Oh quite a bit, but it certainly wasn't immediate, direct, or sometime even entirely intended. I'm going to refer mostly to Singapore even though the Straits Settlements were bigger than that mostly because a) while the specific details are different the disparate areas were governed or ungoverned in roughly the same way and b) Singapore became very rapidly the most prominent port and site of administration was transferred 9 year after settlement and had the most interesting history. Penang served as a penal colony and Dinding never really grew out of backwater status, while Malacca, undervalued by the Dutch and hence not developed for trade, had less economic and social importance. Also note that even though the British never acquired the lands north of the Singapore River in the 1819 acquisition from the Sultan of Johor, between then and the actual acquisition of the land the native population, Chinese or Malay, made no distinction of the two areas.

I think it's necessary to look at what Singaporean/Straits society was like prior to 1867, namely between the drafting of the Raffles plan in 1823 and the passing from company to crown. Singapore itself and its environs was an obvious spot for an entrepot and patrolling the area for piracy as well as curbing Dutch influence but really there was very little viable agriculture at the time. Pepper and Gambier were the main cash crops that were cultivated, and not in great amounts to begin with. Trade was going to be the lifeblood of the area but guess what, the EIC had an official monopoly to trade in Singapore at the time of the settlement and this didn't apply to the Chinese, so between 1823 and 1834, when the monopoly was lifted to allow firms like Jardine Matheson to establish a presence, Chinese traders had already began to outnumber the European traders and establish a form of autonomous self-ruling "secret society" based and decentralized but parallel system of governance. While different dialects used different terms I'll use the term kongsi 公司 (which, incidentally, means company or corporation today) as it was used as nomenclature then and reflected this agri-business based - at least to a degree - Chinese system of near self-governance that the Company pretty much let run free before 1867.

The story gets kind of crazy and gets a bit long. Bear with me. British self-deprecation is ultimately in part based on the cruel realities that frequently they had no idea what the hell was going on in the colonies.

Raffles knew that there were Chinese planter in the area by the time he arrived, and even before. He governed Bencoolen on the outside of Java and was a competitor in pepper plantations, and served in Penang and Malacca. When the Sultan of Johor signed away Singapore and territories just north of the Singapore River in 1819 to Raffles there were already 20 Gambier plantation. While it was never specifically stated, the segregated nature of the original design of Singapore had been speculated to accommodate separation as overseas Chinese tended to - and still to this day - form native-place associations that both governed a certainly trade, industry, as well as the social needs of anyone from a particular locality. This was also true in Singapore even before the British came and this was not unique to Singapore. What soon became apparently unique to Singapore is that Singapore was essentially undergoverned in an absurd an almost hysterically inept way before 1867.

Between the time Raffles sorted the details of who actually owned the island and who governed it between him, the Company, the Dutch, and the Sultan of Johor, his right hand man an deputy was one Major General William Farquhar, apparently some direct ancestor of the current Canadian Prime Minister, hailing from Aberdeenshire and a speaker of Malay, handy in dealing with the local Malay leader, the Temmengong, who had actual control of the island. Raffles left him there for 4 years and Farquhar was named resident. While the plan Raffles and his engineer Phillip Jackson drew up with gridded streets and segregation was followed, Farquhar decided that the place should be made as attractive to traders as possible and decided to let opium smugglers and slave traders in on the action. By the time Raffles returned in 1823 the cat's out of the bag. Farquhar was fired in May of 1823 and replaced by Dr. John Crawfurd. The locals quite liked Farquhar, for obvious reasons - he essentially let them do what they wanted, and whether intended to or not this policy of salutary neglect and laissez-faire entrepot economic planning continued in Singapore, and serves as the precursor to their economic system today.

So you bring in another Scot who speaks Malay, what does he you? The exact. Same. Thing. Crawfurd built infrastructure but spent most of the time figuring out terms with the Sultan of Johor as to a formal treaty with the Dutch, signed next year. By the time there was a legally agreed upon Singapore, it was basically a wild west meets Mos Eisley meets Asia. A couple years later the Company transferred it under the Presidency of Bengal and henceforth ran either by a civil servant more familiar with India than Malay or for a bit, "governed directly from Bengal", aka not governed by anyone at all. Between 1826 and 1830 the Residency was located in Penang and there was no official Resident or Governor for much of 1843.

It wasn't as if there weren't Europeans in Singapore, but there were very few administrators, and no governor of Singapore prior to the transfer to the crown even spoke Chinese of any sort, which became the majority language in 1827. The transfer to Bengal Jurisdiction reduced British civil servants actually stationed there in any senior administrative capacity from 19 to 8, and actually, by the time it was transferred to the crown, the Company could only pay the salary of two senior administrators. The colony was insolvent because it was a free port, smuggling or no smuggling, opium or no opium, it was favored by traders but the company by treaty couldn't collect excise from them. While residents are supposed to be ratepayers - taxpayers essentially, because ratepayers needed to be British and essentially white, none of the Chinese or Malay had to pay. So by 1840 there were 500 Europeans paying a pittance to run the colony and a ridiculous amount of trade, 10 time as many Chinese organized into little societies closed to the outside world engaging in trade and agriculture that couldn't be taxed - oh did I mention that the different kongsi would fight in the streets for control and the British called it "Chinese Riots" because no magistrate or police officers - and there weren't many - ever actually spoke any of the dialects to find out what the hell was going on? Finally in 1840 someone decided that "we need to make money, there's opium around, fuck it, let's just open the floodgates" and started a system of excise farming. Also note that while the Company didn't manage to appoint any Chinese speaker to any administrative positions or the police, there were plenty of private merchants and middlemen who were effectively bilingual and so trade worked quite well, administration, not so much.

And then we get to excise farming. This is a ridiculous idea today but it was quite popular once upon a time. Excise farming, in its most basic form, was the selling of the right to monopolize a certain trade, industry, business, whatever, in the form of a license recognized by the government, in exchange for a fee and the right to tax. Prior to this, there was no official monopoly based on place of origin in any trade, although informal ones existed. The administration simply made it official. A kongsi, represented by a leader and through a bilingual middleman, would negotiate and bid on these farms, and there were farm for everything: opium, of course, but also gambling, prostitution, as well as the more traditional stuff like gambier and pepper, actual farming. Opium farming elsewhere made up for 50% of the Company's revenue, why shouldn't it work? Officially the farms were sold to individuals but in reality, it was being sold to a kongsi, so it was being sold to something that in reality operated as a mix of a charity and a street gang. Because different kongsi and different assets and abilities and an ever-rotating membership due to the transient nature of the coolie world, whenever one got stronger, one would attempt to force a sale of the farm, and the British were never the wiser. These "Chinese riots" over excise farming happened in 1846, 1851, and 1854. The right to sale also came with the right to plant and before you know it, agriculture shifted to planting opium, the most profitable, with gambier and pepper moving north of the river. Changing political winds in China brought in more immigrants. Catholics arrived and didn't feel like they needed to adhere to the excise farm system, so they had a street fight, the Catholics lost, and with it 500 acres and 28 plantations burned. Then the Small Sword Society arrived after being expelled from Shanghai during the Taiping Rebellion. Having one strong Kongsi would've helped the British out a lot to maintain social order, but it was essentially unchecked and no kongsi ever had a permanent stranglehold on power, compared to say, Shanghai where the Green Gang effectively took over by the late 1800s.

So at the time of the transition, Singapore had around 500 European or Eurasian merchants, around 50,000 Malay and Chinese, 1 magistrate, 15 policemen who did not speak the local language, many small gangs, 2 senior administrators. Then, the crown took over.

Continued below.