Malay

The Malays are the Austronesian coastal people of the Malay Peninsula, eastern Sumatra and the shores of Borneo, bound together by Malayic languages and a trading life shaped by Indians, Chinese and the sea-nomad Orang Laut. Early in the Common Era their harbours gave rise to states such as Kedah and Langkasuka, and from the 600s most entered the mandala of Srivijaya, whose capital at Palembang made Old Malay the lingua franca of the archipelago; Chinese sources first use the name Malayu in 644. Chola raids after 1025 broke Srivijaya, and after the Javanese Pamalayu campaigns of the late 1200s the prince Sang Nila Utama, backed by the Orang Laut, founded the Kingdom of Singapura at Temasek in 1299. In 1337 that island kingdom was still the focus of Malay political life.

In 1400 Parameswara fled Temasek and founded the Malacca Sultanate, whose command of the strait made it the region's emporium. Islam, attested on the peninsula by the fourteenth-century Terengganu stone, became its state religion, fusing faith, language and court custom into a classical Malay identity later sultanates emulated. The Portuguese took Malacca in 1511, but its royal line continued in Johor from 1528 and in Perak and Pahang, while Brunei built a maritime empire in Borneo. The Dutch, allied with Johor, captured Malacca in 1641; the British leased Penang in 1786 and founded Singapore in 1819, and the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 divided the Malay world between the two powers.