The Littoral and the Literary: Making Moral Communities in the Straits Settlements and the Gold Coast in the late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

doi:10.5117/9789089643247-5

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The Littoral and the Literary: Making Moral Communities in the Straits Settlements and the Gold Coast in the late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT

In late 2009, I returned to Singapore after several months abroad. Eager to catch up on the popular history I had missed, I started browsing in the relevant section of Borders on Orchard Road. I picked up, not without some effort, the weighty 800-page Men in White: The Untold Story of Singapore’s People’s Action Party. Opening the first few pages, I scanned its table of contents. The name of a single politician, understandably, was prominently featured early on in the story, yet he kept returning and returning, almost two decades after he stepped down as prime minister of Singapore. “Can PAP,” the book’s authors wondered even in their last chapter, “survive LKY?” (Yap, Lim and Leong 2009: 641).