A Comment on P.J. Drake's “The Economic Development of British Malaya to 1914: An Essay in Historiography with Some Questions for Historians”

Extract

There is little that is not known already in Prof. P.J. Drake's article. He himself admits this. He gets his materials from various published sources. Most surprisingly, he does not make any direct reference to such easily readable and indispensable sources of materials such as Frank Swettenham's British Malaya and Lewis Fermor's Report Upon the Mining Industry of Malaya. Given his subject matter and for the period of his study, to omit these two sources is like discussing Christianity without quoting from the Bible or Islam without reading from the Koran.