Historical Background

The geographic characteristics of the Peninsular Malaysia — a long and narrow peninsula with a 1,900-km coastline — give support to the belief that fishing in the inshore waters is as old as settlement in the coastal lowlands of the country. These coastal villages, self-sufficient in food and other necessities, were beginning to engage in some trade as early as the last century BC (Ryan 1962). Dried and salted fish were among the traditional items of trade and by the fifteenth century there was an extensive trade in them throughout the Malay archipelago. Malacca's main domestic product at the end of that century was fish (Meilink-Roelofsz 1962).

With the establishment of British rule and the growth of urban centres in the Malay Peninsula, the demand for fish increased considerably. This in turn attracted fishermen from among the immigrant communities, mainly Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Indians, who in contrast to the Malays took to fishing as a full-time commercial occupation. Entry to the fisheries was unrestricted and required only the payment of a small annual licence fee for nets and fishing stakes. By the second half of the nineteenth century these commercial fishermen had built up a thriving fishing industry along the west coast of the peninsula and the east coast of Johore, serving the markets of Western Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia) and Singapore. In the 1890s, for example, Penang and Province Wellesley had a multiracial group of fishermen; north Perak, some 1,100 fishermen of whom 90 per cent were Chinese; and Kuala Selangor, over 500 fishermen, mainly Chinese (Dew 1891; Maxwell 1921).

The fishing industry expanded in the early twentieth century as the establishment of a modem road and rail transportation network and the availability of ice allowed for the long-distance haulage of fresh fish to the main towns. By 1920 the annual movement of fresh fish by rail to the urban areas of the Federated Malay States had reached 7,000 tons. In addition, substantial quantities of dried fish were shipped from the East Coast states to the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States (Winstedt 1923).