International migrants in Malaya frequently engaged in social and associational activities, often leading to the growth of what may be termed a diasporic civil society. Civil society organisations created a public space in urban areas to secure their interests and represent themselves through various activities, including social services, acts of community solidarity, policy advocacy and cultural activities. Each generation of migrants made its imprint by creating new organisations or promoting existing ones. The Bangla-speaking diaspora shared a similar historical process for space-making in Malaysia and Singapore. The previous chapter focused on Bengali place-making from the lens of political organisations and activism. This chapter explores further Bengali contributions to place-making from the vantage point of civil society, including associational and other activities. The binary processes of globalisation, that is, ‘globalization of the local’ and ‘localization of the global’, could help to articulate the role and engagement of Bengali migrants in the local and international sphere, especially since the end of WWI.

Bengali Civic Spaces within the South Asian Diaspora

During the early twentieth century, South Asian transnational communities formed different organisations under the umbrella term ‘Indian’ mainly for three reasons. First, despite different ethnic backgrounds, the Indian diasporic communities were open to forging cooperation. The Bengalis, among other diverse South Asian migrants, played a vital role in forming organisations and associations of a social and religious nature. For example, Hindu migrants disseminated the idea of reforming Hinduism in Malaya. S. N. Bardhan, a Bengali, was a founding member of the Arya Samaj Sangam, established in 1910. Later, he served as its president from 1911 to 1919. Adi Dravida Sangam, another Hindu reformist organisation, was founded in the 1920s in Singapore. S. C. Goho frequently arranged dialogues there on the Hindu religion. Apart from the religious debates, members of Hindu religious associations occasionally placed their demands before the government. For instance, delegates from the Arya Samaj, Dravida Sangam and Vivekananda Sanmarga Sangam appealed to Singapore's government to introduce an ordinance for the registration of Hindu marriage in the Straits Settlements.

Chapter 3 focuses on notarial credit. Because notaries drafted various kinds of contracts related to individuals, families, and household wealth, scholars have emphasized the exceptional access they had to a vast array of information. With such information, especially regarding creditworthiness, notaries could overcome asymmetric information, lower transaction costs, and match lenders and borrowers effectively, precluding the role of banks until the nineteenth century. Recent historiography highlights, therefore, their role as intermediaries between investors and borrowers. In rural areas, where most individuals knew each other, were related to each other, and conducted business on a daily basis with each other, this brokerage role bore another meaning. This chapter look closely at the various types of notarial contracts and their characteristics.

This introduction provides a broad overview of the literature on caravan trade and economic history of the Middle East up to the nineteenth century. It is first a survey of existing literature on caravan trade with an emphasis on the role of caravans in the creation of regional markets. It moves then to challenging the paradigm of Silk Roads and argues against the idea of a homogeneous decline of overland trade since the seventeenth century. This introduction helps in bringing back Bedouin, camels, steppe and desert as historical actors by discussing sources and scholarly debates (the relationship between nomads and the Ottoman State in particular).

Since the early 1930s, a broad acceptance of the need for social planning had been growing in Britain. Neurath naturally became involved in debates on this matter, not only with British and American scholars (C. H. Waddington and James Burnham) but with fellow Central European émigrés in the UK, Karl Mannheim and Friedrich Hayek. Neurath and Mannheim concurred on the possibility of ‘planning for freedom’, whereas Hayek feared that any socialist planning would lead inevitably to totalitarianism. Neurath took issue with this, not least in his reading of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which can be reconstructed from Neurath’s copious notes in his own copy. Neurath’s ideas of the 1920s for a socialized ‘economy in kind’ were moderated by his situation in Britain, with its democratic ‘muddle’ of the 1940s. By contextualizing Neurath’s views in relation to other prominent figures of the era, we point out what made him unique among them.

This chapter analyzes the history of marriage customs in late Roman and Byzantine law and various forms of literature. Themes include laws on the age of betrothal and marriage, the rise of the legal importance of the church marriage service, and imperial weddings attested in the works of Byzantine historians and the tenth-century Book of Ceremonies.

Bengalis migrated to British Malaya through an evolving system regulated from both the sending and receiving ends. The system underwent sporadic changes, revisions and additions, often in response to public criticism or the need for efficiency. However, the flow of emigration and demand for labourers remained largely unaltered. In the early 1920s, a fundamental alteration occurred in migration history with the introduction of passports. This system led to stricter control of mobility, and with the fashioning of a new administration in Malaya and India in the 1940s, migration became even more controlled. The Straits Settlements were dissolved in 1946; Singapore became a separate crown colony, and the Malayan Union was formed with the Unfederated and Federated Malay States. In India, British decolonisation left the subcontinent divided into India and Pakistan, which each devised specific sets of migration rules and regulations. These changes in the sending and receiving regions left marks on migration governance.

Types of Bengali Migrants

Before dealing with the theme in detail, it may be pertinent to note that, based on its characteristics and governing systems, Bengali migration can be divided broadly into bondage or systematic migration and ‘free’ migration. Convicts, indentured and kangany labourers can be placed under the first category. Non-government as well as government agencies transported such labourers through stringent systems. Those being transported like this had no choice or very little legal freedom of movement. The Bengalis who migrated willingly from the early colonial period for better opportunities in commercial ventures and the government sector can be termed ‘free’ migrants. Though they are termed ‘free’, the choices of these labourers were still quite limited at home and overseas. These migrants also had only a little freedom of movement. There was another kind of migrant—those who had to leave India or Bengal due to political persecution. Many Bengali revolutionaries moved to Malaya during the anti-British and nationalist movements in Bengal.

Convicts

From the late eighteenth century, the EIC transported convicts from British India to the Malay Archipelago. Regulation XVII of 1817 categorised the convicts as those accused of robbery, burglary, theft or any other form of open violence, who were liable to be whipped, imprisoned and transported for life.

In 2008, the American housing bubble unexpectedly burst sending property values plummeting. Thousands of American families had ceased refinancing their household loans. Their adjustable-rate mortgages far outpaced the value of their homes, causing a wave of foreclosures across the country. An estimated nine million households lost their homes because the subprime loans they had subscribed to were subject to speculation on the stock market and to predatory lending, making them incredibly toxic. In the meantime, banks and insurance companies, which had neither anticipated the bubble nor the high number of failed payments, faced huge difficulties. Real estate is not only the largest single form of wealth, it is also the most important form of collateral for borrowing.