Malay traders

The Malay entrepreneurs recorded in Makassar chronicles as entided to the kind of autonomy and guarantees of property that traders everywhere require, were reported to originate from Johor, Patani, Pahang, Minangkabau and Champa , while Indian Muslims later also played a prominent role in the community. As if prophetically aware of the stereotype into which British colonialism would caste Malays two centuries later, the Melayu community who had helped spread Islam in the island of Sumbawa refused to be rewarded with rice-fields, for we are sailors and traders, not peasants , and asked instead for exemption from port duties (cited Reid 1988-93, II 128). 

Prior to this shift, settled cultivators were few in both the lower Peninsula and lowland Sumatra. The main populations of cultivators who would later be classified Malay were in Kelantan and Patani, and appear to have called themselves by these place names or even more local ones. Their Siamese overlords distinguished them where necessary as Khek. In Sumatra, around 90 per cent of the population south of Aceh was in the highlands, and identified themselves by the lake (Toba, Ranau, Kerinci), river valley or locality around which they lived. When Muslim traders, rulers and diplomats of the hybrid lowland centres later thought of as Malay needed very broad labels to distinguish themselves from Arabs, Europeans, Chinese and other outsiders they would use... 

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