Situating Temasik within the Larger Regional Context: Maritime Asia and Malay State Formation in the Pre-Modern Era

Singapore’s history as a port settlement has, until very recently, been considered to date from around 1819. The general consensus had been that no significant settlement existed prior to that date. Indeed, the late Raffles Professor of History at the University of Singapore — Wong Lin Ken — once commented that “no historian has yet adequately explained why Singapore failed to be a major trading centre before the nineteenth century” (Wong 1981: 15).