ABSTRACT
International experts, acting as third-party advisers on economic and social policy, crucially helped colonial Singapore transition into the post-independence era. The 1907 report of W.J.R. Simpson not only affected sanitary improvement and tuberculosis control but also laid the foundation for the public housing programme. So did, in a more direct way, the United Nations Mission of Experts which visited the city-state as part of its investigation of squatter settlements and slums in Southeast and South Asia in 1950–1951. The experts’ work was not merely technical but inherently political, as manifest in the brief conflict between British advisers to the early Singapore Polytechnic and the People’s Action Party government after 1959. Even more overtly, the Dutch economic planner Albert Winsemius went beyond his UN terms of reference to urge the government to retain the colonial legacy and purge the political left. In all four instances, the experts and the government were able to enjoin in collaboration and transform Singapore, ensuring the triumph of planned public housing over squatter settlements, subordinating technical education and industrial relations to the nation’s needs and advocating an open policy to foreign capital and expertise.
