Tastes of the Indian Ocean: Indigenous Knowledge Transfers in Colonial Singapore
In the 1848 publication of Hugh Low’s travel book, Sarawak: Its Inhabitants and Productions, Being Notes During a Residence in that Country with His Excellency Mr. Brooke, the author recorded the growing, harvesting and production techniques of sago palms and other food by Dayak tribes in Borneo, Sarawak, and other Malay islands. Botanical collectors, such as Hugh Low, focused on sago palm production since the processed food meal was a staple in Southeast Asia and China, as well as a luxury export to Europe. Botanists focused on the minute details of processing palms to encourage European colonists to enter the trade and develop plantations in the region to displace tribal farming. By creating plantations, botanists argued that British men could organize and profit from fertile land, unlike the tribes who grew only what they needed for export. This blog post tracks this transfer of knowledge and the attempts by botanists to supplant indigenous growers with European style plantations as a way to develop wealth in the British Empire, despite the ecological consequences of plantation agriculture.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, professional botanists such as Hugh Low travelled and collected among the islands of Southeast Asia with assistance from the colonial governments in Singapore and Sarawak for the purpose of obtaining economic plants and indigenous cultivation practices. The designation as scientists provided legitimacy to collectors in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but the earlier time period between 1820 and 1840 reveal a unique and vast array of people engaged in collecting, acclimatization (experimentation), and travel writing. Eighteenth century collectors were restricted in travel due to the constant threat of disease, conflicts (both European and Asian), and lack of access to remote regions of South and Southeast Asia. But the expansion of the British Empire into Sarawak, Java, and Singapore provided safe travel zones for botanists in the early half of the nineteenth century.
Hugh Low’s detailed account of the trading and agricultural practices of local people in Sarawak emphasize the economic importance of forest products to indigenous communities. But the implementation of British colonial policies benefited large plantation growers, usually Chinese or European, over small farmers. There were long standing consequences of disenfranchising and dislocating massive groups of people as is evidenced even today.
Hugh Low depended on the local administrators and local guides in Singapore and Sarawak when collecting in the Malay Archipelago. By the middle of the nineteenth century, scientific societies such as Kew and the Royal Society sent botanists to newly acquired colonies in Southeast specifically to gain local knowledge about plants which could make the colonies economically sustainable. Hugh Low is representative of this group of botanists connected to Kew that travelled in the newly acquired territory of Sarawak. Once Low arrived in Southeast Asia he formed a close friendship with James Brooke and eventually took a position in his government, which prevented him from taking over the family business in England.
While Sarawak is a small island in the Indonesia Archipelago, it provides an interesting case of colonization quite different from India, but very close to much of colonization in Island Southeast Asia. It is representative because British colonization occurred at the request of indigenous rulers who asked for British assistance with local conflicts. James Brooke, following orders from the governor of Singapore, visited Sarawak in 1838 to build relationships with the governor, Raja Muda Hassim, under the control of the Sultan of Brunei. After traveling for a year among the islands, Brooke returned to Sarawak to find the Raja dealing with an insurrection. Muda Hassim offered Brooke the governorship, an act that allowed the British to control trade on the island as long as Brooke paid a yearly fee to the Sultan of Brunei. Brooke agreed and in 1841 became the Raja of Sarawak. His family ruled this small, but economically important island until 1946, when it came under British Crown rule.[i]
While Brooke technically ruled under an indigenous Sultan, he fortified trade relations between the British and indigenous rulers in the Straits of Malacca. More importantly, Brooke provided a safe and Western friendly territory from which British visitors could stay. One of these visitors was Hugh Low. He spent extensive time in Sarawak and nearby islands recording the botanical and agricultural productions of local tribes. He based some of his knowledge on previous collections made by Thomas Oxley,[ii] who worked as senior surgeon of the Straits Settlements and on Stamford Raffles’ History of Java.[iii] Like many scientists and professionals claiming expert knowledge of the East, Low depended on previous work to build his own narrative in true Orientalist fashion. However, many of his observations of the agricultural techniques and food processing of local people on the islands came from his own observations made during his travels.
For example, Sago Palms were, and are, a staple food in various islands of the Malay Archipelago and the transfer of palms to Singapore for processing depended on indigenous labor on the islands. Once processed, sago palms were exported from Singapore to Europe, China, and India by Chinese manufacturers in Singapore. What makes the case of sago palm processing so interesting is the transfer of knowledge and the central role of tribal women in processing and export. Manufacturers in Singapore used indigenous techniques brought by indigenous women from the islands. This transfer of indigenous knowledge allowed manufacturers (primarily Chinese immigrants) to capitalize on the traditional food staple of tribes in the islands. Low’s detailed descriptions of sago palm processing and Dayak shipping techniques of the processed food reveal the deeper nature of his book beyond a simple travel narrative.
Low organized his book into chapters describing different Dayak tribes and provided details about the different agricultural techniques, plants grown, and trade each tribe engaged in, with particular emphasis on food and food processing. He differentiates between land Dayaks, sea Dayaks, and hill Dayaks each distinctly different in their trade exports and agriculture. When describing the agricultural practices of the sea Dayaks he labels the practice barbaric since the soil was so rich but the tribe only grew what was needed instead of planting a surplus to trade for luxury goods. [iv] He also deemed the hill tribe method of slash and burn agriculture primitive not because of the destruction of forests but because the tribe only used a field for one season and then allowed the land to lay fallow for several years.[v] The method took more time even though the farmers would not have to plough to renew the soil after laying fallow for so long. Low’s fixation on the improper use of land in the book highlights historian Richard Drayton’s argument that the agricultural revolution in England changed the mindset of how scientists and settlers perceived land use. According to Drayton, Englishmen believed that if the land was not being used to the fullest capacity, then the person working the land no longer had a right to it.[vi] Each tribe cultivated food and commodity plants for both personal consumption and trade, but each tribe grew different things. Low described the hill Dayaks in this way:“The Dyaks have small gardens, usually the property of women, in which they plant vegetables of different kinds, principally the ‘trong,’ brenjal [sic] of the East, and egg-plant [sic] of Europe, sugar-cane, plantains, yams, sweet potatoes, chilies, &c.”[vii]
The list of plants also included tobacco, a crop introduced by Europeans and grown for personal consumption. The notion that gardens were the sole property of the women could be a misconception by Low since women sold vegetables and goods at the market instead of men. When describing the cultivation practices of the sea Dayaks he listed the crops of rice, maize, gourds, pumpkins, and cucumbers.[viii] These plants represent earlier exchanges of foods including crops from the Americas, Africa, and the Mediterranean as well as mainland Southeast Asia (in the case of wet rice cultivation). He also observed, “cotton is grown by the Sea Dyaks [sic] sufficient in quantity for their own use, and to make cloths for exportation. Some of the same kind produced in the garden of Mr. Hentig, and which was sent to Liverpool as a sample, was found to be of superior quality.” [ix] This again provides an example of how Low collected information on local agricultural techniques and the high quality of plants grown but also how European markets could, and should, mass produce these products since local farmers did not produce in bulk. This quantification that local farmers did not understand the wealth to be gained from their plants simply because they did not cultivate on a grand scale reveals the economic basis of Low’s motivations.
It was not just Dayak tribes that Low observed on the islands but everyone who conducted agriculture, even on a very small scale. He described the sugar-cane cultivation of local Dayaks but also of Chinese immigrant workers who brought to the islands a variety of cane, which Low found vastly superior.[x] Sugar cane grew with little effort, according to Low, which meant the production of sugar rivalled British cultivation in Ceylon despite the little effort put into cultivation in Sarawak. Low also spent several pages describing the agricultural and trading practices of Milanowe settlements on the rivers of Borneo where people cultivated sago palms, Hoya and Mocha, to be sent to Singapore for manufacturing and then on to European markets. Tribes such as these used these commodities to trade for rice since cultivation of rice was limited in their area.[xi] Similarly, a tribe he labels the “Kyans” exported beeswax and camphor to Muslim traders who exported the goods and excluded European traders.[xii] Not only isolated tribes depended on imports according to Low. Malays in Sarawak depended on imports as well as the agricultural goods produced by Dayaks in the interior and Chinese gardens. Traders visiting the islands considered setting up plantations of these economic crops once the trade diminished. Low also hoped that the introduction of missionaries and conversion of the tribes would encourage them to start commercial agriculture on a large scale.[xiii] Obviously Low believed in the use of land for resource extraction which suggests he was unaware of the ecological emergencies already evident in Singapore and parts of India, or he did not think ecological devastation elsewhere was an issue locally. Land was to be used to its fullest extent for the greatest amount of profit, the view of a true economic botanist in this sense.
To conclude, Hugh Low’s book provides an interesting case study from the 1840s, a critical period in the rise of economic botany. There is a clear shift that happens by the 1840s where collecting for the sake of categorizing and understanding nature transformed into collecting plants based on their economic value and resource extraction. Government plans to expand tree farms in India bolstered imperial expansion into Island and Mainland Southeast Asia. Building materials were needed for this expansion and administrators encouraged plantation agriculture to extract revenue from the colonies by harvesting natural resources. There were ecological consequences to this expansion that would not be recognized until the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Imperial expansion also affected the engagement of indigenous groups in the network of botanical exchange. From Hugh Low’s descriptions, it is clear that local, on-the-ground individuals, whether Dayak tribespeople or British administrators, engaged in experimentation and trading of plants specimens and forest products. Historians studying the environmental history of Southeast Asia describe the importance of forest products to international trade from the earliest connections of trade routes. Low’s descriptions reveal that local tribes engaged in these same trade systems albeit on a smaller scale.
It was in the interest of Empire to seize the local and long-distance trade networks, which led eventually to exhaustion of the soil and forced many tribes into urban lifestyles in order to survive. Hugh Low and other collectors focused on the agricultural production of food and food processing to encourage colonizers to expand indigenous growing techniques for the economic benefit of the colonies. Later ecologists and conservationists argued that indigenous growing practices provided sustainable food while colonial plantations depleted the soil in a short time period. The implementation of colonial laws displaced indigenous groups and provoked old forms of agriculture and trade to diminish and eventually disappear.
About the author: Carey McCormack is a PhD candidate at the WSU Vancouver campus. Her research includes the development of colonial botany and the interaction between science, gender, race, and class in nineteenth century British Empire.
[i]Bodleian Library, Brookes Family Papers, vol. 1, Mss Pac. s90, pgs. ii, ii, vi.
[ii]Thomas Oxley published several articles in The Journal of Indian Archipelago and East Asia during the 1840s. Referenced by Low, Sarawak, 49.
[iii]Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles,History of Java, vol. 1 (London: Black, Parbury, and Allen, 1817). Referenced by Hugh Low, Sarawak: Its Inhabitants and Productions, Being Notes During a Residence in that Country with His Excellency Mr. Brooke(London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1848), 51.
[vi]Low, Sarawak, 225.
[v]Low, Sarawak, 228.
[vi]Drayton, Nature’s Government, 56.
[vii]Low, Sarawak, 233.
[viii]Low, Sarawak, 229.
[ix]Low, Sarawak, 55.
[x]Low, Sarawak, 33.
[xi]Low, Sarawak, 339.
[xii]Low, Sarawak, 323.
[xii]Low, Sarawak, 161.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, professional botanists such as Hugh Low travelled and collected among the islands of Southeast Asia with assistance from the colonial governments in Singapore and Sarawak for the purpose of obtaining economic plants and indigenous cultivation practices. The designation as scientists provided legitimacy to collectors in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but the earlier time period between 1820 and 1840 reveal a unique and vast array of people engaged in collecting, acclimatization (experimentation), and travel writing. Eighteenth century collectors were restricted in travel due to the constant threat of disease, conflicts (both European and Asian), and lack of access to remote regions of South and Southeast Asia. But the expansion of the British Empire into Sarawak, Java, and Singapore provided safe travel zones for botanists in the early half of the nineteenth century.
| Hugh Low |
While Sarawak is a small island in the Indonesia Archipelago, it provides an interesting case of colonization quite different from India, but very close to much of colonization in Island Southeast Asia. It is representative because British colonization occurred at the request of indigenous rulers who asked for British assistance with local conflicts. James Brooke, following orders from the governor of Singapore, visited Sarawak in 1838 to build relationships with the governor, Raja Muda Hassim, under the control of the Sultan of Brunei. After traveling for a year among the islands, Brooke returned to Sarawak to find the Raja dealing with an insurrection. Muda Hassim offered Brooke the governorship, an act that allowed the British to control trade on the island as long as Brooke paid a yearly fee to the Sultan of Brunei. Brooke agreed and in 1841 became the Raja of Sarawak. His family ruled this small, but economically important island until 1946, when it came under British Crown rule.[i]
| Island Map |
For example, Sago Palms were, and are, a staple food in various islands of the Malay Archipelago and the transfer of palms to Singapore for processing depended on indigenous labor on the islands. Once processed, sago palms were exported from Singapore to Europe, China, and India by Chinese manufacturers in Singapore. What makes the case of sago palm processing so interesting is the transfer of knowledge and the central role of tribal women in processing and export. Manufacturers in Singapore used indigenous techniques brought by indigenous women from the islands. This transfer of indigenous knowledge allowed manufacturers (primarily Chinese immigrants) to capitalize on the traditional food staple of tribes in the islands. Low’s detailed descriptions of sago palm processing and Dayak shipping techniques of the processed food reveal the deeper nature of his book beyond a simple travel narrative.
Low organized his book into chapters describing different Dayak tribes and provided details about the different agricultural techniques, plants grown, and trade each tribe engaged in, with particular emphasis on food and food processing. He differentiates between land Dayaks, sea Dayaks, and hill Dayaks each distinctly different in their trade exports and agriculture. When describing the agricultural practices of the sea Dayaks he labels the practice barbaric since the soil was so rich but the tribe only grew what was needed instead of planting a surplus to trade for luxury goods. [iv] He also deemed the hill tribe method of slash and burn agriculture primitive not because of the destruction of forests but because the tribe only used a field for one season and then allowed the land to lay fallow for several years.[v] The method took more time even though the farmers would not have to plough to renew the soil after laying fallow for so long. Low’s fixation on the improper use of land in the book highlights historian Richard Drayton’s argument that the agricultural revolution in England changed the mindset of how scientists and settlers perceived land use. According to Drayton, Englishmen believed that if the land was not being used to the fullest capacity, then the person working the land no longer had a right to it.[vi] Each tribe cultivated food and commodity plants for both personal consumption and trade, but each tribe grew different things. Low described the hill Dayaks in this way:“The Dyaks have small gardens, usually the property of women, in which they plant vegetables of different kinds, principally the ‘trong,’ brenjal [sic] of the East, and egg-plant [sic] of Europe, sugar-cane, plantains, yams, sweet potatoes, chilies, &c.”[vii]
The list of plants also included tobacco, a crop introduced by Europeans and grown for personal consumption. The notion that gardens were the sole property of the women could be a misconception by Low since women sold vegetables and goods at the market instead of men. When describing the cultivation practices of the sea Dayaks he listed the crops of rice, maize, gourds, pumpkins, and cucumbers.[viii] These plants represent earlier exchanges of foods including crops from the Americas, Africa, and the Mediterranean as well as mainland Southeast Asia (in the case of wet rice cultivation). He also observed, “cotton is grown by the Sea Dyaks [sic] sufficient in quantity for their own use, and to make cloths for exportation. Some of the same kind produced in the garden of Mr. Hentig, and which was sent to Liverpool as a sample, was found to be of superior quality.” [ix] This again provides an example of how Low collected information on local agricultural techniques and the high quality of plants grown but also how European markets could, and should, mass produce these products since local farmers did not produce in bulk. This quantification that local farmers did not understand the wealth to be gained from their plants simply because they did not cultivate on a grand scale reveals the economic basis of Low’s motivations.
It was not just Dayak tribes that Low observed on the islands but everyone who conducted agriculture, even on a very small scale. He described the sugar-cane cultivation of local Dayaks but also of Chinese immigrant workers who brought to the islands a variety of cane, which Low found vastly superior.[x] Sugar cane grew with little effort, according to Low, which meant the production of sugar rivalled British cultivation in Ceylon despite the little effort put into cultivation in Sarawak. Low also spent several pages describing the agricultural and trading practices of Milanowe settlements on the rivers of Borneo where people cultivated sago palms, Hoya and Mocha, to be sent to Singapore for manufacturing and then on to European markets. Tribes such as these used these commodities to trade for rice since cultivation of rice was limited in their area.[xi] Similarly, a tribe he labels the “Kyans” exported beeswax and camphor to Muslim traders who exported the goods and excluded European traders.[xii] Not only isolated tribes depended on imports according to Low. Malays in Sarawak depended on imports as well as the agricultural goods produced by Dayaks in the interior and Chinese gardens. Traders visiting the islands considered setting up plantations of these economic crops once the trade diminished. Low also hoped that the introduction of missionaries and conversion of the tribes would encourage them to start commercial agriculture on a large scale.[xiii] Obviously Low believed in the use of land for resource extraction which suggests he was unaware of the ecological emergencies already evident in Singapore and parts of India, or he did not think ecological devastation elsewhere was an issue locally. Land was to be used to its fullest extent for the greatest amount of profit, the view of a true economic botanist in this sense.
To conclude, Hugh Low’s book provides an interesting case study from the 1840s, a critical period in the rise of economic botany. There is a clear shift that happens by the 1840s where collecting for the sake of categorizing and understanding nature transformed into collecting plants based on their economic value and resource extraction. Government plans to expand tree farms in India bolstered imperial expansion into Island and Mainland Southeast Asia. Building materials were needed for this expansion and administrators encouraged plantation agriculture to extract revenue from the colonies by harvesting natural resources. There were ecological consequences to this expansion that would not be recognized until the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Imperial expansion also affected the engagement of indigenous groups in the network of botanical exchange. From Hugh Low’s descriptions, it is clear that local, on-the-ground individuals, whether Dayak tribespeople or British administrators, engaged in experimentation and trading of plants specimens and forest products. Historians studying the environmental history of Southeast Asia describe the importance of forest products to international trade from the earliest connections of trade routes. Low’s descriptions reveal that local tribes engaged in these same trade systems albeit on a smaller scale.
It was in the interest of Empire to seize the local and long-distance trade networks, which led eventually to exhaustion of the soil and forced many tribes into urban lifestyles in order to survive. Hugh Low and other collectors focused on the agricultural production of food and food processing to encourage colonizers to expand indigenous growing techniques for the economic benefit of the colonies. Later ecologists and conservationists argued that indigenous growing practices provided sustainable food while colonial plantations depleted the soil in a short time period. The implementation of colonial laws displaced indigenous groups and provoked old forms of agriculture and trade to diminish and eventually disappear.
About the author: Carey McCormack is a PhD candidate at the WSU Vancouver campus. Her research includes the development of colonial botany and the interaction between science, gender, race, and class in nineteenth century British Empire.
[i]Bodleian Library, Brookes Family Papers, vol. 1, Mss Pac. s90, pgs. ii, ii, vi.
[ii]Thomas Oxley published several articles in The Journal of Indian Archipelago and East Asia during the 1840s. Referenced by Low, Sarawak, 49.
[iii]Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles,History of Java, vol. 1 (London: Black, Parbury, and Allen, 1817). Referenced by Hugh Low, Sarawak: Its Inhabitants and Productions, Being Notes During a Residence in that Country with His Excellency Mr. Brooke(London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1848), 51.
[vi]Low, Sarawak, 225.
[v]Low, Sarawak, 228.
[vi]Drayton, Nature’s Government, 56.
[vii]Low, Sarawak, 233.
[viii]Low, Sarawak, 229.
[ix]Low, Sarawak, 55.
[x]Low, Sarawak, 33.
[xi]Low, Sarawak, 339.
[xii]Low, Sarawak, 323.
[xii]Low, Sarawak, 161.
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