Homage to Shaharil Talib and His Question of Divide in Malay Society: Merchants, Weavers and Specialists as the ‘Middle-Class’ of an Old Malay World

Abstract

This chapter tries to bring to live Shaharil’s legacy in sharpening the meaning of social class, and its features in local society within the colonial state. It uses colonial records but with a decolonizing framework to examine handloom weavers in Terengganu, Kelantan and Pahang. In doing so, it pays homage to Shaharil’s works in using colonial records to locate the existence of classes of people who reside within the interstices of the all-powerful Raja and the down-trodden Rakyat. The middle-class merchants, weavers and other specialists had carved up a vibrant space of globally interconnected and multifaceted links between production, commodities and markets, which crumbled by the twentieth century from the onslaught of new competing economic systems. Colonial policies were paternalistic in nature, which ultimately prioritized the interests of the Empire. While the handloom industry did not survive the coming of industrial capitalism, a window to its past must acknowledge that a form of creeping industrialization was definitive of its character, while an urban-based ‘middle-class’ of an old Malay world, was its lifeblood.