Chapter 6 focuses on the British Straits Settlements and the Malay States. At the edge of the imperial frontier, where Chinese organizations and their attendant customs had long held sway, British laws and institutions struggled to gain a foothold. From its precarious state in the early 1870s, in the course of a few decades, Britain’s toehold on the Malay Peninsula would solidify in the Straits Settlements and extend to encompass the Malay States. The rapid extension of state control over labor transformed one of the empire’s most strategically vital cities and some of its most inaccessible and unruly territory from, or so British officials would claim, locales of lawless immorality to models of civilized behavior, orderly governance, and stable prosperity. As the overseer-state struggled to establish its political supremacy against highly resilient cultural and economic systems established previously by the Chinese Secret Societies and kongsi, its success or failure hinged increasingly on its ontological power to define moral governance and just rule. In this sense, British colonial authority in the Straits Settlements was synonymous with regulation of the Chinese workforce.