Early Trade and the Malay Peninsul
How Commercial Effects Led to the Formation of Modern States
The Malayan peninsula had three main advantages that enabled it to become part of the global trading system for more than a thousand years.
International trade involving the Malay peninsula, now part of Malaysia, has certainly been active for a thousand years. It is part of a much older trading world which saw cloves transported from the remote Indonesian islands to the Syrian desert, where they have found wrapped within mummified bodies, many centuries BCE.
The Malay peninsula had three distinct advantages in becoming part of this hemispherical trading system. The first is the geographical location, which joins together Indian and Chinese spheres of maritime influence and has been a convenient place for traders and sailors to wait out unfavourable monsoon winds. The second is the presence of the many jungle goods which made such popular trade goods – rhinoceros horn, camphor, resins and rattan are all available for those who dared to brave the interior of the islands. The Malay people themselves, who tended to settle only on coastal and riverine sites where they could establish trading posts supplemented by a little agriculture, rarely entered the interior of their lands. The interior was regarded not just as dangerous to the body but dangerous to the soul as well; people carried charms and amulets to ward off tigers, snakes and evil spirits. It was peoples such as the Negritos, who had occupied the interior of the peninsula for perhaps 10,000 years who were responsible for gathering the jungle goods. They exchanged these treasures with the Malays for salt and iron, to which the jungle-dwellers had no other access. The third advantage that the peninsula had was to be part of the heavily mineralized belt of land which stretches down from Yunnan in China to Belitung and Bangka in what is now Indonesia. The two main metals available in this belt in Malay were gold and tin. It was gold that gave the region its ancient name of the Golden Khersonese, as it was known to the Greeks. Tin was not so immediately useful until the advent of the American Civil War (1861-5); during the war, the demand for preserved food and especially meat increased enormously. It was found that tin cans were the best way for preserving meat and so the tin mines of Malaya came under extensive exploitation. The tin mines are an important reason why so many Chinese migrated to the region during the British colonial period.
Trade helped in the creation and maintenance of the trading posts and towns of Malaya and the formation of the states that represented federations of such settlements. Trade also attracted the attention of outside interests and led to the peninsula becoming a battleground for foreign powers.
