The builders
J. M. Gullick’s “The Builders” (2012) reconstructs the emergence of a building industry in the western Malay states—focused on Selangor and Kuala Lumpur—between 1875 and 1914, arguing that no such industry existed before colonial intervention and that it was created in response to the administrative, commercial, and demographic pressures of the tin boom. The article traces the transition from traditional cooperative Malay housebuilding through a transitional phase of imported expertise and new materials to a more professionalized industry capable of producing large-scale public and commercial structures.
Summary
Gullick begins by establishing the baseline: pre-colonial Malay building was a craft embedded in village reciprocity, not a profession. Houses were sized by the number of posts (tiang), joined without nails using mortise-and-wedge joints, and erected through communal mobilization. Even the ruling class’s larger residences were essentially scaled-up versions of the village model, requiring the temporary conscription of labour rather than the employment of specialists. When colonial administrators arrived in the mid-1870s, they had no building industry to draw upon. Swettenham’s first residence at Bandar Langat was a leaking stockade; Birch had to import house-builders from Province Wellesley because, in his words, “it is impossible to get Perak Malays to work” on the required scale (pp. 80–82).
The article then follows the industry’s maturation through three broad phases. The first, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, saw the establishment of rudimentary Public Works Departments staffed by surveyors and draughtsmen transferred from the Straits Settlements, and the first use of the “transitional Malay house” model—brick pillars supporting a timber upper storey—which required Chinese masons and imported bricks. The second phase, driven by the tin price rise of 1879 and the relocation of the Selangor capital to Kuala Lumpur in 1880, produced a building boom in which the city was rebuilt street by street in brick and tile, brick kilns multiplied, and a new class of contractors emerged—Ceylonese planters like D. G. Gordon who managed large forces of Chinese and Malay labourers on railway earthworks. The third phase, from the mid-1880s onward, was marked by the introduction of Neo-Saracenic architecture (beginning with the Bangunan Sultan Abdul Samad, 1897), the establishment of a PWD factory with a 40-hp steam engine to process timber and metal, and the increasing use of imported iron, steel, and cement in bridges, waterworks, and commercial buildings (pp. 85–91).
Throughout, Gullick draws on a dense base of primary sources—Selangor Secretariat Files, Annual Reports, the Selangor Journal, personal diaries of Swettenham, Douglas, Birch, and Low, and the Singapore and Straits Directory—to reconstruct not just what was built but who built it, how they were organized, and what materials and techniques they employed. The article is as much a social history of the people involved (contractors, surveyors, draughtsmen, Chinese carpenters, Malay carpenters) as it is an architectural or economic history.
Key Findings
- The 4 January 1881 fire in Kuala Lumpur left 500 people homeless and caused an estimated $100,000 in damage, catalysing the decision to rebuild the town’s core in brick and tile (p. 86).
- Houses built in Kuala Lumpur: 234 (1884), 218 (1885), 159 (1886), 180 (1888); brick kilns in Selangor rose from 15 to 33 and lime kilns from 8 to 16 between 1886 and 1888 (pp. 86–87).
- The price of hardwood timber “balks” in Selangor rose from $1.90 (1887) to $4.50 (1888) despite the opening of a new sawmill, signalling acute resource pressure (p. 87).
- The Connaught Bridge (1890) carried the railway across the Klang River on cast iron cylinders driven approximately 60 feet to bedrock; its metal components were fabricated at Stockton-on-Tees and assembled by Howarth Erskine (p. 90).
- The PWD factory, established to supply materials for the Bangunan Sultan Abdul Samad (1897), was powered by a 40-hp steam engine driving a sawmill and metal-cutting machines, and included a brickworks managed by Gordon & Co. (p. 90).
- By 1913, J. A. Russell paid more than $1.5 million for Yau Tet Shin’s 300-house “new town” estate in Ipoh, illustrating the scale of property investment that the building industry had made possible (p. 94).
Conclusion
Gullick’s definitive takeaway is that the building industry in the western Malay states was not an organic outgrowth of local economic development but an institution created by the colonial state and the tin economy, evolving from improvised mobilization of traditional skills into a professionalized sector with its own supply chains, regulatory frameworks (the Sanitary Board, established 1890), and architectural vocabulary. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 abruptly interrupted this trajectory, and the post-war industry that re-emerged was organized along different lines, making 1914 a natural terminus for the story of the “builders” as Gullick has reconstructed them.
Context
- Primary archival collections: Selangor Secretariat Files (SSF), Selangor Annual Reports, Selangor Journal (1892–97), Straits Settlements despatches to the Colonial Office (SSD), Perak Commission of Enquiry papers (CO 273/86–88), and the unpublished diaries of William Bloomfield Douglas and James Innes, the Kuala Langat Collector (Bodleian Library, Rhodes House, Oxford).
- Historiographical contribution: The article extends Gullick’s long-standing project of reconstructing the material and economic history of colonial Selangor (building on his monographs on Kuala Lumpur and Selangor) by filling a gap in the literature on the physical infrastructure of the colonial state. It connects architectural history, labour history, and administrative history in a way that neither the architectural literature nor the economic history of the tin industry had previously achieved for this period and region.