We explore the socioeconomic experience of a group of south Indian Tamil laborers and their families who established the Chuah Tamil agricultural settlement in British Malaya during the Great Depression. These were laborers who, though unemployed, refused to be repatriated to south India. Progressing from subsistence farming to small-scale agricultural production, their settlement evolved into an organized, socioeconomic system. It was also a critical field experiment for the British to assess the viability of a self-generating labor pool. In this article, we examine the social history of the settlers and the development of the Chuah Tamil colony within the context of Britain's overarching desire to create a labor source. Our study contributes to the reconciliation of microsocial history and colonialism, as well as to global labor history more broadly, by situating the settlers’ experience and the settlement itself in relation to historical contemporaries.

我们探讨了大萧条时期在英属马来亚建立了楚亚泰米尔农业定居点的一群南印度泰米尔劳工及其家人的社会经济经历。这些劳工虽然失业，但拒绝被遣返回印度南部。从自给农业发展到小规模农业生产，他们的定居点演变成一个有组织的社会经济体系。对于英国人来说，这也是评估自产劳动力库可行性的一项关键实地实验。在本文中，我们在英国创造劳动力来源的总体愿望的背景下研究了定居者的社会历史和蔡泰米尔殖民地的发展。我们的研究通过将定居者的经历和定居点本身与历史上的同时代人联系起来，有助于微观社会历史和殖民主义的调和，以及更广泛的全球劳工史。