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Against this background, the present article sets out to sketch how Europeans in the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries moved from understanding “Malay” as a rather precise and limited term used to denote a specific ethnic and linguistic group to instead defining it as a broad ethnic category, which, after the middle of the eighteenth century, became strongly associated with piratical inclinations and activities as well as a generally treacherous and violent disposition. 130), but the longer history of the association, in the eyes of European observers, between piracy and the Malay has hitherto not been explored in depth (see ( Reber 1966 Amirell 2018) for studies focusing mainly on the nineteenth century). Some of these studies note, in passing, the tendency among nineteenth-century Europeans to describe the Malays as piratical (e.g., Goh 2007, p. The idea that Malays were natural pirates also paved the way for several brutal colonial anti-piracy campaigns in the Malay Archipelago during the nineteenth century. This development preceded the notion of the Malays as one of humanity’s principle races, which emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century. In part, the change was due to the rise in maritime raiding on the part of certain indigenous seafaring peoples of Southeast Asia combined with increasing European commercial interests in Southeast Asia, but it was also part of a generally more negative view in Europe of non-settled and non-agricultural populations.

Second, more negative assessments gained influence after the mid-eighteenth century, and the Malays were increasingly associated with piracy, treachery, and rapaciousness. First, the European understanding of the Malay was expanded to encompass most of the indigenous population of maritime Southeast Asia. This image changed in the course of the eighteenth century. For most of the early modern period, European observers of the Malay Archipelago associated the Malays with the people and diaspora of the Sultanate of Melaka, who were seen as commercially and culturally accomplished. This article traces the long historical background of the nineteenth-century European notion of the Malay as a human “race” with an inherent addiction to piracy.