ABSTRACT
Singapore island has been lodged within a number of wider encompassing
systems; the island has been a site where multiple systems intersected; these
co-existing intersecting systems (each a complex social pattern) have secured
particular political relationships, allowing the participants to secure their
diverse objectives. Singapore island has been lodged within these wider sys-
tems in a series of ways and has played a number of different roles in line
with dominant elite interests: Malay, British and Chinese. In each set of
structures there were different actors and institutions; and between agents within each sphere there were complex exchanges. These forms of life have
interacted on Singapore island; at any one time a particular mix of elements
could be found, ordered according to shifting political relationships. There
is no one Singapore; there is only the tale told now of the trajectory sket-
ched out by successive elite accommodations to changing unfolding cir-
cumstances; contemporary arrangements are contingent; the trajectory
could have been different; elites could have acted otherwise; the future is
British traders, moving eastwards from their bases in India, advancing
towards the goal of China, entered the extant Malay world; they encoun-
tered an established form of life, a coherent civilization, a regional econ-
omy.2 The Malay world comprised numerous maritime trading empires;
their economies were based on seaborne trade; there were extensive net-
works of trade; political power and authority rested upon control of a key
port; politics were ordered around the person of the sultan. European tra-
ders participated in an existing trading system; the networks were complex, so too the politics; country powers and traders manoeuvred for advantage;
foreign encroachment was persistent. The British manoeuvred against the
Dutch and local country powers; the episode is complex as there were
multiple agents; the British slowly displaced Malays and migrants flowed
into the settlement; the island was embedded within three spheres, British,
Malay and Chinese, and was a mechanism for discrete and interlinked trade
flows; Singapore island was a local and regional trade nexus.3 The late
nineteenth-century industrial production and mass consumer markets within the European capitalist heartlands placed new demands on Southeast
Asian economies for tin, rubber, sugar, oil and so on; Singapore became a
conduit for the extraction of tropical agricultural, mineral and primary
products and for the introduction of European manufactures; the new eco-
nomic relationship was mediated by the establishment of new political arrangements both in the peninsula and in Singapore island as the colonial
power asserted control; a formal colonial system was established to order a
global trading role. The colonial system endured until it was destroyed by
the Imperial Japanese advance into Southeast Asia; the end of the Pacific
War saw the colonial power returning; however, at this time the idea of
empire was untenable; an uneasy process of colonial retreat followed. After
independence in 1965 the Singapore state regime, centred on the PAP, pre-
sided over a major reorientation of the economy and society: inviting in the multinational corporations and making a dependent capitalist economy, a
global trading hub.4
