Your Royal Highnesses, distinguished guests, excellencies, friends. It is a great honour for me to be here to launch this remarkable book, and to celebrate its author, HRH Sultan Nazrin Shah.

As Professor Timmer has told us: this book is a conclusion of a trilogy and of a long intellectual journey to better understand Perak and Malaysia’s place in the global economy, and the possibilities this might bring to its people.

In the final part of the book Sultan Nazrin lays out a new vision for Perak. He quotes from the Oxford historian Peter Frankopan’s history of the Silk Road: ‘we think of globalization as a uniquely modern phenomenon; yet 2,000 years ago too it was a fact of life., one that presented opportunities, created problems and prompted technological advances’. Sultan Nazrin makes the point that Perak has always been global. It was part of the exchanges of the commodities and ideas of the ancient world; part of the connections of the dar al-Islam, and the expansion of long-distant trade in the early modern ‘age of commerce’. Historians usually focus on only one era of globalization. It is rare that they traverse several, and with such a nuanced account of the costs and benefits, as this book provides.

The book centers on a particular moment of globalization at its most dramatic and traumatic: the imperial globalization from around the mid-19th century to the great depression of the 1930s; the consequences of which, in some ways, the people of Perak are still wrestling with.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, for the western powers, the Columbian age of discovery and maritime conquest was coming to an end. In an imaginative sense, the limits of ‘human empire’ had been reached, and with this came a massive, coordinated drive to harness fully the world’s natural resources, in particular to extract mineral wealth on an unprecedented scale.

We might date this to the first California gold rush of 1848. This provoked unprecedented migrations of people over long distances. Many were miners and adventurers from Europe, pouring into the American West, but other ‘rushes’ in Australia, Canada, South Africa and elsewhere. But perhaps 25 per cent of these movements were from China in a great dispersal across the entire Indo-Pacific world. It was a scramble for what J. M. Keynes later called ‘the real wealth of the world’; the gold standard that underpinned investments in imperial expansion and the enabling technologies of globalization: steam, telegraph, electrification, and, not least, hydraulic pump mining. Mining fever gave a new intensity to the global circulation of people, technologies, and skills. As Sultan Nazrin shows this early on alerted speculators to the long seams of precious metals that ran from Yunnan in China to the island of Bangka, seams that rise closest to the surface in Perak. Speculators came for gold and increasingly for tin.

Sultan Nazrin’s account of the impact of this volatile aggressive globalisation is striking in several ways. The first is its deep understanding of geography and demography. The book shows how Perak’s river system – an abundance of water – its ready supply of timber, made Perak an irresistible draw for miners of tin. Perak offered a skilled labour force, supplemented by enterprising Mandailing settlers from Sumatra, and by Chinese. Sultan Nazrin shows how this placed Perak at the forefront of globalization, and not as a bit player.

However, he also shows how this kind of industrialization – a dependency on single commodities; on industrialized extraction rather than a diversified production, meant that much of the profit from tin was exported from Perak. A consequence, as the film showed, [https://www.ehm.my/updates/photos-and-videos/videos/globalization-peraks-rise-relative-decline-and-regeneration] was the industry’s gradual domination by highly capitalized European concerns.

But Sultan Nazrin’s book asks us to look again at the history of industrialization. When we think of the industrial revolution, we think of the cotton mills of Lancashire – it’s a familiar story; but it’s also a very Eurocentric one. Sultan Nazrin reverses our understanding of this. Such was the speed of Perak’s transformation that in a crucial sense, parts of the colony might be more industrial than the metropole itself; its modernity more experimental, more uncompromising. What comes across so well in this book is the sheer scale of the industrial transformation in Perak: the speed at which road and rail connections were built. The rapidity of urban growth: creating a unique cluster of small towns with distinctive modern architecture. In 1872 Taiping was already a town of 10,000 souls, 1,000 of them shopkeepers. Industrial works could be on a pharaonic scale. When the Chenderoh hydro-electric dam was completed in 1930, it was the largest construction project in the entire British empire. By the 1930s, it was observed that Malaya had a better-quality road system than Britain itself, which the Japanese army exploited to devasting effect in the Blitzkrieg of 1941.

The pace of extraction of Perak’s natural resources had also put Perak at the forefront of another global process: the advent of what we now call the Anthropocene era. As one historian of the global mining boom, Andrew C. Isenberg, puts it: ‘Precisely because industrialization relied disproportionately on cheap natural resources, it exacted heavy environmental costs¹’. Tin mining drew so heavily on all aspects of Perak’s natural abundance, water and wood—by damming and diverting rivers and streams; converting vast forest tracts into fuel, and creating expanses of wasteland. Damage to rivers, vegetation and natural drainage increased with high-pressure hydraulic mining, as exposed in the Great Flood of 1926. Sultan Nazrin shows that history of energy sources and of environmental management is vital to understanding the story of Perak.

Sultan Nazrin’s history is not just a brilliant example of economic history. It is also a rather unique, insider’s account of how Perak’s elite skillfully navigated a conquest they could not prevent. It provides a nuanced, long-distance examination of federal-state relations, the terms of which further weakened the state’s capacity to dictate its own economic destiny.

A final theme I want to stress is the author’s powerful account of the ‘human cost’ of all this. Sultan Nazrin reconstructs the health costs, the high mortality rates that accompanied the growth in wealth in Perak. The epidemiological costs of globalization was paid by Asian workers. The provision of road and water up to the Cameron Highland in the 1930s cost $973,905 and the lives of 84 labourers. Yet, drawing on his pioneering early work on per capita income in Malaya, Sultan Nazrin describes the fragile prosperity that emerged before the depression. Some of the new wealth was directed to education and public works, but this was a society in which inequities of wealth were all too visible and viscerally felt. It was no coincidence that much of the leadership of the Malayan Communist Party came from Perak. It was no coincidence too that the some of the most radical Malay nationalists came out of the Sultan Idris Training College. They belonged to the same world of the new, modern and outward-looking Perak towns.

Above all, as Peter Timmer has described, the book shows that Perak’s encounter with imperial globalization left distortions which policies of Malayanisation and national development plans in the first decades of independence could not easily reverse. This left Perak dangerously adrift, and the rural economy perhaps most adrift of all. Talented people moved away. The book has a powerful sense of locality, of how towns and individuals in Perak adapted with great resilience to relative decline and regeneration. This is conveyed through rich oral testimonies. This is after all a book about and for the people of Perak; about their future as well as their past.

At this point, I am reminded of a conference I attended some years ago which brought historians together with senior World Bank people to ask how historical understanding might help shape global development policy.

After two days of it, when it was my turn to speak (about education in Southeast Asia), one of bankers threw up his hands in despair: ‘Man’, he said, ‘How much history do I need?’

I think there is an answer to this question. I think it is history of this ambition and long vision, that can really make a difference and best inform policy interventions. Sultan Nazrin’s ‘New Vision for Perak’ carries a powerful message precisely because its themes resonate deeply with the themes of his meticulous, deep insightful historical research: his emphasis on the force of geography, on long-term investment in education, and perhaps most distinctively of all placing Perak’s natural abundance—perhaps the biggest casualty of modern globalization—at the heart of its future prosperity. I can think of no better guide to how we can draw upon deep wells of historical experience to better understand the possibilities for public policy.

This is the history we need. And it is my great privilege to help launch this wonderful book on its onward journey.