Most early colonial Bengali migrants travelled and worked under contract and experienced poor health, insecurity and desperation. Nevertheless, with the end of the indenture system, the government gradually introduced regulations to secure migrants’ welfare and interests. British Malaya offered new and extensive work opportunities in different plantations and mines, including rubber and tin mines. Though most workers were Chinese and Tamils, many came from northern India and Bengal. The ethnic identity of Bengali professionals and workers was often conflated with that of non-Bengalis, and their vocations were not officially recorded. However, piecemeal sources can help us to locate many Bengali professionals. This chapter examines various formal and informal occupations that Bengalis engaged in, shedding light on their vibrant presence in colonial and postcolonial Malaya.

At the Construction Site and Cattle Farm

The term ‘coolie’ is widespread in British colonial history in Asia. It broadly refers to hardworking labourers who performed menial jobs; however, the definition of coolie differs according to different perspectives and circumstances. I had used this term consciously and in a non-diminishing manner to reflect the professional category of labourers in colonial registers when they migrated as workers to British Malaya and other colonies. South Asian and Chinese coolies worked in construction sites and rubber estates in the Straits Settlements. Most South Asian coolies were Tamils, and most female coolies were ‘passive victims’ in the migration process and lived in the plantations. Alongside other South Asians, Bengali coolies worked in different sectors, including roads and railways, harbours and cattle farms. The Singapore Governor fully implemented the Indian Immigrants’ Protection Act in order to protect the well-being of labourers, in particular those who came from India and Bengal. L. H. Clayton, the Chairman of the Immigration Committee in Malaya, made provisions for social amenities for labourers and coolies. He showed a keen interest in employing Bengali coolies. However, he noted that the recruitment of Bengali coolies rested on the cooperation of the Indian government. I. R. Belilios (1846–1910), a cattle trader, recruited mostly Bengali5 clerks and coolies for his farm business, and their number significantly increased in the 1890s. Aristarchus Moses, an Armenian Jewish merchant, migrated from Calcutta to Singapore in 1820 and established a trading farm in 1840. Like Belilios, Moses employed Bengalis as stevedores and keepers at his house and warehouses.

This chapter argues that the Americanisation of theme or content in Irish literature became more pervasive from about the 1890s onwards. Prior to that the reluctant Americanisation of Irish authors had been well underway, facilitated by cash-rich tours of the continent and a certain transatlantic reciprocity of intellectual influence. Representations of ‘American wakes’, and the ‘returned Yank’ are common in Irish popular culture, and the chapter probes these for significance. There are tantalising glimpses of Irish authors at the ‘frontier’, and perhaps the most enduring influence of the Irish was their influence on one of the most famous product of America itself – the very mythology of the western frontier, which was produced by Irish authors in some cases. This helps to show how the mythos of the West converges in both Irish and American culture, and the ways in which they may have been dialogically produced.

This chapter critically examines the long-debated issue of Turkey’s state security and survival discourse through the lens of the securitisation logic of protection in order to unpack how the AKP government has used an expansive definition of security threat to allow for the suppression of the basic rights of dissenters by invoking the need to protect the state. The first section presents an historical account of the discourse on Turkey’s primary referent object of security – state survival (beka sorunu). The second section describes the Turkish state’s current security flagging of refugees as ‘risky outsiders’ and of those purged as ‘dangerous insiders’. The last section examines state authorisation of various auxiliary armed security agents and forces. I argue that in lieu of protecting its citizens, the AKP’s authoritarian securitisation state protects the state, the discursive ‘nation,’ and the security apparatus, a practice it legitimizes via a discourse of terrorism insecurity.

During the early twentieth century, Rabindranath Tagore sought to spread his intellectual ideas in a fight against a scientific racist ideology which presented non-White or non-European individuals as downtrodden and in need of European colonialism to civilize them. Tagore was born in 1861 into a prominent Bengali Brahmin family as the youngest of thirteen children. His family was extremely wealthy, mainly due to the success of his grandfather Dwarkanath who had amassed a fortune through his firm, Carr, Tagore and Co. Dwarkanath had earned a great deal of respect from the British for his business accomplishments. From an early age, Tagore was an avid reader. Heavily influenced by the Upanishads, he was inspired to become a writer himself. In his works, Tagore set out to find unity and “a stability of belief and moral principal to give meaning and order to everything he did.”1 He looked for harmony in all things while paying attention to the deep religious beliefs of ancient India. Tagore believed the “unity of God and his creation was the unity of a creative personality.”2 He expressed his creative passions by writing poetry that had strong spiritual messages. His writings referred heavily to the landscape of eastern India where he described the flowers, forests, birds, and the sacred Ganges River. Many of Tagore's poems created a sense of nostalgia. In one of his poems, titled Shah Jahan, named after the Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal, Tagore lamented the end of the Mughal Empire, writing, “You are gone now emperor – Your empire has dissolved like a dream, Your throne is shattered, Your armies, whose marching shook the earth, Today have no more weight than the windblown dust on the Delhi road.”3 Tagore believed that the British Raj neglected the histories of the great Indian empires within their schools for Indian pupils. He wanted Indians to be proud of their ancestry, and sought to reassert their cultural brilliance both at home and abroad.

Women’s agency was contingent on the multiple parties concerned with it, and they formed its gendered understandings and practices. This chapter traces those understandings and practices in the courtroom, where Taiwanese women in premarital sexual relationships expressed their interests. From the early 1920s, more women made their voices heard in civil cases on marital affairs and divorce, which revealed changing attitudes toward marriage and premarital sexual relationships among themselves, their partners and family members, and Japanese judges. The judges joined the male litigants in highlighting the formal state of marriage and wifehood against women’s informal personal status and their sexual histories. Meanwhile, Taiwanese women continued to react against the discriminatory treatment of premarital sexual relationships and eventually won the more flexible treatment of premarital relationships as if they were formal marriages in the mid-1930s. However, this result was achieved only when those women agreed to be submissive to their male partners or otherwise considered promiscuous. Changing the direction of their sexual, marital, and family lives took on a gender-specific tone.

The final published debate in which Neurath participated was with Horace Kallen, founding member of the New School in New York. This discussion with manifold cultural dimensions was a fitting swansong for Neurath, summarizing key themes of his thought and highlighting essential issues of his complex and contentious legacy. Kallen suspected Neurath’s drive for ‘Unity of Science’ as harbouring the danger of totalitarianism, but Neurath defended the pluralism of his approach while accepting Kallen’s proposed term of ‘orchestration’ instead of ‘unity’ for the sciences. Neurath felt rather neglected for his scholarly achievements at the end of his life, but these now become increasingly more relevant.

The two worlds of Bengal and Malaya were connected through language, religion, maritime trade and colonial administration. In addition to being a trade route, the Bay of Bengal carried flows of migrants, information, ideas, cultural practices, pilgrims and soldiers over the centuries. However, this tie between the two worlds became more direct and extensive as British bureaucratic control spread over the Malay Peninsula from Calcutta, creating opportunities in various capacities for the Bengalis. By exploring the cultural contexts of migration, and the routes and nodal points of bonding with the Malay world, this chapter examines the administrative web that cemented existing flows of people, commodities and cultural practices from Bengal.

Linguistic and Cultural Links

The linguistic connection between Bengal and Malaya dates back to the early Christian era. In the Malay Archipelago and mainland Southeast Asia, Austroasiatic languages are widely spoken, which are also used throughout some parts of India, Bangladesh, Nepal and the southern borders of China. Hindu and Buddhist preachers from the Indian subcontinent, including Bengal, spread their beliefs in Southeast Asia in Sanskrit and Pali, leading to Indian linguistic influences in the region. The influence of Bangla, in particular, can be seen through the use of a pre-Nāgarī script. Srivijaya, a Buddhist thalassocratic empire based on the island of Sumatra, also had religious, cultural and trade links with the Buddhist Pala dynasty of Bengal.

The Malay language has borrowed many Sanskrit words. The Bangla script and the Sanskrit language are found in the Sejarah Melayu (Figure 1.1). Lanman suggests that Sanskrit influenced not only the Malay vocabulary but also ideas. About 45 per cent of the total Bangla lexicon is composed of naturally modified Sanskrit words and corrupted forms of Sanskrit. Similarly, there are many Sanskrit loanwords in the Bahasa Melayu. Although Bangla belongs to the Indo-European languages family, while Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian/Austronesian family, many common Sanskrit loanwords can be found in classic Malay and Bangla. Both languages have borrowed a good number of standard Arabic and Persian words (Tables 1.1 and 1.2).

One of the earliest references to Bengal in Malay texts is in Raja Culan's Misa Melayu (The Mass of Malay), dating back to the second half of the eighteenth century. It mentions that a British captain had come from Bengal.

This chapter explores Schopenhauer’s views of the political systems in North America, Europe, and China. Schopenhauer understood the United States as a modern republic geared toward maximum individual freedom. He also took note of its high levels of interpersonal violence. Importantly, he repeatedly returned to US slavery as the most egregious example of institutionalized exploitation and brutality. In his treatment of the United States, he then connected republicanism to slavery and concluded that they were tightly associated. Schopenhauer’s argument against American republicanism does not, however, suggest that he endorsed traditional European monarchies. Against both North America and Europe, Schopenhauer instead held up the example of China as an advanced state that was hierarchical and imperial and yet resolutely nontheist. For Schopenhauer, China combined political stability and peacefulness with a philosophically sound atheism and thus demonstrated the realization of his political and his philosophical ideals.