ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter seems most appropriate. The metaphor is taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, whose setting of an island shipwreck was based on an early colonial adventure which did in fact end in that lamentable condition. More significant is the broad characteristic of modern colonial empire as seaborne, a geographical condition suited, if at all, to that first phase of industrialization when the European world was powered by steam and structured with iron and steel. Some easily found statistical proof of this contention is found in Lloyd’s Register (1910-11) which indicated that Great Britain, Germany, and France in 1910 had a combined mercantile steamship fleet of 1,965 iron-hull ships and 9,074 steel ones, all over 100 tons. (In the same year construction began on the 45,000 ton Titanic.) Much of that shipping was directed toward the Far East and its major port of Singapore, which was the location of W. Somerset Maugham’s short story, “P & O,” published in the 1920s. After describing the port, Maugham concludes:
In the soft light of the evening the busy scene was strangely touched with mystery, and you felt that all those vessels, their activity for the moment suspended, waited for some event of a peculiar significance.
That event came little more than ten years later, on February 15, 1942, when approximately 70,000 British colonial troops surrendered the city to the Japanese. The invaders did not come from the sea but overland, down the Johore peninsula of Malaya. The city’s fall may be said to mark the end of what the Indian historian K. M. Panikkar has called the “Vasco da Gama Epoch,” the European maritime domination of Asia, begun when da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in Calicut in 1498.
