Mr Derek Mackay has produced a magisterial account of the Service replete with
appendices, thorough notes and a useful index. It should appeal to two different
readerships: people with a general interest in the Far East, particularly of course those
who lived and worked there, and a more specialised readership who study the economic
background to the British Empire. The latter will be absorbed by the factual information
and the abundant detailed statistics. The former will certainly be interested in the more
human side of the story.
The book has two intertwined themes: the methods used by the colonial
administration to raise revenue and the changing attitude to the trade in opium. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as our influence in the Straits Settlements and the
Malay States expanded revenue was raised by the grant of monopolies to syndicates of
local merchants to trade in and supply opium chandu (opium prepared for smoking),
liquor, and other delights. Government got its revenue, the syndicates made a good
profit, and no one thought it wrong to trade in opium. But by the turn of the century
reform was in the air. The opium trade, like the slave trade before it, was being
condemned as immoral and by 1910 the old system of monopolies had been swept away
and a Government Monopolies Department - the immediate predecessor of the Malayan
Customs Service - had taken over the control of the opium/chandu market and the
implementation of an increasing number of customs and excise regulations. The object
was for Government to directly control and gradually reduce the importation,
manufacture, sale and consumption of opium. Of course the illegal trade continued side
by side with the official government trade but by 1942 opium smokers were licensed,
their rations were reduced and there had been a sensible decline in opium smoking.
In 1946 reform triumphed and it became illegal to consume or possess opium or
chandu. This at a time when the consumption of chandu had increased during the
Japanese occupation and all customs records on illegal importation of opium had been lost. The entirely predictable result was a vast increase in smuggling and the illegal
manufacture of chandu. The Malayan Customs Service had considerable success in its
preventive work but however many battles it won it could not win the war.
The recruitment of a permanent staff of European officers for the Service did not
begin until a decade or so before the war and they led varied and interesting lives. In
Singapore work tended to be specialised - court work perhaps or full time preventive
work combating smugglers and collating intelligence on big operators. In Malaya work
was usually more varied. An officer and his small staff might be responsible for
supervising a small port, keeping any eye on the local distillery, supervising licensed
premises and organising preventive work along a stretch of coast - with occasional seagoing
duties - and a large rural area. Prior to 1946 he would also have managed the local
chandu monopoly.
Derek Mackay has covered every aspect of his former Service's work and has surely
produced the definitive work on an important and neglected aspect of Malaysian history.
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