On John Furnivall's 'Plural Society'
Dutch East Indies, Burma, and the Malay States
John Furnivall coined the concept of the ‘plural society,’ a framework that he proposed as illuminating the dimensions of social exchange within “tropical dependencies” that have come under direct colonial rule where “the [ethnic] sections [were] not segregated” but different ethnic groups “intermingled and [met] as individuals” involuntarily by economic circumstances imposed by the colonial power, but never unified culturally outside the marketplace.[1] Not only was the “disintegration of social life” under colonial rule inevitable, according to Furnivall’s ‘plural society,’ but anarchy would surely ensue between the groups within ‘plural societies’ like Burma and Java as soon as the economic model was lifted.[2] Furnivall’s critique of Dutch colonialism is leveled at the impediments to development under the long-term model which he accuses of being not “controlled by the social will,” thus corroding the chain that binds “Profit, progress and welfare.”[3] Furnivall identifies the ‘plural society’ as being a visible manifestation of “economic forces” that “convert human society into a business concern,”[4] all having certain common characteristics such as dual “capitalist and pre-capitalist” economic systems with a “western superstructure of business administration rising above the native world” where the masses, when “left alone,” lived according to traditional values, where “economic values” were ranked less important than in European culture generally.[5] Interestingly, Furnivall compares the ‘plural societies’ of Africa (such as the Congo Free State under King Leopold) to Burma, stating that the waste of “human resources” via “killing off” so many people impedes profit; and that the belief in “native disregard of economic values” is used as justification for “securing labour” through compulsion.[6] Thus, the ‘plural society’ is characterized by an ethnic caste system where labour is divided along racial lines including a “westernized” native group who have, according to Furnivall, attained development in comparison to the “primitive conditions” of the masses.[7]
The model of the ‘plural society,’ where a “total absorption in the exchange and market” created a social “life for production” rather than “production for life” where ethnic blocs mingled in the marketplace but didn’t combine culturally—which Furnivall called an “unfettered capitalism far more complete and absolute than in the homogenous western lands”—is still prominent in western scholarship on nation-states in Southeast Asia such as Burma, the Netherlands East Indies, and the Malay States.[8] For instance, Anthony Milner argues that Malaysia has been popularly depicted as a definitive ‘plural society’ where religious, commercial, and rural-urban environmental divides tend to permeate social life.[9] Sunil Amrith goes as far as to call Furnivall’s model a “prophetic description” of the “hyperdiverse” London of the 21st century while also identifying Furnivall’s conception of ‘plural society’ as a product of “severe economic contraction and interethnic violence” of 1930s Rangoon.[10] Nonetheless, despite a level of criticism and hesitance surrounding its efficacy, the continued use of the ‘plural society’ as a model to describe social relations in European colonies within Southeast Asia lives on in contemporary scholarship of the region.
It’s vital to remember the colonially derived nature of the ‘nation-state’ when engaging in the discourse surrounding the ‘plural society’ and its many separate, non-interacting ethnic blocs. Pre-colonial states in Southeast Asia didn’t have vertical borders of their boundaries but rather, they had a central court with surrounding core territories where the court's power lessened the further one distanced themselves from the court.[11] The concept of distinct territorial boundaries was a consequence of European colonialism’s influence and thereby carries on to present-day imaginings of what constitutes “Indonesia,” an “Indonesian,” or any other nation-state or nationality of Southeast Asia.[12] This serialization process is guilty of what Benedict Anderson calls “the assumption that the world [is] made up of replicable plurals” which are merely representative of their ideal platonic form.[13] The territorial division of land along such methods is a similar process to the intranational balkanization that took place under colonial occupation, which enforced a segregated society where each culture was viewed as performing “different functions” for the state.[14] Therefore, the partition of land and the simultaneous racialization of humans inhabiting that land is due to the colonization process and is artificially imposed on Southeast Asian society, rather than an essential part of Southeast Asian society itself.
The reductive nature of the colonially imposed ethnic classificatory system the ‘plural society’ represents causes ethnic tensions to arise when paired with the colonially bestowed caste system present within these societies, because it turns exploitative economic situations into interethnic conflicts. The colonial classificatory system that the ‘plural society’ uses is inherently flawed because it’s based on an imagined category, that of different “races” within the human genome. Because of said race theory’s pseudoscientific nature, models built off notions of ethnic monoliths (like the ‘plural society’) are never able to account for the totality of the present data inflow, causing blatant discrepancies such as in the “Ethnic Classifications in the Census of British Malaya” of 1921 where there are more than 50 different ‘non-European’ groups listed by ‘race’ including “Jews,” “Negros,” “Turks (Asiatic),” “Others,” “Unspecified,” and “Not Returned.”[15] The fabricated, projected nature of such segregationist measures becomes even more blatant when regarding the Police regulations in Java 1872 that banned people from appearing in public with the clothes of “another race,” indicating the colonial authority’s difficulty in carrying out segregationist law due to their inability to distinguish between the Chinese and the ‘natives’ of Java.[16] Although the caste systems characteristic of ‘plural societies’ are built upon unscientific ideals, the material consequences of such racial wealth disparities results in real conflicts, such as the situation George Orwell describes as the British government’s letting of “hordes of Indians” into Burma, who the Burmese largely viewed as exploitative creditors or competitors in the labour market, ultimately leading class conflict to be expressed distortedly via ethnic rivalry.[17] Thus, the adoption of interethnic violence as a defining aspect of social life in Burma is in part attributable to the pseudoscientific categorization system imposed upon the population by Britain’s colonial administration and the socio-economic effects derived thereof.
Furnivall’s ‘plural society’ is more than just the stated worldview of colonial-minded reformists, it is the symptom of a false ideal being used as a measurement system rather than a material analysis being applied to understand social relations. Although Furnivall is considered one of the authoritative English scholars of Southeast Asian societies, his inability to speak or engage with the Malay language which was the lingua franca in Java at the time indicates his disconnection with the Javanese indigenous culture he was a leading European expert on.[18] Likewise, Furnivall’s disconnected idea of social advancement in Burma can be witnessed in his admission to “ghost hunting” for the essential Burmese-ness, which he describes as “looking for something elusive and impalpable, […] far removed from all material ends.”[19] Not only does a return to a more potent manifestation of the ‘Burmese essence’ not help the people of Burma to obtain a developed state, but the colonial perspective causes him to misunderstand the meaning of ‘development’ as merely the bourgeois ‘spiritual’ and ‘economic’ factors of development, rather than defining Burma’s development by the Burmese peoples’ overall knowledge and mastery over their environment that they’re indigenous to.[20] The notion that development for the Burmese people would release their ‘Burmese essence,’ which is a return to their former greatness rather than an emancipatory step forward, reveals Furnivall’s developmental aspirations informed by the ‘plural society’ model to be regressive rather than progressive.
Therefore, it’s necessary to use class as a metric to sufficiently explain the power dynamics at play within a given ‘plural’ society. For example, the draining effect of policies such as the “Cultivation System” on Java, where Javanese farmers were forced to forfeit certain key crops to the Dutch colonial power to sell abroad can be viewed as international class exploitation of Java by the Netherlands.[21] Likewise, within Java and the Netherlands, there are different class struggles between respective aristocracies [such as the priyayi] and their underlings, as well as intraclass struggles within the patriarchal family structure that doesn’t recognize women as political equals to men. For example, in a judicial case from an end of a seventeenth-century murder case, the Cirebonese court files detail the murderer as a woman who was a “high official of the Cirebonese court” under the alias of “Ki Aria Marta Ningrat,” whereas the VOC files merely reported the murderer as “a Chinees,”[22] showing the difference in quality between racial and class data within a brief sentence. The fact that through class analysis one can account for the wealth being drained that directly impedes the development of a society like Java renders models relying on race essentialist ideology like Furnivall’s ‘Plural Society’ to be of little value to those trying to find a sociological model that is by any means ‘scientific.’ Therefore, using material analyses rather than subscribing to idealistic race-essentialist ideologies like Furnivall’s ‘plural society’ serves as a more precise tool for investigating the social impediments to development.
[1] John Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and the Netherlands India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), https://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=6204712, 306-7, 304.
[2] Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, 303, 306.
[3] Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, 303.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, 304.
[6] Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, 303-04.
[7] Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, 305-06.
[8] Thant Myint-U, The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century (New York: Norton, 2020), chapter 1, pp. 7-31. PDF on Canvas in Readings folder, 19.
[9] Anthony Milner, “Who Created Malaysia’s Plural Society?,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 76:2 (2003), https://www.jstor.org/stable/41493497), 1.
[10] Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 144-165. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wpmb1Links to an external site., 148.
[11]John Roosa, “Long Term Trends in Southeast Asian History,” 6.
[12] Benedict Anderson, “Census, Map, Museum,” in Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 163-186. https://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=8518196, 184-5.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Furnivall, Colonial Policy, 305-6.
[15] Charles Hirshman, “The Meaning and Measurement of Ethnicity in Malaysia: An Analysis of Census Classifications,” Journal of Asian Studies (1987), https://www.jstor.org/stable/2056899?saml_data=eyJzYW1sVG9rZW4iOiI3MGExN2UyOC1mNzNmLTQwMWYtYjFlMS03MmMzNWJhMzYxNDkiLCJpbnN0aXR1dGlvbklkcyI6WyIxMjJiMTFjOS00YWE5LTQzY2UtYWQzZS0xMmUyYTE4YmU3ZWUiXX0&seq=21, 575.
[16] Charles A Coppel, “Revisiting Furnivall's ‘Plural Society’: Colonial Java as a Mestizo Society?” Ethnic and Racial Studies (Melbourne: Taylor and Francis, 2010), PDF on Canvas in Readings Folder, 569-70.
[17] Myint-U, The Hidden History of Burma, 19.
[18] Coppel, “Revisiting Furnivall's ‘Plural Society’: Colonial Java as a Mestizo Society?” 570.
[19] Julie Pham, “Ghost Hunting in Colonial Burma: Nostalgia, Paternalism and the Thoughts of J.S. Furnivall,” South East Asia Research 12:2 (2004), https://doi.org/10.5367/0000000041524734, 248.
[20] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington: Howard University Press, 1982), 40.
[21] John Roosa, “The Netherlands East Indies and Indonesian Nationalism,” 4.
[22] Anderson, “Census, Map, Museum,” 167-8.