5 - A Comparison of the Home Remittance Systems of Indian and Chinese Migrants in Southeast Asia: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Summary

Introduction: Migration and Remittance

There were many differences in the history and dynamics of emigration between South Asia, Southeast Asia and South China over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These differences had, in turn, a far-reaching impact on patterns of remittance transmission back to home villages of origin. While these remittances were earmarked by their senders as household expenses and investment capital, the present study reveals that the financial instruments in which these funds were actually used were conditioned by a wide range of locally specific environmental, infrastructural and politico-economic factors. To understand migration and its relationship with remittances, we need to consider thoroughly the environmental, infrastructural and politico-economic circumstances affecting migrants and their families. This chapter, however, will discuss the similarity in the procedures of home remittances between Indians and Chinese in Southeast Asia. As their business networks utilized informal financial markets, they quite commonly used their local, business and family ties for remittances. The relations between overseas and home towns, at the same time, were strengthened by exchanging money, achieving credit for each other.

Politically and economically speaking, Hong Kong and Singapore have a strong connection as former British colonies. In 1858, the British East India Company, its trade monopoly gone, lost control over the Straits Settlements of Penang, Singapore and Malacca, established as a crown colony in 1867. In the late nineteenth century rubber plantations and tin mines attracted many Indian and Chinese labourers to the Malay Peninsula. During this period, Singapore and Hong Kong became transit points for immigrants and their home remittances, as well as entrepôts for Western capital and settlement points for financial transactions.

Hong Kong and Chinese Migration

Abolition of the slave trade in the 1830s exacerbated a labour shortage in the British Empire and led to the recruitment of Indians and Chinese to work on the sugar plantations of the West Indies and the new rubber and sugar plantations of Southeast Asia.