The origin of weaving centres in the Malay Peninsula
Maznah Mohamed’s 1995 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society traces the origins of the Malay Peninsula’s weaving centres—concentrated on the east coast at Petani, Kelantan, Terengganu, and Pahang—through four successive phases of international trade, from the first-century Silk Road to the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution. Her overarching thesis is that these centres were not indigenous agricultural by-products but the direct product of the Peninsula’s strategic position along maritime routes linking China, India, and the West, where imported raw materials (silk and cotton) met local weaving skills, royal patronage, and concentrated populations to generate a commercial textile industry.
Summary
Mohamed structures her argument around the premise that weaving in the Malay Peninsula was fundamentally an import-dependent craft. Unlike China or India, where raw materials were grown locally, the Peninsula’s weavers relied on silk from China and cotton from India, Annam, Java, and the Middle East. This dependency meant that weaving could only flourish where trade was active—namely, coastal ports. The article therefore reads the history of textile production as a subset of the history of maritime commerce, with each shift in the global trading order (Roman demand for silk, the rise of Srivijaya and Melaka, European East India Company activity, and British industrialisation) producing a corresponding transformation in local weaving.
The most analytically rich section concerns the mid-nineteenth-century “transitional phase,” when the collapse of Indian handloom exports created a market vacuum that English machine-made cloth could not immediately fill due to consumer preferences for durability and specific patterns. Mohamed argues this gap, combined with the new availability of cheap English cotton twist (spun yarn) and the peak of Chinese raw silk exports, created the conditions for a genuine boom in local handloom production, particularly in Kelantan and Terengganu. She supports this with trade statistics showing that the eastern states were the largest importers of cotton twist into the Peninsula and that Malay piece-goods constituted a growing share of Singapore’s imports.
The final section addresses the geographic puzzle of why weaving centres clustered on the east coast rather than the west. Mohamed identifies a confluence of factors: the east coast’s position within a continuous chain of Islamic trading ports stretching from Champa through the Peninsula to Sulawesi and Aceh; the migration of Bugis weavers to Pahang after the Dutch capture of Makassar in 1669; Cham migration bringing textile knowledge from Cochin China; and the demographic concentration of the northeastern states, which provided both labour and market depth for commodity production.
Key Findings
- In 1828, Indian piece-goods exported from Singapore to the Peninsula exceeded English piece-goods by a ratio of 2.37:1; by 1865–66 this had reversed to 0.003:1, with English piece-goods valued at 929,015 Spanish dollars against only 3,215 for Indian (p. 102, Table 1).
- In 1836, the eastern Malay states imported 471 piculs of English cotton twist from Singapore (worth 41,467 Spanish dollars), compared to 36 piculs for Penang and 5 for Melaka; by 1844 this had risen to 1,548 piculs for the eastern states alone (pp. 105–106, Table 3).
- Malay piece-goods accounted for 6.5% of all piece-goods imported into Singapore in 1834–35 and 11.3% in 1835–36, with T.J. Newbold identifying silk and cotton cloths as the bulk of east coast imports (p. 102, Table 2).
- In 1856, the Malay Peninsula was the largest importer of raw silk from Singapore in the entire Malay Archipelago, receiving 9,815 lb. (worth 40,627 rupees), exceeding Java, Celebes, Borneo, and Sumatra combined (p. 106, Table 5).
- East coast trade with Singapore grew by approximately 500% in tonnage between 1830 and 1866, while west coast trade remained essentially unchanged (p. 110, Table 6).
- In 1764, the Governor General of Kwantung-Kwangsi formally requested permission for Chinese merchants to export raw silk and Fuchou second-generation silk to Terengganu, confirming the port’s integration into the Chinese silk trade network (p. 109).
Conclusion
Mohamed concludes that the Malay handloom industry was both created and ultimately destroyed by the shifting architecture of global trade. European commercial power first stimulated local production by displacing Indian textiles and supplying cheap spun yarn, but the same industrialisation that enabled this stimulus eventually rendered handloom production economically unviable. The weaving centres that survive today are remnants of a pre-capitalist commercial system whose logic—imported raw materials, coastal location, royal patronage, and inter-Asian cultural exchange—was fundamentally different from the industrial model that replaced it.
Context
- The article draws heavily on Paul Wheatley’s The Golden Khersonese (1980) for early Chinese and Arab source material, T.J. Newbold’s Political and Statistical Account of the British Settlements in the Straits of Malacca for nineteenth-century trade data, and Wong Lin Ken’s “The Trade of Singapore” for quantitative export figures.
- Historiographically, the article contributes to the MBRAS tradition of economic and social history by reframing the textile industry not as a static “traditional craft” but as a dynamic response to global market forces, aligning with the broader Southeast Asian historiographical shift of the 1980s–90s toward trade-network and world-systems approaches.