Studies on the international history of fourteenth-century Singapore have been hitherto limited to external trade conducted by local inhabitants, and material consumption patterns that this trade enabled them to develop. Broader regional cultural influences have been postulated though not clearly demonstrated, given scant textual records and limited material culture remains. This article seeks to examine the external influences, adaptation and assimilation in the production and consumption of fourteenth-century Singapore. In particular, it looks at three aspects of Singapore's pre-colonial existence — modes of economic production, patterns of consumption of international products, and the articulation of high culture vis-à-vis external entities. By examining available archaeological, epigraphic, art historical and cartographic data from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries, this article postulates how distinct consumption patterns may have developed among different riverside populations living north of the Singapore River. This study also questions the common view that Singapore developed as a cosmopolitan port-city only after the advent of British colonialism, demonstrating that its diversity and openness was likely a feature centuries before.

Ancient Singapore is often discussed exclusive of its cultural and historical context, a backward projection of the modern, independent city-state. Temasek is understood mainly in terms of being a maritime entrepôt with extensive trade connections. This research is interested in Temasek as a proto-historic Malay port-city, namely its social, political and economic organisation. It is an aspect of early Singapore, and of the Malay World, in general, we know very little about. However, more than three decades of archaeology have provided a wealth of data related to daily life in the settlement and the data has provided hints of a diverse sociocultural landscape. This study focuses on the relationship between metal production and social organisation, and employs a conceptual and interpretative framework that is both multidisciplinary and cross-cultural. Craft production is as much a social and political phenomenon as an economic and technological one, and studies of production systems can shed light on issues of power and control over resources and labour. The data suggest the presence of a social stratum that could generate and mobilise resources independent of the ruling elite. Metals were rare and valuable commodities during this period, however, the ruling class in Temasek did not appear to control nor restrict production of iron and copper-based goods as it did with glass. The results are by no means the final word on ancient Singapore or Malay society. Instead it provides a provisional model that can be tested with archaeological data, refined and expanded as more material becomes available.

Munsyi Abdullah and his better-known writings, Kisah Pelayaran Abdullah (1838) and Hikayat Abdullah (1843), are much-discussed in the historiography of early British colonial Singapore. However, Amin Sweeney's efforts to historicise some aspects of Abdullah's life and writings have established that Abdullah was much more than a sharp social critic of Malays and their rulers. He is better understood as a subtle critic and even a manipulator of his European interlocutors who craftily used his occidental contacts and connections alongside his local knowledge to preserve his role as a cultural intermediary in a burgeoning port settlement. Sweeney's efforts bring into focus a multifaceted imperial experience where notions like ‘interactions’ and ‘connections’ become viable descriptive categories in making sense of the intersections of Abdullah and empire, thereby strongly resonating with networked conceptions of imperial space propounded by ‘new’ imperial history. Taken alongside the recent literary and theoretical efforts of Jan van der Putten and Sanjay Krishnan respectively on Abdullah, and the carefully circumscribed historical efforts of Ian Proudfoot, the recent historiography of Abdullah offers fresh interpretive possibilities of early colonial Singapore. Leveraging such developments to engage with Mary Turnbull's scripting of a gruesome episode in 1823 indicates that Turnbull's historiographical dominance of Singapore's early colonial history can be transcended to better represent British coloniality, warts and all.

Colonial Singapore witnessed the movement and settling of Chinese, Malay, Indian, Arab, European and other mercantile groups as a free port and emporium of the British Empire. This social landscape was defined by boundaries between the different ethnic communities, often drawn up by the British, in contrast to the cosmopolitan exchanges of the market. This article focuses on the Indian business communities which had played a significant role in maritime trade networks since pre-colonial times and continued to be a part of Singapore's developing society and economy in the British period. A minority in the colonial era port city and largely confined within intra-ethnic economic and social circuits, Indians participated in the complex colonial structure of trade and credit alongside British, European and Asian traders and merchant houses, as brokers, agents, and retailers. British hegemony over the Indian subcontinent was both an advantage and a disadvantage for these Indian trading communities. This article brings to light the history of Indian networks in the colonial transnational flows of capital and entrepreneurship, and their patterns of integration into and role in the development of Singapore, a role marginalised in the scholarship and the national narratives alike by a focus on the large-scale Indian labour migrations.

The year 1819 is almost universally taken as a seminal date in Singapore historiography. Yet Stamford Raffles’ founding of a British trading post there was controversial from the start. The Dutch and the British haggled as to whether or not Raffles had overstepped his authority, and whether the trading post was legal. From the start, the Dutch demanded that the British quit their occupation of Singapore. During a three-year hiatus in the Anglo–Dutch negotiations (1820–23), Anton Reinhard Falck, the lead Dutch negotiator, decided to drop claims to Singapore in favour of a rearrangement of possessions in the archipelago. Crucially, he concluded that dropping claims over Singapore would not amount to a real loss. Instead, Falck hoped to use Singapore as a bargaining chip to squeeze additional concessions from the British. The Dutch formally relinquished their claim over Singapore in article 12 of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty, which gave full recognition and legitimacy to the British post, and sanctioned a breakup of the Johor-Riau Empire with the Singapore Straits acting as a notional dividing line. Earlier studies were substantially based on English-language materials and present the British as dominating the negotiations. The present article, based on Dutch archival materials as well as studies and sources in French, Dutch and English, reveals a fuller story of diplomatic disputes, territorial concessions, errors of judgement, and the triggering of the Dutch empire in the archipelago, in a paper war for the contested space of Singapore.

This article explores the idea of Singapore's repute as the ‘Liverpool of the East’ and the depictions of Britain's maritime empire in Asia. It does so via two important cruises related to the British Empire. The first is the Royal Tour of 1901 and the second cruise was the Empire Cruise of 1923 to 1924. By examining the reception afforded to both royal and naval visitors, this article argues that we have insights into what it meant for Singapore as a port city in a British maritime and imperial network. This article explores how Singapore was depicted as a maritime hub through these tours and concludes with a reflection that similar descriptions still hold a place in modern descriptions of Singapore.

While Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles led the expedition that founded colonial Singapore in 1819 and conceptualised many of the early institutions that developed the trade port, it was the depiction and commemoration of his time in the region that made him an icon of imperial mythology. This was part of a process in which admiration of his name and exploits were exalted, ultimately representing a core element in the Victorian mentality, the need to create heroes to glorify the British Empire. This article will survey and analyse how the commemoration of Raffles in the first 75 years of colonial rule, through the commissioning of statues and the attachment of his name to establishments and institutions, solidified and justified a British presence in the region and larger imperial history, which continues to echo in the modern nation-state of Singapore and its history.

1819 represents a highly charged moment in the Singapore imagination. It marks the birth of our modern city-state, yet it also signals the beginning of our colonisation: the domination of Malay and other Asian cultures by Western powers. Artists have thus responded to the event with widely variant attitudes, ranging from E.W. Jesudason's laudatory Raffles Institution Anthem (c.1963–66) to Isa Kamari's stridently anti-colonial novel, Duka Tuan Bertakhta / 1819 (2011). The prevailing sentiment, however, has been one of playful ambivalence. While accepting the fact of colonisation, artists have rejected a founding myth that glorifies our primary colonist, Sir Stamford Raffles. Instead, we have lampooned him in works like Robert Yeo's play The Eye of History (1991) and Colin Goh's film Talking Cock: The Movie (2002); raised ourselves to the height of his statue in Lee Wen's art event Untitled (Raffles) (2001); highlighted narratives of overlooked figures in the drama of colonisation: William Farquhar, Sophia Raffles, Nonio Clement, Sultan Hussein Shah, Munsyi Abdullah, and Sang Nila Utama. As a cultural researcher and author of the biographical drama The Last Temptation of Stamford Raffles (2008), I shall examine trends behind these divergent representations of our colonisation. I argue that artists have chosen to retell 1819 not as a year of conquest, but as a polymorphous moment of transformative contact between East and West; one in which we may view ourselves, not as the victims of change, but as its agents.

Most of the research presented in this special issue questions the notion of a singular Singaporean story, and yet this narrative persists as a form of Gramscian common sense for most Singaporeans, whether young or old, and also for recent immigrants and international commentators. To understand the reasons for this persistence, I turn to American political scientist Rogers M. Smith's concept of narratives of peoplehood, and in particular his notion of ethically constitutive stories that are central to individual subject formation. The role of the colonial past in such stories of Singapore is contradictory, in that the relationship between colonialism and the nation-state is seen simultaneously in terms of rupture and continuity, and this conceals a further contradiction in terms of the relationship between individual and the collective. In exploring these contradictions, and in tracing reparative possibilities for new stories of peoplehood, I will, in conclusion, turn to recent literary narratives, and in particular recent historical speculative fiction that revisions the colonial past.

In Asia, and in Southeast Asia in particular, the Cold War was far from cold, witnessing the most deadly conflicts and political massacres of the second half of the twentieth century. Also, the clash of ideologies there did not follow a binary logic but included a third force, nationalism, which was rooted in the anticolonialist movements of the interwar years and played a significant role even in countries that decolonised peacefully after the end of the Second World War. The Cold War thus overlapped with the twin process of decolonisation and nation-building, which had its founding moment at the Asian-African Conference at Bandung in 1955, where the non-aligned camp, which advocated a neutral position vis-à-vis the two rival blocs, coalesced (one year ealier, the anticommunist Southeast Asia Treaty Organization had been established). Postcolonial aspirations to national progress that tied socioeconomic development to the civic and cultural elevation of the citizenry were widely shared among newly decolonised countries. By the mid-1960s, however, the utopian ‘Bandung Spirit’ had lost ground to Cold War realpolitik; intra-Asian and communal conflicts fomented by Cold War enmities (the Sino–Indian War of 1962, the Indo–Pakistani War of 1965, Indonesia's anticommunist purges of 1965–66) along with the escalation of the Vietnam War and the consequent exacerbation of regional divisions, belied governments’ earlier commitment to human rights, Third World solidarity and world peace. The authoritarian involution of several Asian countries that were often American allies, redoubled by the opening of their economies to multinational corporations, led many artists and intellectuals to embrace political activism. The conception of art as a revolutionary instrument in the service of the masses had been famously articulated by Mao Zedong at the Yan'an Forum in 1942. In China, Mao's prescriptions on art were sidelined, though never officially repudiated, only in the early 1990s, following the end of the Cold War and the adoption of a socialist market economy, by acknowledging the necessity ‘to respect and guarantee the creativity of individuals’.