History Commons^™

Shakila Yacob And Nicholas White, ‘The “Unfinished Business” Of Malaysia’S Decolonisation: The Origins Of The Guthrie Dawn Raid’, Shakila P. Yacob Associate Professor

Shakila Yacob

In a ‘dawn raid’ on the London Stock Exchange on 7 September 1981, the premiere British rubber and oil palm conglomerate in Malaysia, the Guthrie Corporation Limited, was taken into local control in less than four hours. Thiswas the most dramatic Malaysian acquisition of a foreign company during the restructuring of the country’s post-colonial economy during the 1970s and 1980s, and the Guthrie Dawn Raid remains a celebrated but, at the same time, contested juncture in contemporary Malaysian memory. Drawing upon a variety of sources—including original interviews and correspondence with key participants in, and observers of, the Guthrie Dawn Raid, …