ABSTRACT
The history syllabuses of Malaya and Singapore in the late 1950s and early 1960s were on what Karl Hack has called a ‘Malayan’ trajectory in which both shared a common ‘Malayan outlook’ or ‘Malayan identity’. Politically, the ‘Malayan trajectory’ culminated in the merger of Malaya and Singapore in 1963, along with the Borneo states of Sarawak and Sabah, to form Malaysia. Although the history syllabuses remained separate and overseen by separate education departments, they shared a common, or very similar, historical content that reflected a multiracial and multicultural sense of ‘Malayan identity’. This identity, portrayed in the two syllabuses, was what T.N. Harper has called ‘colonial inheritance’. The ‘colonial inheritance’ was further ‘decolonized’ in the 1960s with revisions that added more Asian historical characters and events. Yet, the history syllabuses still stayed within the broad framework laid down in the 1950s.
