The history of Malaysia

Malaysia as a state dates only from 1963, but the lands it joins together, the Malay Peninsula and the northern third of Borneo, have a human history reaching back tens of thousands of years. Their position on the Strait of Malacca, the sea lane between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, drew traders from India, China and the Islamic world, and shaped a series of port kingdoms, above all the sultanate of Malacca in the fifteenth century. Portuguese, Dutch and finally British rule followed, and the British brought in Chinese and Indian workers on a scale that made Malaya one of the most ethnically mixed societies in Asia. Independence came in 1957, the wider federation of Malaysia in 1963, and ever since, the balance between the Malay majority, the other indigenous peoples and the Chinese and Indian communities has shaped the country's politics.

Stone tools found in the Lenggong Valley of Perak have been dated to about 1.8 million years ago, evidence that early humans, probably Homo erectus, lived here long before modern people. A skull from the Niah Caves in Sarawak, around 40,000 years old, is among the earliest remains of modern humans in the region, from a time when low sea levels joined Borneo to the mainland. The 11,000-year-old skeleton known as Perak Man, found in 1991, is the oldest complete skeleton yet discovered in the country.

The peninsula's oldest surviving peoples are the Orang Asli, a collective name for some eighteen groups. The Semang, often called Negritos, are thought to descend from the earliest hunter-gatherers. The Senoi seem to combine that ancestry with Austroasiatic-speaking farmers who arrived from mainland Southeast Asia around 4,000 years ago. Austronesian-speaking peoples, ancestors of the Malays and of many Bornean groups, spread through the islands from the second millennium BCE, bringing seafaring, rice farming and later metalworking. In Borneo, peoples such as the Iban, Bidayuh, Kadazan-Dusun, Kayan and Kenyah built societies based on longhouse communities, shifting cultivation, river trade and, among some groups, headhunting raids, which continued into the nineteenth century.

From the first centuries CE the peninsula sat on the sea route between India and China. Indian texts speak of a Suvarnadvipa, a golden land in the east, and Ptolemy's map shows a Golden Chersonese. Chinese pottery in Borneo dates from around the time of the Han dynasty. Small coastal states grew up whose rulers adopted Indian ideas of kingship, the Sanskrit language and both Hinduism and Buddhism. Langkasuka on the northern east coast was among the earliest, and in the Bujang Valley of Kedah archaeologists have found temples, jetties and iron-working sites in use from about the fifth century to the fourteenth.

From the seventh century much of the peninsula fell under the influence of Srivijaya, a Buddhist maritime power based at Palembang in Sumatra that controlled the straits and the trade passing through them. In 1025 the south Indian Chola dynasty under Rajendra I raided Srivijaya's ports, among them Kedah, a blow from which Srivijayan power never fully recovered. In the centuries that followed, the northern Malay states came under pressure from the Thai kingdoms, while the Javanese empire of Majapahit claimed overlordship over much of the archipelago in the fourteenth century.

Around 1400 a prince named Parameswara, who had been driven out of Singapura (later Singapore) by attacks linked to Majapahit or Siam, founded a settlement at Malacca on the west coast. It grew with astonishing speed. Its rulers sought the protection of the Ming dynasty, whose fleets under Zheng He called there repeatedly, and paid tribute to the Chinese emperor in return for security against Siam. Merchants from Gujarat, Bengal, Tamil India, Persia, Arabia, Java, China and the Ryukyu Islands met in its harbour to exchange textiles, spices, porcelain and gold.

Malacca's rulers converted to Islam early in the fifteenth century and took the title of sultan. Their court became a centre of Islamic learning and the model of Malay kingship, with elaborate ceremonial, a hierarchy of officials headed by the bendahara, and the idea of daulat, the sacred sovereignty of the ruler. Through Malacca's trade and prestige, Islam and the Malay language spread across the islands, and Malay became the common tongue of commerce from Sumatra to the southern Philippines. At its height under Sultan Mansur Shah and his successors, Malacca ruled most of the peninsula and parts of eastern Sumatra.

Across the sea, Brunei emerged as the great power of Borneo. Its sultans, Muslim from the fifteenth century, held sway over the coasts of what are now Sarawak and Sabah, and at their height in the early sixteenth century their influence reached as far as Manila. The history of these lands is shared with Brunei and the Philippines.

In 1511 the Portuguese commander Afonso de Albuquerque captured Malacca, making it a fortified base of the Portuguese Empire. Sultan Mahmud Shah fled, and his heirs founded new sultanates: Johor in the south and Perak in the north. For more than a century Johor, the Portuguese and the rising sultanate of Aceh in northern Sumatra fought for control of the straits, in what is often called the triangular war.

The Dutch East India Company, the trading arm of the Dutch Republic, allied with Johor and took Malacca in 1641 after a long siege. The Dutch tried to channel trade towards their headquarters at Batavia on Java, and Malacca declined. Johor rose again, but after the murder of Sultan Mahmud II in 1699 ended the old Malaccan line, it fell into a long succession struggle in which Bugis warriors from Sulawesi and Minangkabau from Sumatra became kingmakers. The Bugis founded the sultanate of Selangor in the eighteenth century, and Minangkabau settlers formed the confederacy that became Negeri Sembilan. In the north, Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu sent tribute to the Thai court of the Ayutthaya Kingdom and later Bangkok, and Siamese armies occupied Kedah from 1821 to 1842.

British interest began with trade. In 1786 Francis Light obtained Penang from the Sultan of Kedah for the East India Company, and in 1819 Stamford Raffles secured Singapore from a claimant to the Johor throne. The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 split the Malay world along the Strait of Malacca: the Dutch kept Sumatra and the islands to the south, which became the Dutch East Indies and later Indonesia, while Britain took Malacca and the peninsula. Penang, Malacca and Singapore were joined as the Straits Settlements, a crown colony from 1867.

The tin boom of the mid-nineteenth century drew tens of thousands of Chinese miners into the western states, and rival Malay chiefs and Chinese secret societies fought over the mines in wars such as those in Larut and Klang. Kuala Lumpur began in 1857 as a tin-mining camp at the meeting of two rivers. The disorder gave Britain its reason to intervene. The Pangkor Treaty of 1874 installed a British Resident in Perak whose advice the sultan was obliged to follow on everything except Malay religion and custom. The first Resident, J. W. W. Birch, was killed in 1875, and British troops crushed the resistance that followed. Selangor, Negeri Sembilan and Pahang accepted Residents, and in 1895 the four became the Federated Malay States, with Kuala Lumpur as capital. The Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909 transferred Kedah, Kelantan, Perlis and Terengganu from Siam to British protection, and Johor accepted an adviser in 1914; these five formed the Unfederated Malay States.

In Borneo, the English adventurer James Brooke helped the Brunei court suppress a revolt and in 1841 was made Raja of Sarawak. His family, the White Rajahs, ruled Sarawak for a century and enlarged it at Brunei's expense. North Borneo, now Sabah, was run from 1881 by the British North Borneo Company. The Philippines later claimed eastern Sabah as former territory of the Sultanate of Sulu, a dispute that remains unresolved.

Under the British Empire Malaya became one of the most profitable colonies in the world. It was the leading producer of tin, and after rubber seedlings arrived from Brazil by way of Kew Gardens in 1877, plantations spread across the western lowlands until Malaya supplied around half of the world's rubber. Labour came from abroad. Chinese immigrants, mostly from Fujian and Guangdong under the Qing dynasty, worked the mines and filled the towns, while Tamil workers recruited from British India tapped rubber on the estates, often under harsh indentures. By the 1930s Chinese and Indians together roughly equalled the Malays in number on the peninsula.

Colonial policy kept the communities apart. Malays were treated as the rightful people of the land, under their sultans, and were channelled into farming, fishing and, for the elite, the civil service. The Chinese dominated commerce and the towns, and Indians the plantations. Malay nationalism grew from the 1920s through religious reformers, newspapers and teachers trained at the Sultan Idris Training College, and in 1938 Ibrahim Yaacob founded the Kesatuan Melayu Muda, the first Malay nationalist organisation.

On 8 December 1941 Japanese troops landed at Kota Bharu in Kelantan, and within ten weeks they had overrun the peninsula. Singapore surrendered on 15 February 1942, the largest surrender of British-led forces in history. During the occupation by the Empire of Japan the Chinese suffered most: in the Sook Ching purges of early 1942, Japanese forces killed many thousands of Chinese men in Singapore and Malaya, with estimates running into the tens of thousands. Japan handed the four northern states back to Thailand in 1943. Resistance was led by the communist-dominated Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army, mostly Chinese, which received British arms and training.

When the British returned after World War II they proposed a Malayan Union that would have reduced the sultans' powers and offered equal citizenship to non-Malays. Malay opposition was fierce, and it gave birth in 1946 to the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), led by Onn Jaafar. Britain gave way, and in 1948 the Federation of Malaya was created instead, preserving the sultans and Malay special status.

In June 1948, after the killing of three European planters, the British declared a state of emergency against the Malayan Communist Party, whose guerrillas under Chin Peng had gone back to the jungle. The Malayan Emergency, an early front of the Cold War, lasted until 1960. Under the Briggs Plan hundreds of thousands of rural Chinese, by some estimates close to a million people, were forcibly resettled into guarded "new villages" to cut the guerrillas off from food and support. British forces also committed abuses, most notoriously the killing of 24 unarmed villagers at Batang Kali in 1948. Some 11,000 people died in the conflict.

Political progress ran alongside the war. UMNO, the Malayan Chinese Association and the Malayan Indian Congress formed the Alliance, which won the 1955 elections overwhelmingly, and its leader Tunku Abdul Rahman negotiated independence from Britain. The Federation of Malaya became independent on 31 August 1957 under a constitution that made Islam the religion of the federation, Malay the national language, and the nine hereditary rulers the electors of a rotating king, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong. It also confirmed special rights for Malays while granting citizenship widely to non-Malays, a bargain that has remained central to Malaysian politics.

In 1961 the Tunku proposed a wider federation, and on 16 September 1963 Malaya joined with Singapore, Sarawak and North Borneo, renamed Sabah, to form Malaysia. Brunei chose to stay out. Indonesia under Sukarno opposed the federation as a British neo-colonial project and waged an undeclared war of raids in Borneo and on the peninsula, known as Konfrontasi, until 1966. Within the federation, quarrels between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore's People's Action Party under Lee Kuan Yew over communal politics grew bitter, and on 9 August 1965 Singapore left to become an independent state.

The general election of May 1969 saw the Alliance lose ground to opposition parties, and on 13 May victory celebrations in Kuala Lumpur gave way to communal violence between Malays and Chinese. The official death toll was 196, though other estimates are higher. Parliament was suspended and the country ruled by a National Operations Council until 1971. The government responded with the New Economic Policy, which aimed to reduce poverty and to raise the share of the economy held by the Bumiputera, Malays and other indigenous peoples, through quotas in education, employment and business ownership. The Alliance was enlarged into the Barisan Nasional coalition in 1973.

Mahathir Mohamad, prime minister from 1981 to 2003, transformed the economy from tin, rubber and palm oil to manufacturing and electronics, built the national car Proton and the Petronas Twin Towers, and championed a "Look East" policy modelled on Japan. His rule also concentrated power, curbed the judiciary and limited dissent. During the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 he rejected IMF prescriptions and imposed capital controls. In 1998 he sacked his deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, who was then convicted on charges of corruption and sodomy that his supporters said were politically motivated, and the protest movement known as Reformasi was born.

Under Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and then Najib Razak, prime minister from 2009, the Barisan Nasional's dominance weakened. In 2008 it lost its two-thirds majority, and in 2013 it lost the popular vote while keeping power. Najib's government was overshadowed from 2015 by the scandal at the state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), from which billions of dollars were found to have been diverted, and in May 2018 a coalition led by the 92-year-old Mahathir, now in opposition, ended the Barisan Nasional's 61 years in power. Najib was convicted of corruption in 2020 and began a prison sentence in 2022; in December 2025 he was convicted in the main 1MDB trial as well.

The new government collapsed in early 2020 when defections brought Muhyiddin Yassin to power, followed by Ismail Sabri Yaakob in 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The November 2022 election produced the country's first hung parliament, and Anwar Ibrahim, once Mahathir's imprisoned rival, became prime minister on 24 November at the head of a unity government that included his former UMNO opponents. His government ended the mandatory death penalty in 2023 and cut fuel subsidies, and in 2025 Kuala Lumpur hosted the talks that ended that year's border fighting between Thailand and Cambodia.