Article

Printing

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Printing

Printing in the Malay world spans nearly four centuries, from the first printed Malay book in Amsterdam in 1603 to the industrial-scale letterpress operations of the early twentieth century in Singapore and the Straits Settlements. The history of Malay printing is inseparable from the movements of European colonialism, Christian missionary enterprise, and indigenous commercial enterprise, and its geographical reach extended from the Netherlands and England to Batavia, Melaka, Penang, Singapore, Bencoolen, the Moluccas, Timor, Sri Lanka, Bombay, and the Middle East [1, pp. 85–110]. The technology of the printing press introduced a transformative shift in the production and distribution of Malay-language texts, moving the region from a manuscript culture sustained by royal patronage and religious institutions toward a print economy shaped by colonial policy, market forces, and the emergence of an indigenous publishing industry [2, pp. 101–132], [3, pp. 1–9].

Origins and the Missionary Press

The first Malay book printed anywhere was Frederick de Houtman’s Spraek ende woord-boeck, Inde Maleysche ende Madagaskarsche Talen, published in Amsterdam in 1603 by Jan Ebertsz. Cloppenburg [1, p. 86]. De Houtman, who had spent two years in captivity in Aceh, produced a phrasebook of topical conversations in Malay and Dutch covering the practicalities of spice trade negotiations, and the British Library copy bears his autograph signature [1, p. 86]. This work spawned a lineage of translations and editions, including a Latin-Malay edition by Gothard Arthus (Frankfurt, 1613) and an English translation by Agustus Spalding, Dialogues in the English and Malaiane languages (London, 1614), the first Malay book printed in England [1, p. 86].

The earliest Christian works in Malay followed. Albert Cornelius Ruyl’s translation of the Gospel of Matthew, published in 1629 under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) as Het Nieuwe Testament (Enckhuysen), has been described as “probably the earliest example in history of the translation and printing of a book of the Bible in a non-European language as a means of evangelisation” [1, p. 86]. The first Christian work in Malay printed in England was Jang ampat Evangelia, the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, published in Oxford in 1677, notable for its fourteen-page preface by Dr. Thomas Marshall of Lincoln College, which surveys all previous Malay publications known to him [1, p. 86].

In the Malay archipelago itself, Batavia became the earliest and for a long time the only centre of printing. The first Malay book printed there was a 1677 edition of a Malay-Dutch dictionary at the VOC press, followed by a catechism by Melchior Leydekker in 1685 [1, p. 87]. The Seminary Press, established in 1746, produced what were probably the first Malay books in jawi (the Arabic-based script used for writing Malay) to be printed in Southeast Asia, using Arabic types donated by the VOC printer Rudolf Wetstein in 1742 [1, p. 87]. The most significant product of this press was the first complete Malay Bible in jawi characters, published in five volumes in 1758 [1, p. 87].

The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the decisive spread of Malay printing across the archipelago, driven almost entirely by Protestant missionary activity. The London Missionary Society (LMS) established presses in Melaka, Penang, Singapore, and Batavia, while the Baptists operated at Bencoolen, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Singapore, and the Rotterdam and Netherlands Missionary Societies in Kupang and Ambon respectively [1, p. 92]. The LMS’s primary target was China, but restrictions on missionary activity there made the Straits Settlements and Batavia, with their large Chinese populations, ideal interim bases [1, p. 92].

The Melaka station, planned by Robert Morrison and established by William Milne in 1815, became the LMS’s primary printing centre in the Peninsula [4, p. 62]. By 1820 the press had produced approximately 140,000 items in Chinese against only about 20,500 in Malay, reflecting the station’s pronounced China bias [4, pp. 66]. The Chinese translation of the Bible completed by Morrison and Milne was published in Melaka in 1823, the first such translation published in the region and only the second printed anywhere [5, pp. 25–26]. The first Malay-language periodical in the archipelago, the bilingual quarterly The Malay Magazine/Bustan Arifin, was published in Melaka from 1821 to 1822 [1, p. 95].

In Singapore, printing commenced with the arrival of Claudius Henry Thomsen and Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munsyi from Melaka in 1822; the first recorded instance was a proclamation for Raffles on the disposal of land, printed on 2 December 1822 [1, p. 96]. The LMS Mission Press in Singapore printed Raffles’s first proclamations in January 1823 and produced the Singapore Chronicle (1824–30), the island’s first newspaper [5, pp. 27–29]. Benjamin Peach Keasberry, who arrived in 1839 and refused to depart for China with the other LMS missionaries in 1843, became the most artistically accomplished printer of the period, marrying the decorative potential of the newly introduced lithographic press with the artistic heritage of the Malay manuscript tradition [1, p. 97]. His quarterly journal Cermin Mata (1858–59) has been described as the most beautiful Malay printed work of the nineteenth century in the British Library [1, p. 97], and his lithographic printing in jawi has been characterised by Ian Proudfoot as having “an impact comparable to that of Gutenberg’s typography in the West” [5, pp. 27–29].

The Baptist Mission Press at Bencoolen, established under the direct patronage of Sir Stamford Raffles during his second tenure as Lieutenant Governor of Fort Marlborough (1818–1824), represents a distinct model in which printing served administrative and educational rather than primarily evangelical purposes [6, p. 136]. Raffles took Nathaniel Ward, a young Baptist missionary trained as a printer, from Calcutta to Singapore in 1818, and the press’s stated purpose was the production of educational material for Malay children [6, p. 136]. Its output comprised four known volumes between 1820 and 1823, including the two volumes of Malayan Miscellanies and the Proceedings of the Agricultural Society of Sumatra [6, pp. 136–138]. The press was abruptly curtailed by a devastating epidemic in 1822 that killed Dr. William Jack and numerous others, and by the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, which transferred Bencoolen to the Dutch [6, p. 139].

Indigenous Publishing and the Transition to a Commercial Industry

The period from the 1860s onward witnessed the emergence of the first indigenous Malay printers and publishers, a development that fundamentally altered the character of the Malay book trade [1, p. 105]. The transition from missionary-dominated printing to indigenous commercial publishing was neither sudden nor uniform, but it was irreversible. One of the earliest surviving products of this new industry is a lithographed edition of the Sirat al-Mustakim by Nuruddin ar-Raniri, printed in Singapore in 1864 under the direction of Haji Muhammad Nuh bin Mustafa Banyumas, with the scribe Yusuf of Trengganu responsible for the lithographic copying [1, p. 105]. The work, comprising 514 folios of good quality laid watermarked paper, demonstrates a level of production that suggests it may have been the first product of a pioneer local press or one of the earliest surviving products of an infant Malay-Muslim press in Singapore [1, p. 105].

The Muslim lithographic printing industry centred in Kampung Gelam, Singapore, became the principal vehicle for indigenous Malay publishing in the latter decades of the nineteenth century [3, p. 9]. Encik Ibrahim from Riau is connected by name to at least 95 different titles, mostly rhymed narratives, produced on lithographic presses in Kampung Gelam from the early 1880s to 1910 [3, p. 8]. The first known indigenously owned and operated lithographic press produced a copy of the Qur’an in Palembang in 1848, with the printer acknowledging Abdullah Munshi as his teacher in the art of printing [3, p. 7]. The scribes who had once served royal courts and religious institutions found new employment preparing texts for lithographic presses, and their craft continued almost seamlessly into the print era [3, pp. 1–9].

The Registration of Books Ordinance of 1886, promulgated by the government of the Straits Settlements, required printers to register their publications with the Colonial Secretary’s office and deposit three copies, one of which was sent to the British Museum [1, p. 107]. This system produced the greatest single strength of the British Library’s collection of early Malay printing and provides the documentary foundation for subsequent industrial analysis of the trade [1, p. 107].

Ian Proudfoot’s analysis of the period 1887 to 1920 reveals a three-tiered structure: a concentrated, capital-intensive European sector employing letterpress; a more dispersed indigenous sector relying on lithography and the jawi script; and a small, under-capitalised Chinese sector producing serialised baba-language romances [2, pp. 101–132]. European printers, principally the Methodist Publishing House and Kelly & Walsh, accounted for 64 per cent of bulk output and 67 per cent of value, while indigenous printers managed only 26 per cent of bulk and 16 per cent of value, despite being nearly equal in edition count [2, pp. 107–108]. The colonial government’s expansion of European-style vernacular schooling created a captive textbook market that fell to European firms, while the promotion of Romanised script in education effectively closed off an entire field of publication to indigenous printers, who had never produced rumi (Roman-script) books and whose lithographic technology could not accommodate them [2, pp. 101–132]. The Malay Literature Series, launched in 1906 with government assistance, produced typeset rumi editions at a weighted average price of 0.40 cents per page, compared to 1.61 cents for other rumi general books in the open market, a disparity reflecting the guaranteed school market [2, p. 120].

The economic slump of the mid-1890s exposed the indigenous sector’s vulnerability, with several printers closing down and general-category newspaper circulation falling to its lowest point for the entire 1886–1920 span [2, pp. 116–117]. By 1920, periodical production had grown to approximate the bulk of book publication, and titles such as Utusan Melayu and Lembaga Melayu provided a combined circulation of 1,500 to 2,000, suggesting the emergence of a self-supporting press [2, pp. 124–126]. The Muslim lithographic industry in Kampung Gelam declined at the start of the twentieth century as the market was flooded with cheaper, technologically superior letterpress books from Bombay, Mecca, Cairo, and Istanbul [3, p. 9].

Geographical Spread and Cross-Regional Networks

Malay printing was never confined to the Malay Peninsula or the Indonesian archipelago. The British Library’s collection, which spans nearly four centuries, documents the production of Malay-language works in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and Sri Lanka [1, pp. 85–110]. In the late nineteenth century, Malay works were printed in Cairo and Constantinople following the establishment of a government printing press in Mecca in 1884, at which Ahmad ibn Muhammad Zain of Patani was appointed by the Ottoman government as supervisor of the Malay press [1, p. 97]. In Colombo, Baba Ounos Saldin, a Sri Lankan Malay, printed a lithographed jawi newspaper, Alamat Langkapuri, as early as 1869 [1, p. 97]. In Bombay, the Alvi Press and the Hasani Press produced lithographed kitab jawi (Islamic theological works in Malay) in the 1890s, works that Snouck Hurgronje noted were available on the book market in Mecca [1, pp. 103–104].

The Syair Indera Sebaha by Muhammad Hassan bin Nasaruddin illustrates the transnational networks that connected Malay publishers with the Indian subcontinent. Derived from the Urdu musical drama Indar Sabha, composed at the court of Lucknow in 1853, the Malay edition of 1891 reached its fourth edition by 1901, with illustrations that Gallop links to a Bombay edition facsimiled in Leipzig in 1892 [1, pp. 108–109]. Similarly, the Hikayat Gul Bakawali, translated from an Urdu work originally compiled in 1702, was first published in Malay in 1875 and remained in circulation into the 1920s [1, pp. 108–109]. These works raise questions about the nature and scale of the networks and contacts between early Malay publishers and the book scene in India [1, p. 109].

Singapore’s preeminent position in the field of Malay publishing was not challenged until the twentieth century. Of the over 1,700 separate editions of 830 titles traced by Ian Proudfoot for the Malaysia-Singapore region between 1817 and 1920, 81 per cent were published in Singapore [2, p. 105, n. 34]. The LMS’s total output, including Medhurst’s Batavia publications, exceeded eight million pages by 1836, distributed through a network of ships’ captains, junk masters, and missionaries who boarded vessels bound for destinations as far as America, St. Helena, Tibet, Japan, and the Moluccas [4, pp. 96–97].

Research and Documentation

The study of Malay printing has evolved from descriptive bibliography to industrial-economic analysis, with each generation of scholars building on the physical evidence of surviving imprints and the administrative records of colonial governance. The foundational bibliographic works include van der Chijs’s annotated bibliography of Indonesian imprints from 1659 to 1870, Darlow and Moule’s survey of Bible translations, and Teeuw’s catalogue of Malay vocabularies and dictionaries [1, pp. 86]. Annabel Teh Gallop’s 1990 introduction to the British Library’s collection represented a significant advance, synthesising existing bibliographic scholarship with close physical examination of the books themselves and filling a gap between reference catalogues and narrative history [1, pp. 85–124]. Gallop noted that early Malay printed books had long been regarded as the “poor relations” of Malay manuscripts, and that the forthcoming bibliography by Ian Proudfoot of early Malay books printed in the Malaysia-Singapore region to 1920 would represent the greatest advance in the field [1, p. 111].

Proudfoot’s 1986 article shifted the study of Malay publishing from literary-historical and biographical approaches to an industrial-economic analysis, establishing the three-tier model and demonstrating how colonial education policy structurally determined the industry’s composition [2, pp. 101–132]. His method—measuring output in terms of bulk (pages multiplied by copies) and value (price multiplied by copies) rather than mere edition counts—revealed a hierarchy far steeper than edition numbers alone would suggest [2, pp. 104–108]. Leona O’Sullivan’s 1984 article provided the most comprehensive written record of LMS missionary personnel and printing operations across the Straits Settlements between 1815 and 1847, drawing extensively on the LMS archives at SOAS London [4, pp. 61–104].

More recent scholarship has broadened the frame further. Sandra Hudd’s 2019 article reconceptualised missionaries as faith-based development organisations, arguing that the LMS’s printing activities introduced a print culture to the region whose impact extended well beyond their evangelical purpose [5, pp. 21–40]. Van der Putten’s 2020 article on scribes and copyists shifted attention from texts to the human agents behind their production, demonstrating that the manuscript tradition did not simply collapse under modernity but was absorbed into it, with the same individuals who copied texts for colonial officials becoming the bridge between sacred manuscript culture and the new print economy [3, pp. 1–9]. Roger Tol’s work on the La Galigo manuscripts in the Library of Congress recovered the figure of Husin bin Ismail, a Bugis scribe of Wajoq origin who was among the most productive copyists of his era, and demonstrated that the Bugis and Malay manuscript collections in Western libraries were products of a single collaborative enterprise in colonial Singapore [7, pp. 65–72].

The British Library’s collection remains the unrivalled resource for the study of early Malay printing, representing nearly all the main developments in this history [1, p. 111]. Its strengths derive from three principal sources: the library of King George III, which contained early European imprints; the Abbe Favre collection, purchased in 1888 for £93 8s 2d and comprising 344 items including 150 Malay tracts printed between 1819 and 1846; and the statutory copyright deposit from the Straits Settlements from 1887 onwards [1, p. 85]. The digitisation of the Society’s own journal through JSTOR, which recorded over 91,000 downloads in 2021 from 175 countries, has solved the accessibility problem that preoccupied earlier generations of scholars concerned with the survival and distribution of printed materials [8, p. 100].

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. A.T. Gallop (1990). Early Malay printing: an introduction to the British Library collection JMBRAS 63(1): 85–124. Read on JSTOR
  2. I. Proudfoot (1986). A formative period in Malay book publishing JMBRAS 59(2): 101–132.
  3. J. Van Der Putten (2020). Literary agents in the Malay World: Scribes and copyists JMBRAS 93(2): 1–9. Read on JSTOR
  4. L. O’Sullivan (1984). The London Missionary Society: a written record of missionaries and printing presses in the Straits Settlements 1815–1847 JMBRAS 57(2): 61–104.
  5. S. Hudd (2019). Revisiting Christian missionaries in colonial Malaya and Singapore: blurring the boundaries between empire, mission and development JMBRAS 92(1): 21–40. Read on JSTOR
  6. C.E. Wurtzburg (1950). The Baptist mission press at Bencoolen JMBRAS 23(3): 136–142.
  7. R. Tol (2020). [Pengembaraan La Galigo ke Washington D.C.: Memperkenalkan Husin bin Ismail The La Galigo manuscripts in Washington D.C.: Introducing Husin bin Ismail JMBRAS 93(2): 65–72. Read on JSTOR
  8. P.H. Kratoska and Mubin Sheppard (2022). Dato Haji Mubin Sheppard. With a note P. Kratoska JMBRAS 95(1): 95–103.