The Malay nobat is the only court ensemble found in the Islamicate world that is still performed within its original context to serve political rulers. It symbolises power and sovereignty, and no ruler who possesses a nobat is legitimately installed unless he is dinobatkan (drummed) to its sound. Guarded as part of court regalia, the nobat is revered for its perceived mystical powers and ability to consolidate and maintain socialpolitical order (Andaya 2011). Like many musical traditions, the nobat institution is a product of a long process of encounters, shaped by interactions within and across imagined boundaries; and developed through the accommodation of different cultures and beliefs. Who brought the nobat to the Malay world and why? How was the new musical culture adopted and indigenised? What crucial role did the nobat play in the development of Malay political and social systems? Did the nobat go through a critical transition as a result of western colonisation? By setting up a dialogue between indigenous and western sources, this study situates the nobat in a wider, connected historical milieu (Subrahmanyam 2005), to find a common, multi-lateral historical thread contextualised within the Malay notion of sovereignty (Milner 1982, 2008) and communal identity (Stokes 1997). It explores the development of the nobat with reference to important themes in Malay historiography which include pre- and Islamic influences, connections with South Asia and the Middle East, political rivalry and intrigues, interregional migration, ethnicity and foreign intervention. The first chapter will explain the objectives and research questions regarding the study. Chapter Two looks back at the early Islamicate military/ceremonial band and its relations to the Malay nobat. The third chapter will introduce the current nobat ensembles, including their instruments and music. By studying the Hikayat Patani, Chapter Four explores the importance of the ensemble in a Malay sultanate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chapter Five takes a look at another Malay court literature, the Adat Aceh and accounts of European encounters with the nobat in the seventeenth century. Chapter Six will discuss the impact British colonisation had on the nobat and the final chapter summarises the thesis with a look at the development of the ensemble and its possible future.

This study traces the social history of the European community, most or whose members were of British nationality, in the Federated Malay States of Selangor, Perak, Negri Sembilan, and Pahang. It covers the period from about 1880, a few years after the inception of British rule in the Malay States, to the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. During the 1880s and 1890s the European population, consisting mainly of government servants, grew steadily, and Europeans adapted to life in the Malay States by founding social clubs and building a few small hill stations. After about 1900, as Europeans gained a larger share of the export economy, the number of Europeans in non-government activities such as planting and commerce increased markedly. As a result of the economic prosperity which occurred during the decade before the First World War, living conditions improved, the standard of living to which all Europeans believed they must adhere rose, and government servants sought salary increases in order to maintain both their standing in the European community and their prestige in Asian eyes. During these years there was also considerable tension in European relations with Asians. During the interwar years there were great fluctuations in economic prosperity. Because they were seen as a threat to British prestige unemployed Europeans were removed from Malaya by the government. Various aspects of European life during the interwar years, such as the role of clubs, the structure of the European community, the position of women within the community, the creation of two large hill stations, and relations with Asians, including Asian participation in European social activities, are described in this study. The final chapter looks at relations between European men and Asian mistresses and prostitutes and how concubinage and prostitution changed between the early 1900s and the interwar years.

The Malayan Emergency is often considered the defining paradigm for a successful counter-insurgency campaign. The effective collection and management of intelligence by Special Branch dominates this paradigm. However, the intelligence architecture during Emergency was much more complicated than the simple Special Branch-Army nexus upon which existing studies focus. Other components of the intelligence included the Malayan Security Service (MSS), Security Intelligence Far East (SIFE), the Joint Intelligence Committee / Far East (JIC/FE), the Royal Air Force (RAF), the Army, and the mainstream police. Each component adapted to the challenge of insurgency in different ways – the civilian elements faring far worse than the military. Britain struggled to adapt to the post-war intelligence challenges in the Far East. Key intelligence components and capabilities were constituted in haste with overlapping and ambiguous remits. Consequently, there was bitter infighting at a number of levels, particularly between the various civilian intelligence agencies. In contrast, the Army and RAF demonstrated an instinctive ability to work in a ‘joint’ environment from the very beginning of the Emergency. In particular, the RAF took a leading role in creating a joint theatre-level intelligence apparatus which included establishment of a Joint Operations Room in Kuala Lumpur and the Joint Intelligence Photographic Intelligence Committee / Far East. However, the military were unable to provide the comprehensive human intelligence or strategic leadership necessary to make the broader apparatus effective. This could only come once the apparatus led by the civil agencies – chiefly the uniformed police as well as Special Branch – had learnt to adapt to the demands of waging a counter-insurgency campaign. Given that the British intelligence organisations had learnt to function in a joint manner during the Second World War, it is remarkable how much had apparently been forgotten in the three years preceding the outbreak of the Communist 1 AIR 20/7777, Report on the Emergency in Malaya, from April 1950 to November 1951, by Sir Harold Briggs. insurgency in Malaya and how long it took to create an effective method of coordinating intelligence during subsequent Emergency.

This thesis proposes a new perspective on Malaysian Chinese studies by exploring issues of identity formation refracted through the lens of contestations of war memory, communal history and state-sponsored national history. In multiethnic Malaysia, despite persistent nation-building programs towards inculcating a shared Malaysian national identity, the question as to whether the Chinese are foremost Chinese or Malaysian remains at the heart of Malaysian socio-political debates. Existing scholarship on the Malaysian Chinese is often framed within post-independent development discourses, inevitably juxtaposing the Chinese minority condition against Malay political and cultural supremacy. Similarly, explorations of war memory and history echo familiar Malay-Chinese, dominant-marginalised or national-communal binary tropes. This thesis reveals that prevailing contestations of memory and history are, at their core, struggles for cultural inclusion and belonging. It further maps the overlapping intersections between individual (personal/familial), communal and official histories in the shaping of Malaysian Chinese identities. In tracing the historical trajectory of this community from migrants to its current status as ‘not-quite-citizens,’ the thesis references a longue durée perspective to expose the motif of Otherness embedded within Chinese experience. The distinctiveness of the Japanese occupation of British Malaya between 1941-1945 is prioritised as a historical watershed which compounded the Chinese as a distinct and separate Other. This historical period has also perpetuated simplifying myths of Malay collaboration and Chinese victimhood; these continue to cast their shadows over interethnic relations and influence Chinese representations of self within Malaysian society. In the interstices between Malay-centric national history and marginalised Chinese war memory lie war memory silences. These silences reveal that obfuscation of Malaysia’s wartime past is not only the purview of the state; Chinese complicity is evident in memory-work which selectively (mis)remembers, rejects and rehabilitates war memory. In excavating these silences, the hitherto unexplored issue of intergenerational memory transmission is addressed to discern how reverberations of the wartime past may colour Chinese self-image in the present. The thesis further demonstrates that the marginalisation of Chinese war memory from official historiography complicates the ongoing project of reconciling the Malaysian Chinese to a Malay-dominated nationalist dogma.