Singapore: A Modern History by Michael D. Barr

Singapore: A Modern History Reviews

• 
  Harooon

  Lee Kuan Yew barely held back tears as he announced his country’s independence on August 7, 1965:
  
  

  
  Now I, Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore, do hereby proclaim and declare on behalf of the people and the Government of Singapore that as from today the ninth day of August in the year one thousand nine hundred and sixty-five Singapore shall forever be a sovereign democratic and independent nation, founded upon the principles of liberty and justice and ever seeking the welfare and happiness of her people in a more just and equal society.
  

  
  
  After being kicked out of Malaysia, Singapore was in a bad place. It was a swampy, undeveloped third-world country, with no natural resources and surrounded by enemies on all sides, with a communist insurgency growing within.
  
  Two months later in the Serangoon gardens, Lee outlined his vision of an independent Singapore:
  
  

  
  …if you want a nation and a society to flourish and to prosper, it mustproduce leaders. And leadership is not just being clever and writing essays. You need men of action: sportsmen, gymnasts, rugby players , boxers, outward bound school types, rowers, sailors, airmen, leaders of debating societies, organisers of men. In other words, the whole orientation of your education is different. Your purpose is to breed a fighting, effective generation with the guts and the will to survive. And if we are finally to be overwhelmed by forces bigger than ourselves, then I say it will be "Over our dead bodies".
  

  
  
  Against all the odds, little Singapore prevailed. Against ethnically-based identity politics, Lee’s government promoted meritocracy. Its free-trade principles allowed it to grow its economy and develop its housing and industry. Massive infrastructure programs housed those who were living in slumtowns along the filthy Singapore river. In just one generation it had raised itself up to the living conditions of a first-world country, far beyond what anyone could have imagined for it in 1965.
  
  Unraveling the Myth
  
  This has been the received narrative for a long time. The extent to which it is Singapore’s actual history - as opposed to a national mythology - has been a subject of long debate, especially since Lee Kuan Yew’s death in 2015. A flurry of revisionist histories have come out since then, seeking to understand Singapore’s history on more objective grounds.
  
  Instead of understanding Singapore as the product of two great men, Sir Stamford Raffles and Lee Kuan Yew, Michael D. Barr argues that we should see it in the context of southeast Asia’s broader geopolitical patterns. For a long time, mastery of this area depended on a ruler’s practical ability to control the flow of goods on the sea-lanes between India and China. As one port declined, another grew to replace it, ebb and flow.
  
  More than just a humid swampland, Singapore was an island at the centre of the world’s busiest shipping lane, as much a subject to the broader geopolitical patterns of southeast Asia as those polities around it. Much of the first part of Michael D. Barr’s book is about establishing this pattern, so he can show its effect on the social and commercial life of Singapore. He does this by drawing on recent historical and archaeological work by Carl A. Trocki, A. C. Milner, and John K. Miksic.
  
  Ebb and Flow
  
  In pre-modern southeast Asia, “the level of administration was rudimentary to the point where the modern citizen would not recognise it as such.” (66). Politics was inherently elitist, but a raja could rule only at the behest of his followers. Though born into his position, it was the practical support of his followers which allowed a raja to sustain his authority and project his power over the sea-lanes. The sea-lanes were always more important to a raja than large contiguous land borders, as much of the land was impassable jungle and mountain. “Domains were not demarcated by geographical land borders, but by the personal reach and alliances of rajas based in port cities.” (68).
  
  In the Malay Annals - an ancient, semi-mythological chronicle of Kings - it is recorded how the raja of Palembang was driven out of his territory by the newly ascendant Majapahits. He fled to Singapore with his followers, establishing a city there which flourished as a port. Only several years later, it was abandoned. We don’t know the full extent of why, but it is the first time we know of that Singapore had any significance as a political entity.
  
  The locus of power shifted again with the collapse of the Majapahits, this time to a series of rulers based in Malacca/Johor. This came to an end in 1699 with the murder of Sultan Mahmud Syah, whose subjects could no longer tolerate him; apparently he would take their wives for himself, only to discard and thereby disgrace them once he got bored.
  
  Into the vacuum emerged a new Malay/Bugis consortium based in Johor/Riau. The Bugis were a sea-faring people from further south that had migrated into the region. The new pre-eminence of the Bugis bred resentment. When the Dutch arrived in the region, the Malays sided with the Dutch in order to overthrow the Bugis. They were defeated in 1784 and their most important port-city, Riau, was razed.
  
  Then came the British. They had already established themselves in the reigon by acquiring the island of Penang - located at the north entrance of the Straits - in 1786. More important ports like Aceh were already under Dutch influence. Fearing they would be cut out entirely, British traders were seeking a new port closer to the mouth of the Straits. In 1818, Stamford Raffles found a location for a new port that had no existing Dutch claims: Singapore.
  
  The Early Days
  
  Raffles masterminded the Treaty of Singapore, after which the island fell under the joint sovereignty of the East India Company, Sultan Hussain of Johor, and his Temenggong, Abdul Rahman. It was a dubious legal arrangement, signed without the Sultan’s knowledge, which rankled the colonial administrators: they wanted to reduce their operating costs and were more interested in maximising their profits in India. But Raffles was willing to run Singapore on a shoe-string budget, driven by his burning belief in free trade, and so long as he kept things under control, they were willing to let him do his thing.
  
  The main task of the Singaporean administration was to stop piracy. Based on Raffles’ belief in free trade, there were no excise duties or income taxes. The combination of free trade and protection from the British navy attracted many traders - Asian and European - whose actions, totally independent of any government initiative, became the economic life of the island.
  
  Since there were no taxes, the administration often struggled to make ends meet. Its only method of raising income was to auction off its monopolies to local traders, who paid a regular rental fee for possessing it. These were called “tax farms”. They could be literal farms, but also firms that produced or distributed consumer products. There was a “neat symbiosis between tax farms that grew nothing (but sold both the necessities and the vices that made life tolerable) and agricultural farms that, among other businesses, grew gambier and pepper. The Chinese labourers working and living on the farms served as both the exploited workers and the exploited consumers in this political economy.” (83).
  
  Beyond stopping piracy, the administration had little influence on Singaporean society. This was largely driven by the pre-existing institutions, the most important of which were the kongsi. This was a uniquely Chinese system, something of a cross between a charity organisation and a joint business venture, and a precursor to the secret societies that came to dominate Singapore in the late 19th century. The European traders who came often lacked business contacts, and the Chinese societies became their prime facilitators with Asian businessmen and traders.
  
  The Malays had their own power structures too but these were struggling to adapt to the changing times. The 1824 Anglo-Dutch treaty drew a line between Johor and Riau, the two most important ports of Sultan Hussain. And in acting without his consent, his Temenggong, Abdul Rahman, had undermined his authority. Hussain died in poverty in 1835, and the British established a new power-sharing relationship with the new Temenggong Daing Ibrahim directly, effectively ending the sultanate.
  
  Ibrahim established new economic ventures in Johor. His initial business was in gutta-percha, a kind of rubber tree whose latex was used to coat submarine telegraph cables. His business was so successful he harvested all the gutta-percha trees in one year. He moved on to pepper, gambier, and rattan plantations, as well as tin mines.
  
  To control these, he devolved authority over each river and inlet to a local Chinese headman - a kangchu, or riverlord - who was in charge of the plantation there. He based this on Singapore’s tax-farm system.
  
  As this system expanded to Johor, it drove up competition in Singapore and increased the stakes. Chinese secret societies, farming syndicates, and triad gangs fought one another for control of these monopolies. They would bribe, extort, smuggle, impose price hikes, and fight in the streets.
  
  This all lurked under the official channels of government, which had only a faint idea of all these goings-on. Singapore’s importance in the western mind only grew when it became a hub for telegraph and telephone cables. In 1882, the telegraph office was handling 10,000 messages a day from everywhere around the Anglophone world. In 1894 there were 256 telephone lives serving European businesses. (86).
  
  As the Colonial Office took a more direct interest in the Malayan peninsula, they consolidated their holdings - Penang, Malacca, and Singapore - into The Straits Settlement. Everywhere else on the peninsula they set up a British resident. They also took a more direct role in Singaporean society, outlawing the secret societies which often exploded at each other in violence, and investing money in infrastructure and education. Singapore became the most important port in the region. For Asians, it was the gateway to the west, from which new conceptions of Islam, various nationalisms, and political ideologies spread.
  
  The Occupation
  
  Barr spends little time talking about the early 20th century, skipping right ahead to the Japanese occupation of the island in World War II. Two days after it began, 10,000 Chinese civilians were massacred. Numerous others were rounded up and taken away. The Chinese were treated especially harshly in comparison to the Malays and Indians, some of whom were sympathetic to the Japanese, including Malay nationalists in the Young Malay Union.
  
  This mistreatment emboldened the communist movement. They waged an insurgency from the jungles, which was armed and funded by the British. When the war was over, the communists were welcomed back into the cities as heroes. They began to mete out a somewhat arbitrary and punitive justice against those who collaborated with the Japanese, or whom they simply disliked.
  
  As Britain marched towards decolonisation, it wasn’t clear what shape the Malayan peninsula would take. Ethnic tensions were high. Certain political groups effectively became synonymous with expressions of ethnic pride and identity, such as the Chinese and the communist groups. Britain had lost confidence in the ability of the Malay sultans to govern, so administrators pushed for a new Malayan federation, into which Penang and Malacca were integrated. They retained direct control of Singapore though for two reasons: one, it was an important port; two, being majority Chinese, it allayed Malay fears about Chinese domination.
  
  Once the war was over, Britain disbanded the communist militias. Many refused to hand over their weapons and continued to fight an insurgency for the next two decades. In response to this, over a million Chinese in Malaya were resettled into 600 new towns so their activities could be monitored and the insurgency campaign starved out. Rather than live in these compounds, many Chinese left for Singapore, and a series of unplanned, overpopulated, off-the-grid kampungs and shanty-towns sprung up there.
  
  Towards Independence
  
  In the 1950s, well-organised left-wing groups with revolutionary wings gave way to undisciplined, grass-roots populism. Singapore was also beginning to gain more rights to self-government. At the time of its first election, the Chinese population was largely unenfranchised. The first Chief Minister of Singapore was David Marshall, who led an Anglo-dominated Labour party to victory. A principled man, Marshall made many attempts to push for a greater degree of self-government. When Britain would not take him seriously, he resigned.
  
  The leader of the opposition was Lee Kuan Yew of the People’s Action Party. His star had begun to rise at this time for a variety of reasons. As the opposition leader during the Marshall government - which was trying to negotiate with Britain for more self-rule - Lee wasn’t compromised by the taint of collaborating with the colonial administration, and could maintain his pristine hard-line left-wing anti-colonial credentials. Western-educated, with an eye for the manners that defined polite British society, he could also able to present himself as a credible mainstream political leader to the colonial office.
  
  His party soaked up the populist energy sweeping Singapore. This included a 1957 City Council election, spearheaded by Ong Eng Guan, and the 1959 election, after which Lee Kuan Yew emerged as the first prime minister. That same year the communists won the civil war in China, which caused a surge in ethno-nationalist pride among Singapore’s Chinese that opened up tensions within the party. Lee Kuan Yew’s hold on the PAP was always shaky, and in 1961 members followed Ong Eng Guan and Lim Chin Siong away to two breakaway parties, one more radical, the other more moderate.
  
  Malaysia, which had recently become an independent federation, looked on these events with despair. Its prime minister, the conservative Malay Abdul Rahman, was scared that Singapore might fall to communists. But he also didn’t like the idea of allowing Singapore, with its million Chinese, joining the federation. He privately warned Lee that Malaysia would act to crack down on the radicals - by force, if necessary.
  
  In 1963 Lee authorised the arrest of over a thousand people with claimed links to the Malayan Communist Party, in what was known as Operation Coldstore. The official narrative was a cover-story: well-organised communist groups with terrorist wings had genuine influence in the 1940s, but in 1963 the MCP had fewer than 50 members. The real reason for the arrests was so Lee could neutralise the radical actors in Singaporean politics. This had the support of both Britain and Malaysia. It was also a convenient pretext for Lee to arrest his legitimate parliamentary opposition, many of whom had nothing to do with communism.
  
  With the Singaporean radical left eliminated, Malaysia seemed open to Singapore joining the federation. Lee Kuan Yew put a referendum to his people in which they were offered three ways to say yes, and none to say no. It was obvious: Singapore was joining Malaysia.
  
  But it was a disaster.
  
  The two countries were very different. Rahman led a more rural, conservative, Islamic Malaysia, and Lee a more modern, secular, Chinese Singapore. Not all the fruits of modernity and colonisation had flowed equally to all the races and ethnic tensions were very high along the peninsula. Race riots broke out in which hundreds were killed. The two countries also had irreconcilable differences on legal systems, a common market, and citizenship laws. Lee’s habit of making inflammatory speeches didn’t help either; one of them finally landed him in a jail in Kuala Lumpur.
  
  Deputy Prime Minister Goh Keng Swee opened secret negotiations with Malaysia. Malaysia would release Lee and Singapore would leave the federation. Both parties agreed to a cover-up story in which Malaysia theatrically kicked Singapore out of the federation. This would help Singapore save face and draw attention away from Lee’s arrest.
  
  Which is where we come to the famous image of Lee tearfully announcing his country’s independence. Perhaps these emotions were genuine, an expression of real frustration at Singapore having to make its future alone. But the official narrative masked what was actually a deliberate, bilateral agreement, carefully designed to create an atmosphere of insecurity into which the PAP could reassert themselves. Singapore’s independence was a shock even to Britain and Australia. The secret negotiations were kept a secret for more than 30 years, until the truth was finally revealed to the public.
• 
  Shoon Teoh

  As a 30 y.o. Singaporean, this was actually the first proper book on Singaporean history i've actually read in my lifetime, which really just shows how important humanities is in the Singapore education system.
  
  The book is divided into 8 chapters with roughly the first half of the book covering Singapore's medieval to premodern colonial history. Barr seeks to give greater context to the history of the Singapore island - tracing its origin beyond the 1819 arrival of Sir Stamford Raffles that is often espoused as the starting point for the nationally accepted Singapore Story myth. These chapters do sketch out how society on singapore was organised through the different civilisations but only briefly - the point is mostly to show how Singapore has always been a port of some significance rather than the sleepy fishing village it is often mythologised as before Raffles' arrival.
  
  The second half of the book is devoted to covering the major changes in societal structure from premodern colonial rule to modern (and perhaps post modern) independence in Singapore. Barr goes into some detail about how changes in the British Empire - including the consolidation with Penang and Malacca into the straits settlement, deals with the temeggong and his heirs and how kongsi and towkays ran businesses to paint a fairly expansive and convincing picture of how Singapore society was governed by the British during colonial rule. He also devotes chapters to Singapore's political history post war to post-indepence as well as a brief economic history of Singapore. Perhaps the juiciest detail I learnt was that Singapore's ejection from Malaysia wasn't the Tunku kicking us out but a political coup orchestrated by Dr Goh Keng Swee as a lifeline for the PAP.
  
  The structure of the book is a bit weird as it doesn't exactly follow a clear historical timeline. Barr chooses to structure certain chapters by chronological order whilst later chapters are organised around particular topics (such as governance or economy). This leads to later chapters referring back to earlier under-discussed topics in order to elaborate a point.
  
  As much as Barr tries to argue that the premodern history of Singapore is important, I'd advise to just skip chapters 2 and 3 which I found plodding. Chapters 5-8 which focus on colonial rule and the transition to independence are far more entertaining and pertinent to modern day Singapore.
  
  Barr may have written this book to attempt to dispel that the national founding myths of Singapore, namely that our humble fishing village beginnings and that the politics of survival under the PAP are necessary. However he is unlikely the preach to the unconverted as I feel some of his arguments could have been made with more vigor which might well be an impossible task given the lack of access to archival material from Singapore.
• 
  Diana

  Barr unravels the self congratulatory mythology of Singapore as a “British-Chinese-Lee Kuan Yew success story”. I’m so embarrassed that SG has not decolonised at all 🤡 Some things the book notes:
  
  ⚡️Singapore is not isolated and exceptional in relation to our neighbours and region considering how dependent our survival and wealth are to them, for centuries. “The Singapore that we know succeeded because it successfully captured the region’s intrinsic and historical advantages for its own profit,”
  
  ⚡️The inner circle of the Malaysian govt gave the SG govt the green light to paint them as an enemy to perpetuate the myth that separation was hostile when in fact it had been a negotiated withdrawal *initiated by Singapore*
  
  ⚡️Reforms in the 80s, Barr says, were driven by LKY’s “elitism (education), his Chinese Supremacism (education, language, multiracialism), his personal hostily to welfare (health), and his determination to dilute the Malay community’s political power (by introducing racial quotas into housing estates)”
  
  ⚡️We have benefitted from wars and suffering. Malaya produced half the world’s rubber during the period of WW1 when it was in high demand. Korean war doubled colonial govt’s revenue in tin and rubber. During the Vietnam war “oil exports increased manyfold as Singapore fed off military-generated demand” (and we won a favoured placed in the American view of Asia🫠)
  
  ⚡️We weren’t Raffles’s first, or even second choice, but a last resort. So why do we laud him? It’s embarrassing.. are you not embarazzed… “Are they afraid of having such weak legacies of their own that they need to rest on the laurels of dead men?”
  
  And so much more. I took months to finish this book cause it was quite dense for me (read lots of fiction in between!)
• 
  Ernest

  To preface this, I'm surprised that such an important book has received comparatively little attention. Barr's book quite novelly blends historical writing with political analysis of Singapore- not just as the modern city-state that forms the subject of most academic writing, but as a city, region, colony.
  
  Barr's argument is already short and succinct (I will not reproduce it here, since he quite adequately does it in just four paragraphs in the prologue). Three things that stand out for their analytical value are:
  
  (1) His decision to not use the conventional 'bookends' of 1819 and 1965 as starting points for Singapore's national history, as colony and nation(-state) respectively, thereby freeing him up to analyze how numerous developments hitherto assumed to be pivotal in Singapore's history were in fact contingent on many other factors that may or may not have materialized;
  
  and on a related note (2) The refusal to confine his analysis to narrow, anachronistic spatial boundaries of Singapore's modern borders, hence allowing Barr to analyze how intimately tied to the Johor-Riau region Singapore's developments are. When applied to periods such as colonial rule or the Japanese Occupation, this becomes extremely evident- almost to the point where the amnesia/missing space in conventional textbooks and narratives becomes laughable.
  
  finally (3) His use of more unconventional metrics, such as Singapore's key position in submarine communication cables, alongside more typical measures of oil production/shipping traffic to argue that Singapore's location, rather than merely being a weakness, has in fact been a strength exploited by post-independence elites, building on infrastructure and economic strategies not fully realized under colonial rule. This argument stands out for its engagement with contemporary political narratives- the 'politics of survival', as Barr consciously evokes in later chapters.
  
  The organization of the book into broadly chronological, but ultimately thematic chapter means this book does not aim to supplant previous 'comprehensive' histories of Singapore (e.g Turnbull), but rather is a rich starting point to further explore aspects of Singapore's history. Especially intriguing to me, but (regrettably) inadequately cited were certain claims- particularly that the expulsion of Singapore was something pre-arranged between Goh Keng Swee and Tunku Abdul Rahman. These do not substantially detract from the book's careful scholarship, but I hope that future editions can strengthen the already-impressive bibliography.
  
  Barr certainly achieves his goal of making "the year 1965... a headline, not a punctuation mark, in any Singapore story" through his regional approach. Certainly a welcome complement to the recent wave of revisionist, critical academic literature on Singapore surfacing in recent times.
• 
  elly

  'Singapore A Modern History' by Michael D. Barr was a refreshing read for me, especially with the year-long bicentennial shenanigans happening this year. In this new book, Michael D. Barr presents a thematic study of Singapore and proposes a new approach to understand this development. From the pre-colonial period through to the modern day, he traces the idea, the politics and the geography of Singapore over five centuries of rich history. Yes, we go way back before our precious Sir Stamford Raffles "discovered" this little island 🏝⁣ news flash: our precious island was never his first choice 🙃
  ⁣
  Through his work, Barr rejects the official narrative of the so-called `Singapore Story'. Drawing on in-depth archival work and oral histories, this book opened my eyes to the riches of Singapore's pre-colonial days 🍃 Barr correctly reflects again on the history of Singapore as an important centre of the Malay world. Singapore has always been more than merely an island full of Chinese. The pre-nineteenth-century businesses that flourished in and around Singapore were always Malay centres. It truly challenges the myth of how Singapore was saved miraculously by Raffles and them other whites 😎 ⁣
  
  The chapters became increasingly interesting as Barr delves into the Singapore identity and what has been the convenient and very neat state narrative post-1965. So many reflections on the place of history in shaping our identity resulted from the later chapters 💭 This is an accessible and engaging work that analyses and unpacks the current mythologies / narratives, challenging me to question my assumptions further 🤔 ⁣
  
  There's so much more to say and discuss about this book so do let me know via comments or DMs if you've read it and share your thoughts! ✍🏽
• 
  Ubah Khasimuddin

  Meh, I wanted to learn more about the city I'm living in for the next 3 years but this book seems more for the scholarly think tank sort - he makes arguments against other Singapore books, as if in conversation at a literary salon. I was hoping for something more elementary - though I did learn bits here and there (for example since independence Singapore has followed almost 100% American foreign policy stances, interesting as Singapore is 75% ethnically Chinese and the government decision makers in this country are almost all ethnically Chinese).
  I guess I was hoping for more of a book about recent Singapore, how does this country do it? Melding 3 ethnic groups without racial flare-up? How did they go from developing country to developed?
  The book was a good primer for me to get some simple insight but I think I shall have to look elsewhere for more about the fabric of society here.
• 
  Hunter Marston

  Barr's modern history of Singapore (as opposed to a history of modern history) is best read alongside Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story, through which I have been slowly making my way over the last year. Barr acknowledges his is a critical history of Singapore. He does not spare the founders of modern Singapore from the lens of objective analysis. At times, he praises their myriad accomplishments. But he is also unafraid to point out their shortcomings on human rights and quickness to crack down on all internal opponents under pretenses of combatting communism. It's an extremely well and readable history and, pulling in around 200 pages, very concise. Readers looking for a deep history will be satisfied with Barr's framing of the founding myth and discussion of the events preceding Raffles' landing in 1819, though bona fide history buffs may find the book a bit thin with regards to certain segments of Singapore's history. For that they will have to turn elsewhere.
• 
  diarya диаря 代日 دياريا 디아리아 דיאריא

  With all the missing bit and pieces of Singaporean textbooks, this book is a stimulating historiography of the geo-history.
  
  Among all interesting analysis, I'm fascinated by Lee's appreciation of Japanese brothel efficiency and how he believed the oppression toughened up his generation. Would love to survey SG migrant sex workers of their thoughts about this.
• 
  Owen

  The only drawback about Barr's book is that it is unlikely to preach to the unconverted. Barr is a specialist in Singapore history in what some might accuse of being "revisionist". For those who are open minded enough to accept that Singapore may have had a history pre-1819, Barr lays it bare: a fleeing Riau king decides to make this island his home, but only just briefly before he runs off to Malacca; then a Johor royal (but not quite king) builds himself a small town many centuries later; an ambitious but hapless British administrator prevents a Dutch monopoly of the East India trade route by signing a treaty with Singapore (mainly because there was no Dutch sovereign claim to the territory); how the port grew despite the inability of British colonisers to manage a lack of budget; and, finally, how when technology and a mix of other factors allow the creation of a modern Singapore - and we haven't even gotten to World War II yet.