Colonial Land Law, Property Rights and Malay Peasant Inequalities: Ungku Aziz on Land Subdivision and its Consequences

Abstract

Colonial laws and policies radically transformed access to land in the Malay peasant economy. Colonial law recognized private property rights, making land a commodity to be owned, bought and sold. This undermined shifting agriculture and created conditions for landlordism and tenancy. When used as credit collateral, land could be lost through loan default. While large tracts of land were secured by some members of the pre-colonial ruling class, peasant differentiation was mainly due to colonialism. Increases in land cultivation no longer simply reflected demographic growth as lawful cultivation required legally alienated land and the best available land was alienated to big, especially British, plantation interests. The result of Islamic inheritance law and customary Malay inheritance practices in this context was more joint ownership and subdivision of landholdings while concentration of land-ownership led to tenancy and sharecropping arrangements. Hence, landlordism, land hunger and landlessness were primarily consequences of colonialism. All this has had complex implications for Malay peasant agricultural investments and farm viability, resulting in abandonment of peasant land cultivation of unviable farms in recent decades. While both colonial and post-colonial authorities have wanted to preserve a yeoman peasantry to ensure political stability, they did not act decisively to resist undermining the Malay peasantry. can look up to as examples of exemplary intellectual leadership, as well as, academic scholarship.