The closing of the overland route from Asia to Europe by the Ottoman Empire and the claim towards trade monopoly with India and south-east Asia by Arab traders, led European powers to look for a maritime route. In 1498 Vasco da Gama, sent by King John II of Portugal, found the route around the Cape of Good Hope to India, and in 1511 Afonso de Albuquerque led an expedition to Malaya which seized Melaka following a month-long siege and made it the centre of Portugal’s eastern activity. The son of the last Sultan of Melaka fled to the island of Bintan off the southern tip of Malaya, where he founded a state that which became the Sultanate of Johore. By the late sixteenth century the tin mines of northern Malaya had been discovered by European traders, and Perak grew wealthy on the proceeds of tin exports. The European colonial expanded further into the region. The Portuguese gained control over the trade from the spice-rich Maluku islands, and in 1571 the Spanish captured Manila. In the early sixteenth century, the Dutch established Dutch East India Company (VOC), initially based trade and Maluku, and their post Batavia in west Java. From there they expanded across the archipelago, forming an alliance with Johore against their main enemies, the Portuguese at Melaka and the powerful Sultan of Aceh. In 1641, after several attempts, the VOC-Johore alliance captured Melaka, breaking Portuguese power in Malaya for good – Portugal was left with only Portuguese Timor. Backed by the Dutch, Johore established a loose hegemony over the Malay states, except Perak, which was able to play off Johore against the Siamese to the north and retain its independence.
The weakness of the Malay states in this period allowed other people to migrate into the Malay homelands. The most significant migrants being the Bugis, seafarers from eastern Indonesia, who regularly raided the Malay coasts. They seized control of Johore following the assassination of the last Sultan of the old Melaka royal line in 1699 and other Bugis took control of Selangor. The Minangkabau from northern Sumatra migrated into Malaya, and eventually established their own state in Negeri Sembilan. The fall of Johore left a power vacuum on the Malay Peninsula which was partly filled by the Siamese kings of Ayutthaya kingdom, who made the five northern Malay states – Kedah, Kelantan, Patani, Perlis and Terengganu – their vassals. Johore’s eclipse also left Perak as the unrivalled leader of the Malay states.
The economic importance of Malaya to Europe grew rapidly during the 18th century. The fast-growing tea trade between China and Britain increased the demand for high-quality Malayan tin, which was used to line tea-chests. Malayan pepper also had a high reputation in Europe, while Kelantan and Pahang had gold mines. The growth of tin and gold mining and associated service industries led to the first influx of foreign settlers into the Malay world – initially Arabs and Indians, later Chinese – who colonised the towns and soon dominated economic activities. This established a pattern which characterised Malayan society for the next 200 years – a rural Malay population increasingly under the domination of wealthy urban immigrant communities, whose power the Sultans were unable to resist.
English traders had been present in Malay waters since the 17th century, but it was not until the mid 18th century that the British East India Company, based in British India, developed a serious interest in Malayan affairs. The growth of the China trade in British ships increased the Company’s desire for bases in the region. Various islands were used for this purpose, but the first permanent acquisition was Penang, leased from the Sultan of Kedah in 1786. This was followed soon after by the leasing of a block of territory on the mainland opposite Penang (known as Province Wellesley). In 1795, during the Napoleonic Wars, the British occupied Dutch Melaka to forestall possible French interest in the area. When Melaka was handed back to the Dutch in 1815, the British governor, Stamford Raffles, looked for an alternative base, and in 1819 he acquired Singapore from the Sultan of Johore. The twin bases of Penang and Singapore, together with the decline of the Netherlands as a naval power, made Britain the dominant force in Malayan affairs. British influence was increased by Malayan fears of Siamese expansionism, to which Britain made a useful counterweight.[citation needed] During the 19th century the Malay Sultans became loyal allies of the British Empire.
