The Federated Malay States — the British colonial federation formed in 1895 by the union of the protected Malay states of Perak, Selangor, Negeri Sembilan and Pahang under a Resident-General — is named in Vol. I of The Achehnese only in the formal imprint of the work, where it appears as the official post of R. J. Wilkinson, the compiler of the Index.
The title-page of Vol. I records that the index was prepared by R. J. Wilkinson, Inspector of Schools, Federated Malay States. Wilkinson — already a distinguished Malay scholar and subsequently the author of the standard Malay-English dictionary — was at the time of the English edition of The Achehnese (1906) serving in the education service of the Federation, which had been constituted only eleven years earlier by the treaty of 1895. His appointment to index the work is itself a token of the close connexion between the colonial administration of the Malay Peninsula and the Dutch scholarship on Acheh: the British Malay service, like the Netherlands-Indian service, depended for its understanding of the Mohammedan and Indonesian world upon the work of Snouck and his Dutch contemporaries.
The Federated Malay States, as a political unit, plays no part in the body of Vol. I, which is concerned with Acheh and with the comparative Mohammedan world; but its appearance in the imprint is a reminder of the wider colonial frame within which The Achehnese was composed and translated. The work was published at Leyden by E. J. Brill, Late E. J. Brill, in an English translation by A. W. S. O’Sullivan, and indexed by Wilkinson — a collaboration of Dutch, British and colonial-Malay scholarly labour which it was the explicit purpose of the English edition to make accessible to readers outside Holland as well as in it.
The wider comparative references of Vol. I — to the Straits Settlements, to Penang, to the Malay Peninsula, to the work of Walter William Skeat on Malay magic — belong to the same intellectual frame as the imprint mention of the Federated Malay States, and testify to the close connexion which the British administration of the Peninsula maintained with the study of the neighbouring sultanate of Acheh.
See Also
- R. J. Wilkinson
- A. S. O’Sullivan
- E. J. Brill
- Leyden
- Malay Peninsula
- Straits Settlements
- Penang
- Walter William Skeat
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.