抄録
The main objective of this paper is to trace land administration in Perak from the late nineteenth century to the present and to clarify its salient features.
Perak is by far the most important area in terms of colonial land administration in the sense that the succeeding land policies in the Peninsula were heavily influenced by intense arguments between two groups of British officers in the area. The first group, led by Swettenham, viewed Perak as basically untouched and gave priority to inviting as many foreign settlers and planters as possible by offering them privileged land tenure, while the other group, led by Maxwell, acknowledged in principle the “customary tenure” of the Malay and took measures to incorporate them into the colonial land system.
The arguments centered upon the lease system, of land assessment revisions, a uniform land system across different regions, and other issues; but the most disputed point was whether to acknowledge “customary tenure” or not. The arguments between the two groups came to a critical stage when the Draft Perak Land Code was proposed in 1893 by Swettenham. Many people were involved in the argument and serious antagonism was observed throughout the debate. Finally, Maxwell was transferred to the Gold Coast as Governor and left Perak in 1894. Swettenham, on the other hand, took the post of Resident-General of the newly formed Federated Malay States [FMS] in 1895 and planned to propose a uniform land law to be enforced in all the states. From 1897 the states in the FMS accordingly enacted land laws, in which both the lease system advocated by Swettenham and the landholding system by summary registration in the Mukim Register abvocated by Maxwell were integrated.
The intention of colonial administrators to stabilize the Malay villages by preserving “customary” rights of peasants was, however, seriously hindered by the peasants' high mobility, which was further intensified by frequent land transfer and the resultant exodus of the villagers after the rubber boom during the 1910s. The Malay Reservations Enactment of 1913, which prohibited land transactions between Malays and non-Malays, suppressed peasant mobility by lowering the land value to almost nil.
Through the enactment of the FMS Land Code of 1926 and the National Land Code of 1965, the land law in the Peninsula has been reformed in the direction of the uniform lease system, though the respective states still maintain the final authority in land matters, and many types of land laws still survive side by side.
Despite the various arguments regarding the proposed land law in the late nineteenth century, there was one thing common to all the participants. This was a unified acknow-ledgment of state land ownership. As David S. Y. Wong has correctly asserted, the idea of state ownership of land was nothing but the product of British administration.
In the pre-colonial Malay Peninsula there were many institutions and customs that defined relationships among people. Slavery, honour and shame, religious notions, and many other types of relationship existed there. Ties to a particular plot of land, however, had never been counted seriously. The colonial land administration, on the other hand, divided the area into millions of plots of land and promoted the idea of land ownership over each of them. The main aim of this move was to shift from labor to land relationships. The land and related laws gradually played a more important role in the colonial administration. It was, therefore, natural to find many political leaders coming out of the ranks of government servants. The possibility of the emergence of intermediaries from among the landed elite is, however, the subject of future study.
