The economy of colonial Malaya: A rejoinder to the book review by Viswanathan Selvaratnam in Kajian Malaysia 40(2) 2022: 269–278.
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Abstract
A refutation of Viswanathan Selvaratnam’s problematic reading of my monograph, The Economy of Colonial Malaya: Administrators versus Capitalists, which Routledge published in 2018 as part of its Modern History of Asia series, is required here due to his harsh interrogation of my choice of historical, archival-based methodology of late 19th- and early 20th-century colonial sources. Selvaratnam confronts the entirety of the book – from its historical scope and analysis, the questions it seeks to address, and the very reason for the study’s existence in the first place.
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