famous line dividing the Indo-Malayan and Austro-Malayan bioregions demonstrated Crawfurd’s hypothesis that the civilized Malays were pushing the savage Papuans back from their natural border. Wallace’s ethnological line functioned to support his representation of two races as radically different from each other, not only in terms of physical characteristics but also in what Wallace called ‘moral characteristics’ (1869: 588). Malays were sedentary, taciturn, industrious and cultured, having ‘all the quiet ease and dignity


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of the best-bred Europeans’ (1869: 587), but they were intellectually deficient and mediocre in physique. On the other hand, Wallace described Papuans as passionate, energetic and intellectually and physically superior. In contrast to Papuan vitality, Malays were apathetic. The development of Malay civilization through conversion to Hinduism and Islam showed, Wallace argued, that Malays were quietly adaptable to civilized life. Compared with Malay propensity to submit to civilization, Papuans were rebellious and violent because of their vigour and energy. Wallace thus predicted that the Malay race would survive as agriculturalists in the tide of European colonization. The prognosis for Papuans was extinction, as an energetic race ‘must disappear before the white man as surely as do the wolf and the tiger’ (1869: 596). Wallace’s image of Malays making good peasants under European rule fits in with Crawfurd’s picture of Malays as civilized medievals. Wallace, however, rejected the liberal critique of Dutch policy, because he saw Malays as degenerate medievals, like Raffles, but more irredeemably so. The law of evolution, Wallace (1869: 264) argued, applied to human progress. Society must pass through the medieval stage of ‘feudalism or servitude, or a despotic paternal government’ in ‘its onward march from barbarism to civilisation’. Wallace argued that it was ‘not possible for humanity to leap over this transition epoch’ and praised Dutch despotism for supplying ‘this missing link’. The liberal practice of forcing free civilization upon natives would instead ‘demoralise and extirpate’ them. ‘Children’, Wallace wrote, ‘would never grow up into wellbehaved and well-educated men, if the same absolute freedom of action that is allowed to men were allowed to them’ (1869: 262). The other important difference from Crawfurd was Wallace’s positive portrayal of Papuans as noble savages. Wallace also described Borneo Dayaks as noble savages who were physically, intellectually and morally superior to Malays. For Wallace, Raja James Brooke’s Sarawak approximated the ideal colonial government because it accorded equal treatment to the Dayaks, protected them from Malay oppression and civilized the ‘worst laws and customs’ of Malay society (1869: 103). We can discern three relationships between representation and colonialism from my reading of early British travelogues. First, as European exploration progressed, the varied representation of different Malay communities became a cohesive view of Malays as constituting a distinct race. Wallace’s evolutionary depiction is the culmination of this trend. His view of the archipelago as constituting a natural ‘Malay’ bioregion is a crucial advance in constructing the idea of a distinct region defined by a distinct racial group. Secondly, as the region’s commercial centers and their hinterland came increasingly under Western political control, the representation of Malays as inscrutable orientals of incommensurable difference shifted to familiar medievals of commensurable social difference. Race and class were thus congealed in the medieval Malay image. Thirdly, differences in Medievalist representations were closely related to colonial policy positions. To further analyze this relationship, I read the late-nineteenth-century travelogues of pioneering colonial state builders Hugh Clifford, Frank Swettenham and Dean Worcester in the next sections.


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British Medievalist representations and Malayan colonialism Hugh Clifford’s career began with the extension of British control across the Peninsula into remote Pahang. Clifford came from the same aristocratic Catholic family as Frederick Weld, Governor of the Straits Settlements (1880–7), who sent his nephew in 1886 on the perilous mission to persuade the Raja of Pahang to accept British protection. Clifford succeeded and later commanded a native force to suppress a rebellion and became Pahang Resident. The mission to Pahang left indelible memories on young Clifford and provided substance for his writings published over a decade from 1896, which won him literary acclaim and a friend in Joseph Conrad. His writings traced the revelation of the hitherto oriental character of Malay society as a culture akin to the British past (1897: 245–56). Clifford described Malays as ‘living in the Middle Ages’ before British interference, each state being ruled by its own sultan ‘under a complete Feudal System’ of titled chiefs ruling over the rakyat or peasant commoners (1897: 3). Clifford therefore warned his readers to be cautious in the way they apply Victorian standards to ‘a people whose ideas of the fitness of things are much the same as those which prevailed in Europe some six centuries agone’. Describing Malay society as presenting ‘a curiously close parallel to that which was in force in Medieval Europe’ (1897: 3–4), Clifford defended this equivalence by criticizing the chroniclers of medieval Europe for telling only ‘merry tales’ of ‘Princes and Nobles, and Knights and Dames’ (1897: 5). Clifford was no romantic. He despised Malay customs as a ‘fetish’ and Malay manners and character as ‘unregenerate’ (1897: 139, 17). Clifford believed that British rule was necessary, as he doubted whether the Malay race possessed the ‘energy’ to grapple with progress away from feudalism when the rakyat had been content ‘to plod on through the centuries’ (1897: 6). Similarly, Clifford applied Wallace’s logic of evolutionary development to criticize British colonialism. Clifford argued that forcing Malays ‘to bear NineteenthCentury fruit’ would cause them ‘to become morally weak and seedy, and to lose something of his robust self-respect’, to become ‘sadly dull, limp, and civilised’, thus the attempt ‘to crush into twenty years the revolutions in facts and in ideas, which, even in energetic Europe, six long centuries have been needed to accomplish’ would bring about further degeneration (1897: 3). The representation of degeneration was further elaborated in the novel Saleh. Clifford told a cautionary tale of a young Malay prince who finds himself wanting in identity after finishing his education in England. The British Resident sends him back home to the court to fit him ‘back into his own groove’ before appointing him to office, because a Malay ‘guided by white influence is all right; the denationalised Malay is the devil’ (Clifford, 1989: 167). Through the eyes of Saleh, Clifford proposed that rapid civilization would alienate the degenerate medieval. The homecoming Saleh finds the court ‘a hybrid creation’ of ‘the Malayan and the European’, ‘the ancient, the inviolate, the unreformed’ versus the modern, and rejects ‘the unlovely


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hybrid’ (1989: 169). As time passes, the Malay in Saleh asserts itself. As much as he tries to fight against the dirtiness besetting the European bungalow assigned to him, Saleh fails, and the place becomes increasingly like ‘any ordinary Malay house’ (1989: 192). Finding himself ‘more and more distinctively a Malay’ (1989: 196), Saleh resents the white man for causing his class to lose its traditional power and identity: ‘the tawdry shell, the valueless husk, had been left to the Malay by the Englishmen; but the soul which it had once sheltered, the soul which had given to it meaning and force and value, had been reft from it’ (1989: 177). But just as Clifford began to offer a sociological explanation of native resistance, he turned it into racial degeneracy. Saleh is sent on rent collection, makes a mess of it, and is chided by the British district officer, but it is not this humiliation that turns him into a rebel. Clifford contrived that Saleh catches malaria during the trip, as mosquitoes greeted him ‘not as a seasoned native, but as a newcomer from Europe’ (1989: 205), and went into a digression concerning ‘energy’, which is not a virtue that can be inculcated but a predetermined quantity ‘Nature grants from her store of hoarded forces’ (1989: 213). Saleh, ‘in whose veins ran the blood of hundreds of absolute rulers’ (1989: 226), is tormented during his fevers by twin demons, ‘the Horror of Effort and the Futility of Endeavour’ (1989: 212), from which he recovers only to revolt and is killed. The turning point is not the realization of nationalist consciousness, but the sapping of Malay ‘energy’ or racial essence, the physical fact of ‘declimatisation’ not the social fact of ‘denationalisation’ (1989: 208). The tragedy of commensurable syncretism was reiterated in the counterpart novel, A Free Lance of To-Day, in which the crossing over of the white man to Malay society is portrayed as possible but bound to end in racial tragedy. The hero is Maurice Curzon, ‘a thorough Anglo-Saxon’, whose abundant ‘latent energy’ marks him as ‘a white man of the white men – a masterful son of the dominant race’ and causes him to tire of clerical work in a Singapore bank and to ‘herd with natives’ (Clifford, 1903: 8–9). Curzon joins a Malay raja in running arms and assisting Acehnese rebels against the Dutch but regrets his decision when he sees the insurgents mutilate the Dutchmen he helped to kill. Against Acehnese hostility, he gives the dead men Christian burial. Conrad criticized this very scene and doubted the plausibility of a character as immature and unscrupulous as Curzon (Gailey, 1982: 37). But as the turning point in the narrative, the emotional trauma of the mutilation of dead white bodies allowed Clifford to show that Curzon only realizes the true Malay character and his white identity when the Acehnese acted in a degenerate way. On the other hand, the antagonist is an English mercenary who had betrayed his Dutch employers to the Acehnese and subsequently gone native as a Malay witchdoctor. Pawang Üteh buys a shipwrecked English girl from her Acehnese captors but dies as Curzon rescues the girl. The theme is racial degeneration for the white man who crosses over into Malay culture and its inevitable tragic fate as represented by a white man known only to us by his Malay name.


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On his literary relationship with Conrad, Clifford stressed that he knew and portrayed Malay character more accurately than Conrad, while acknowledging the latter as penning a more sublime imagination of the archipelago and its people, particularly in Almayer’s Folly, which resonated deeply with his memories of jungle fighting (Clifford, 1928: 287; also Clifford, 1927). In comparison, if Conrad saw the inevitability of madness and ineffaceability of painful memories as the underside of rational civilization with its glorious histories, then Clifford’s novels can be read as assertions of the possibility of separating madness from reason, pain from glory, savagery from civilization, and the imperative to do it as an honorable imperialist (see Dryden, 1998). Thus, while he allowed their commensurability, Clifford found the distance between Malay society and white civilization too great to be crossed without tragedy. Frank Swettenham was Clifford’s senior colleague in British Malaya who was also initiated into his career by way of imperial violence. Arriving in Singapore in 1871, he was posted to the western Malay states that had recently come under tenuous British control and played an active part in suppressing insurgent Malay chiefs. In the following three decades, Swettenham climbed the ranks, becoming the first Resident-General of the Federated Malay States and later Governor. Like Clifford, Swettenham constructed the medieval image of Malays in his writings, but unlike Clifford, he was ambivalent, differentiating between model and degenerate medievals. Swettenham often evaluated Malay practices using familiar images from historical Europe. For examples, in three different stories, Swettenham (1993: 104, 73, 90) compared Malay superstitions and witchcraft to the irrationalities of Western witchcraft ‘not so many centuries ago’, nostalgically described a Malay warrior who avenges a dishonored lady relative as a knightly ‘champion of a lady in distress’, and equated a sultan’s nepotism to peerage in the Upper House of Parliament. The ambivalence of Swettenham’s portrayal revolved around the sociological differentiation of rajas and peasants. On the one hand, Swettenham saw the ordinary Malays as degenerate medievals who came to be so through racial evolution. ‘[C]enturies of Malay mis-government’, Swettenham wrote, ‘has produced a race which looked with suspicion upon every innovation, opposed it on principle and only became reconciled to alteration when the feeblest intelligence was compelled to admit that there was no harm in it’ (1948: 143). Swettenham believed that this racial conservatism and lack of intelligence translated to the commoner’s blind obedience to customary authority and their rajas. On the other hand, despite their misrule, the rajas were model medievals. Swettenham admiringly described Raja Mahmud, a rebel who became his bodyguard: ‘He had a fine open face, looked you straight and fearlessly in the eyes, and you realized that he always spoke the truth ... was very smartly dressed, with silk trousers and a silk sarong, a fighting-jacket, a kerchief deftly and becomingly tied on his head, and in his belt the famous kris Kapak China’, and admitted, ‘Raja Mahmud’s strong personality, his straightforward manner, and his fearless courage attracted me


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immensely’ (1948: 191). Swettenham’s admiration for the rajas was born of their resistance against British encroachment. The attributes that made the rajas model medievals – strong, courageous and chivalrous – were specifically the characteristics of the idealized masculine and aristocratic Anglo-Saxon of Victorian Britain, the conservative ornamental image Cannadine analyzes. Both Swettenham and Clifford began from the same point: Malay society was a medieval society sharing the same psychological, cultural and sociological make-up as Western society of feudal past, particularly the oppressive misgovernment of commoners. This was accounted for by racial characteristics reminiscent of Wallace’s characterization: lack of ‘energy’ for Clifford and intelligence for Swettenham. Swettenham and Clifford saw British rule in Malaya as a natural development in the march of civilization, in which the higher-evolved Anglo-Saxon race that had pulled itself out of feudalism should guide the medieval natives to achieve modernity. The difference is that, although his depiction of the degenerate rakyat was a commentary on raja misrule, Swettenham nevertheless found the blue-blooded rajas to possess redeeming virtues. Consequently, the objectives of British rule for Swettenham were to provide the missing factor of good and just government. Swettenham (1993: 205) was therefore decisively positive concerning the civilization of Malays, believing that the changes brought about by British rule were ‘regeneration’ for Malays, since they improved their material life without altering their noble hearts. In Swettenham’s vision, British rule would advance the noble virtues of his model medievals by modernizing their habits of government, thereby providing a secure environment to halt the degeneration of the rakyat. Clifford believed that such attempts would only bring about further degeneration, causing the rajas to revolt against the enervation of their nature. Like Wallace, Clifford believed that only a paternalistic government would benefit the natives. Correspondingly, the policies both men supported differed. Swettenham sought to utilize the traditional authority of the rajas for colonial indirect rule, from penghulu village administration to the invented tradition of the Malay durbar. On the other hand, Clifford was sceptical of British policy in Malaya at the same time that he grappled with the contradictions of indirect rule in his writings (Holden, 2000). When he became Governor in 1927, Clifford preferred a direct British administration and tried to reverse the decentralization of power to the rajas. Allen (1964: 60) correctly argues that the ideological difference between Swettenham and Clifford hinged on ‘their different concepts of regeneration’, but also argues that this difference was due to the fact that while both men ‘liked the Malays’, ‘only Clifford really respected them’. Rather than attribute the differences in representations to the depth of their Malayophilia, I have placed Swettenham’s and Clifford’s writings in the development of the Malay image in Western representations to show that their ideas were part of the larger relationship between Medievalist discourse and imperial expansion. My concluding analysis of the same vacillation in the single person of Dean Worcester and different case of the American Philippines further strengthens


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this point. I read Worcester’s 1898 travelogue, written as a naturalist, and his 1914 book, written as a retired colonial statesman, to show that the shift in his representation of Filipinos from model to degenerate medievals took place as he hardened his position on American imperial democracy.

American naturalism, Medievalism and Philippine colonialism While Wallace considered the Filipinos as belonging to the Malay race, he left the Philippines out of his study. As American trade activity increased in the Pacific, American naturalists became interested in the Philippine biodiversity that Wallace did not map. Dean Worcester was one such naturalist who conducted two zoological expeditions in 1887 and 1891 to test the hypothesis that a biodiversity line similar to Wallace’s line divided the Philippines from Formosa. Back in the States, Worcester’s Philippine writings grew in tandem with worsening Spanish-American relations. After war broke out, Worcester wrote The Philippine Islands and Their People and became celebrated as a Philippine expert. Worcester’s early observation of the natives was an extension of his scientific work. But like Wallace, the naturalist representations were interwoven with views on colonial policy. Worcester assigned the hunting-gathering Negritos to the bottom heap of the racial hierarchy and reserved hope of civilization for those he grouped under ‘pagan’ and ‘civilized Malays’. Pagan Malays referred to the various groups living on the margins of Spanish Philippines, generally practicing sedentary cultivation and remaining culturally independent of colonial society. The sign of hope of their civilization was the civilized Malays, Hispanized Filipinos organized into tenant peasantry, whom Worcester vigorously defended against detractors, blaming unenlightened Spanish colonial rule for their ignorance, childishness, lack of originality and indolence. It is for this reason that he thought they were unfit for self-government, agreeing with Spanish priests on the natives being ‘big children who must be treated like little ones’. But because they were ‘naturally law-abiding and peace-loving’ and ‘appreciate and profit by just treatment’ Worcester implied that American rule would offer the race its proper advance. In other words, Filipinos were degenerate medievals only because retrograde Westerners held them back. With America’s imminent displacement of Spain as colonial ruler, Worcester believed that it was American manifest destiny to replace a retrograde imperial power. In this belief, Worcester was influenced by nineteenth-century Spanish representations of Filipinos as degenerate medievals (Sullivan, 1991: 58–60). As Spanish reformers sought to strengthen Spain’s crumbling imperial power by modern state building in the colonies, early Spanish representations of the Filipinos as noble savages gave way to self-critical nineteenth-century depictions blaming the degenerate character of their Filipino subjects on colonial maladministration (Alatas,


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1977: 53–7; Sullivan, 1991: 54–8). Seeking to pull Spain out of backward absolutism, Spanish reformers saw Filipinos as creatures of their own backwardness. In effect, Worcester used the self-criticisms of Spanish authors to affirm American manifest destiny in the Philippines. Mateo Francisco, Worcester’s native companion during his trips, was his symbol of Filipino racial prospects, the exemplary model medieval. Francisco lived in America for 13 years, attached to the professor who led the first expedition. Worcester (1898: 220) described him as a ‘full-blooded’ native whose rather black skin he ‘had long since ceased to think’ about, because his stay in America made him ‘a living demonstration of the capability for improvement possessed by the average native’. In contrast, Worcester disparaged Filipino mestizos. In Panay, Worcester attended the wedding festivities of a mestizo mayor’s son. ‘Dancing was followed by really elegant dinner,’ Worcester wrote. ‘The table was set with fine linen, cut glass, and solid silver, while the guests sat on chairs, and conducted themselves with due regard for the proprieties.’ Revisiting his host the next day, Worcester found the mayor and his family ‘squatting on the table, and eating rice and fish out of one dish with their fingers’. He concluded that ‘the veneer of civilization was still … a trifle thin’ (1898: 240). The full-blooded plebeian native acculturated in America was therefore superior to the elite native of mixed Spanish descent. This implied, first, that racial hybridity was degenerative, imparting a superficial civilization at best, and, secondly, that American Anglo-Saxon civilization was superior to the Old World civilization of Spain. Only recently subjugated, Muslims in the southern islands remained fiercely resistant to Spanish rule. This violence borne by colonial struggle Worcester read as the intractable racial nature of the ‘born warrior’ who disdained work and loved ‘inhuman cruelty’ (1898: 175). He advocated repression rather than civilization. Their religion must be let ‘strictly alone’, while ‘a strong hand’ must hold them ‘in check’, the ‘only sane policy’ being ‘absolute justice combined with relentless firmness’ (1898: 475). This depiction of Moros as savages contradicts Worcester’s general thesis regarding Malay racial prospect and is due to his identification with several Spanish commanders, whom he thought were not only exceptions to Spanish retrogression but were American in character and spirit. Worcester described General Arolas, governor of the Sulu islands, as ‘an outspoken republican’ who admired America (1898: 168). His ‘just, but absolutely merciless’ way of dealing with Moros had earned their respect and they called him ‘papa’ (1898: 170). Worcester then described how his party, infected by ‘the spirit of Arolas’ (1898: 178), went about their collecting task in the jungle with daredevil disregard to being surrounded at all times by imagined hostile Moros. Another man was Captain Aguado, also an exiled republican, whom Worcester opined ‘ought to have been born an American; for he seemed to have more Yankee than Spaniard in him’ (1898: 182–3). Among Worcester’s treasured collection was a cleaver presented to him by Aguado, with which a Moro had killed three soldiers in a suicidal attack.


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Worcester’s travelogue belonged to the culmination of a trend in American Orientalist portrayal of Asia as the origin of civilization. This civilization then traveled resolutely westward until it reached the New World to be reinvigorated by the rise of the Anglo-Saxon American nation as symbolized by the figure of Columbia (Schueller, 1998: 175–98). Old World nations were therefore seen as retrograde members of Western civilization that had passed on the torch of human development to the Anglo-Saxon nations. Worcester’s travelogue was part of the discourse that saw the American conquest of the Philippines as having closed the circuit of progress and returned civilization in its full glory to its Asian birthplace. Moreover, the denigration of Spanish colonialism was an American twist to liberal criticisms of Dutch colonialism made by Crawfurd and Raffles. But the twist turned on itself as Worcester later adopted Wallace’s identification with pagan noble savages against degenerate Malays. Partly because of his book, Worcester was recruited for the American colonial government. Worcester became Interior Secretary, holding the office until 1913, when Democrats came to power promising sweeping changes to American rule in favor of Filipino nationalists. Within a year of leaving office, Worcester published The Philippines, Past and Present to defend the record of Republican rule and to criticize Wilsonian Democrats for betraying American manifest destiny in the Islands. In this second book, Worcester (1930: 423) described the Moros as exemplifying ‘the highest stage of civilization which Malays have ever attained unaided’. Combining them with pagan groups, he pleaded for continued American rule to prevent them from being exploited by Christian Filipinos. The intervening years had caused Worcester to turn against the Filipino he previously evaluated in a positive light. Instead of the Christians standing as a sign of civilizing hope for all Filipinos, they now replaced Moros as the threat in the Islands. After the Filipino revolutionaries were defeated by American forces in a brutal pacification campaign, mestizo Filipino nationalists mobilized popular ‘full-blooded’ Filipino sentiment in support of Philippine independence within the framework of American imperial democracy. Thus, in Philippines, Past and Present, Worcester trenchantly criticized Filipino nationalism and denied the right or capacity of Filipinos for independence. As Interior Secretary administering land reform favoring peasant proprietors and large-scale American enterprise, Worcester found himself in the centre of acrimonious political disputes with landowning nationalists. The elites attacked him relentlessly, turning ‘full-blooded’ Filipino public opinion against him. In turn, Worcester responded vehemently with lawsuits and hardened his position (Sullivan, 1991: 95–139). Correspondingly, Worcester (1930: 673) reversed his positive view of Filipino character and wrote that it was an unknown quality, as it was repressed by ‘the mestizo element’ in the racial admixture of Spanish or Chinese blood. In contrast, Worcester painted a positive picture of Filipino tribal peoples, particularly the Mountain peoples in northern Luzon. Worcester had a direct


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hand in the establishment of colonial rule over tribal groups. Worcester’s portrayals of savagery such as headhunting were matched by descriptions of how American rule had changed customs and advanced the civilization of the groups, crediting himself and the officers directly under his charge. Worcester (1930: 434), for example, recorded his achievement with the Kalingas with pride: ‘the fighting men who were once so anxious to take my head but now make a long journey yearly in order to see me’. His direct involvement with the tribes and his disenchantment with civilized Filipinos led Worcester (1930: 505) to argue that the natives’ ‘splendid physiques and high intelligence’, their ‘truthfulness, honesty and morality’ make them worth saving from Christian Filipinos. In other words, the noble savages had to be protected from oppression by degenerate Hispanized Filipinos, a view echoing Wallace’s contrastive pair of degenerate Malay and Polynesian noble savage.

Conclusion Early European travelers saw the Islamized peoples who dominated the region as perfidious oriental Malays and the tribal peoples as noble savages. British writers in the nineteenth century, spurred by imperial rivalry, transformed the Orientalist image to a novel Medievalist convention that saw Malay social development as commensurable to the evolution of Western civilization. Wallace’s Malay Archipelago marks a watershed by bringing comparative racial anthropology to underpin the Medievalist image. Pioneering colonial statesmen inherited the image, with race and class forming its two dimensions. Framed by the lens of class familiarity, Clifford portrayed Malays as degenerate medievals and Swettenham as consisting of model Malay rajas and degenerate commoners. Distinguishing full-blooded from mestizo Filipinos, Worcester held up the plebeian former as the model medieval who showed that the civilization of all Filipinos was possible. Nationalist resurgence led Worcester to later represent the Hispanized Filipinos as degenerate medievals, from whom the pagan noble savages needed to be defended. I argued that the medieval image and its vacillation were closely correlated to colonial policy positions taken up by the authors. Whether Medievalism had a larger impact on the trajectories of colonial state formation in the two cases requires closer study. But it is no coincidence that the British and American colonial states instituted scientific ethnographic departments to study native groups so as to define the problems of colonial government (Goh, 2007). The political conflicts of colonial rule could be linked to the vacillation between images of model and degenerate medievals. In the Philippines, the conflict was between those who sought to work with Filipino nationalists to implement colonial tutelage and those who favored uncompromising American administration. Worcester’s colonial career embodied the conflict, as he reversed his initial support for Filipino nationalist collaborators to a


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hard-line stance that informed the controversial policy of reasserting American direct rule in the 1920s. In Malaya, the bone of contention was centered on political decentralization to encourage greater Malay elite participation in government in the 1920s, which Clifford strongly opposed. Therefore, in order to see the relationship between imperial culture and native policy in the colonies, the Medievalist-inflected ethnographic representations of the colonial state, rather than the metropolitan discourses of Orientalism or Ornamentalism per se, deserve closer analysis. Medievalist discourse has wider postcolonial implications if it is indeed encoded in the universalizing power of the modern state. While Medievalism provided the vacillating imagination of the native for the colonial regime of disciplinary power and the anthropological subject of racial problems, it became transfigured in the postcolonial era of nation states as the developmentalist imagination of model self-regulating citizens and the sociological problem of unproductive degenerates. Medievalism and developmentalism both involve the teleological placement of non-Western societies in the linear path of Western socioeconomic and cultural development. But developmentalism rewrites Medievalism, reversing the inscription of racial backwardness with injunction to play socioeconomic catch-up under Western tutelage, into the prescription to play socioeconomic catch-up under statist direction to prove racial fitness. It is through this discursive reversal of Medievalism that the racial and class representations of Orientalism and Ornamentalism became postcolonial legacies.

Acknowledgement I am indebted to George Steinmetz, Philip Holden, Lydia Liu, Jeffery Paige, Julia Adams and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their critical comments.

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● DANIEL P. S. GOH is assistant professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore. He obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He specializes in comparativehistorical sociology and cultural studies and is currently working on his


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book, Ethnographic Empire: Imperial Culture and Colonial State Formation in Malaya and the Philippines. Address: Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, AS1 #03–06, 11 Arts Link, Singapore 117570, Republic of Singapore. [email: [email protected]] ●


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