The Myth of the Lazy Native

Introduction

The book appeared in London in 1977 with the subtitle “A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism”. Using Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, Alatas examines writings by Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British officials, travellers and scholars, among them Stamford Raffles and Frank Swettenham. He shows that the charge of laziness was directed at people who refused to work as cheap labour on plantations and in mines, and that the image served to justify colonial rule. The final chapters criticise Malaysian authors who repeated the myth after independence, above all Mahathir Mohamad’s The Malay Dilemma. Edward Said discussed the book in Culture and Imperialism.

Connections

Builds on

• Ideology and Utopia1929 · Karl Mannheim

More works by Syed Hussein Alatas

• 1972The Captive Mind in Development Studies