The British involvement, then, was more catalytic than anything else. They didn't own the rubber plantations. They merely bought the rubber on an open market from Chinese brokers who in turn bought it from producers of various ethnicities. The market was just a few square blocks of George Town where British law was enforced, i.e. where businessmen could rely on a few basics like property rights, contracts, and a currency.

During and after World War II, the British lost what presence they had here. Penang fell to the Japanese and became a base for German U-Boats patrolling the Indian Ocean. Later, there was a somewhat messy transition to independence involving a communist insurrection and a war with Indonesia. Today, Malaysia is one of Asia's economic supernovas and evidently has decided that it will be second to none when it comes to the Internet. They are furiously wiring up the place and have established JARING, which is the Malaysian Internet (this word is a somewhat tortured English acronym that happens to spell out the Malay word for the Net).

If you have a look at JARING's homepage (www.jaring.my/jaring), you will be confronted by a link that will take you to a page reciting Malaysia's censorship laws, which, like most censorship laws, are ridiculously vague and hence sort of creepy and yet, in the context of the Internet, totally unworkable.

In a way, the architects of JARING are trying to run the Kew Gardens experiment all over again. By adopting the Internet protocol for their national information infrastructure, they have copied the same DNA that, planted in the deregulated telecom environment of the United States, has grown like some unstoppable exotic weed. Now they are trying to raise the same plant inside a hothouse (because they want it to flourish) but in a pot (because they don't want it to escape into the wild).