Seven Hundred Years: A History of Singapore

Global Histories. A Student Journal, 2019

in Singapore Dreaming: Managing Utopia, edited by H. Koon Wee and Jeremy Chia, 102-126. Singapore: Asian Urban Lab. , 2016

The recovery of a Southeast Asian perspective has been discussed among historians interested in "autonomous" frameworks upon the past since the 1930s, and remains a central challenge in the historiography of Singapore. This essay instigates a reevaluation of Singapore's nationalist understanding of self and "Other," so as to enable us to begin to recognise the colonial frames we routinely adopt. Histories written for nation-states are circumscribed in their scope and ambit by the limits of artificial present-day political boundaries. In the case of accounts written for small city-states, such as Singapore, this constraint is a serious shortcoming. The default geographical limits assumed for a nation-state is woefully inadequate in addressing the very different connections, boundaries, and terrains of older political, economic and cultural spheres in a longue-duree perspective of maritime trade and of the fortunes of ports. This is the case for the scope and timeline ambition set up for the book Singapore: A 700-year History (henceforth SG700). This essay is an excerpt from a longer presentation for the Singapore Dreaming Conference in February 2015. It addresses a gap in the perspective of Singapore history and the trade of the Singapore Straits presented in the book SG700 and in the prevailing standard accounts and popular understanding. The excluded events are crucial components in the history of the English, Chinese, and Archipelago traders in the Straits of Singapore and in the major international port cities of the Archipelago before Singapore's founding - in other words, in places beyond our present-day territorial waters. Singapore's initial survival and prosperity in the 191h century has also not been contextualised within larger regional developments, and consequently we possess a truncated notion of our history, cut off from knowledge of the older regional links that were of immense significance to Singapore and her early trade communities. This essay also discusses the dual port that developed in Singapore. An overlooked indigenous royal port-town existed alongside the English trade post, and the former's crucial role and economic significance is absent in existing accounts. The narratives supplied here involve widening our historical consciousness and consequently our capacities for imagining beyond our narrow vision of our position based on the colonial perspective vis-a-vis those of the Archipelago or Nusantara.

Chapters on Asia 2021, 2022

The Circulation of Premodern Knowledge of Singapore and Its Straits before 1819 Chapters On Asia such as Mary Turnbull and Lim Joo-Jock were equally unenthusiastic about a search for Singapore's older roots, adding that the historical record relating to Singapore and its straits before the 19th century was not only scarce but also fragmentary, vague and contradictory.3 Not only was making sense of these references of premodern Singapore discouraged, it was also seen as unfashionable and unprofitable.4 However, the scholarship in the past three decades has challenged these assumptions. Archaeological work and archival research, in particular, have shown that there was a thriving settlement and that precolonial Singapore was not as irrelevant as once assumed.5 As more testimonies come to light, historians are now working towards unifying them into the longer narrative of Singapore's past.6 Despite this progress, we have yet to tackle these references found in European literature, as hinted at by Swettenham long ago. Hence the objective of this paper is to collect these references related to Singapore and its straits in European literature and question whether they are as scarce, fragmentary, vague and contradictory as formerly supposed. Lim Joo-Jock had in 1991 suggested two possible approaches: either one can summarise all the available evidence and present them in chronological order, or one can focus on the tangible pieces and draw a series of insights from them.7 Sophie Sim has rightly deemed these approaches insufficient, because they lack critical analysis and fail to deal with the power and ambiguities of memory.8 Here I adapt these suggestions and perspectives in the following manner. First, I quantify the references about Singapore or its straits in European literature, focusing on the genre of these publications,

Department of History, National University of Singapore, 2012

Over two centuries have passed since the revelation of the existence of an ancient settlement in Singapore, but knowledge of this pre-colonial polity has not advanced much with time. Despite the archaeological recovery of material cultural remains of this settlement in recent years, historical discourse on the subject remains largely confined to either the epistemological significance of this settlement in the colonial and post-colonial histories of the Malay-speaking people in the Malay Archipelago, or the general importance of this landmark within the context of maritime trade in Southeast Asia. More often than not, artefacts are used only to highlight these narratives but are themselves seldom addressed. This thesis is hence dedicated to the study of these artefacts as primary sources of 14th century Singapore. It seeks to address a fundamental question which underlies all narratives of the settlement but has hitherto been inadequately addressed by conjunctures and hypotheses: How complex was this pre-colonial Singapore society? In doing so, this thesis will first address the historiographical issues underlying this question by reviewing existing literature and primary sources concerning this pre-colonial entity. Deductions from the analysis of material cultural remains sampled from the archaeological site at the churchyard of the Saint Andrew’s Cathedral (STA) will next be made. Finally, statistically-measured variations in their site distribution will reflect the nature of the settlement’s spatial organization from which the degree of social complexity in pre-colonial Singapore can eventually be discerned.

Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2018

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