Malaysia

From the Malacca Sultanate and the spice straits to a multiethnic federation of peninsula and Borneo.

Malaysia's history is bound to the Strait of Malacca, the maritime artery between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, where early Malay polities and the Buddhist realm of Srivijaya gave way around 1400 to the Malacca Sultanate, the great Islamic entrepot of the Malay world. Successive European powers seized that wealth, the Portuguese in 1511, the Dutch in 1641 and the British across the nineteenth century, who knit the Straits Settlements, the Malay states and the Borneo territories of Sabah and Sarawak into British Malaya. After the Japanese occupation and the long Malayan Emergency, the Federation of Malaya won independence on 31 August 1957 and Malaysia itself was formed on 16 September 1963; Singapore separated in 1965. Today Malaysia is a multiethnic constitutional monarchy and federation shaped by the New Economic Policy, the Mahathir era and a turbulent modern democracy.