Counter-insurgency gave birth to new networks of clientage. These were demanded of the people of Malaya by the British to bind communities to the colonial state. They were also required by the people themselves as they faced crises of leadership and collective identity. Hitherto, we have focused primarily on the Chinese and Indian populations on the industrial front-line of the Communist war. However, the social repercussions of the Emergency also provoked British officials and Malay leaders into attempts to recast the economic structure of the peninsula through reform of the Malay rural economy. British understanding of the economic predicament of the Malays was couched in the language of Protection. Administrators underlined the historical and cultural obstacles to Malay material progress: idleness, an aversion to business and reluctance to innovate had allowed the Malays to be overrun by the economically aggressive Chinese - ‘the locusts of commerce’ as Sir Richard Winstedt called them. This understanding of the Malay economy was more lyrical than scientific. The image of statis, for example, disguised an incomplete appreciation of Malay land tenure and the diverseness of the rural economy; what was dismissed as rural conservatism often merely indicated the Malays’ reluctance to follow blindly the direction of change ordained by the colonial state. However, these assumptions became deeply imbedded in administrative practice and modern scholars have suggested that many of them have been reflected in Malay understandings of their predicament; for example, in Dr Mahathir Mohamad's diagnosis of the ‘Malay dilemma’.