At first glance, Studying Singapore before 1800 is a conventional collection of eighteen essays that showcases neglected scholarship on precolonial Singapore. At second glance, it is a forceful repudiation of the work of the History Department of the National University of Singapore (NUS) and its predecessors (the University of Singapore and the University of Malaya) throughout the entire second half of the twentieth century—scholarship that refused to study Singapore's history beyond the colonial-cum-nationalist story that starts with the arrival of Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819. Furthermore, it leaves little room to doubt where the fault lies. Over many decades, both successive departmental heads and leading professors such as K. G. Tregonning discouraged and ignored research that might lead to conclusions that would disturb comfortable Whiggish narratives favored by both colonial and nationalist elites. Their version of history derived entirely from British colonial records, written conveniently in English.
The case for the prosecution is set out in the introductory chapter, written by Kwa Chong Guan, who is currently an adjunct professor in the department, having been closely associated with it (though never on the payroll) for the entire period. This chapter is a must-read for every NUS history graduate.
Both Kwa and his co-editor, Peter Borschberg (an associate professor in the department since the early 1990s) have spent the last two decades working to rehabilitate Singapore's “lost” history and to build upon the foundation it has provided to produce new groundbreaking scholarship. Borschberg's role in this is all the more remarkable because he is employed to teach and research European history, and only stumbled into Singapore history as an aside to his main research.
About half the book is devoted to studies of Singapore's thirteenth-century origins. The eight chapters covering this material include considerations of ancient Chinese, Arabic, and Greek texts, along with more recent Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Malay texts.
One of the contributions to this discourse was written by the one-time director of the Raffles Museum, Carl Alexander Gibson-Hill, whose 1956 history of Keppel Harbour and the Old Singapore Strait provides a narrative that seamlessly joins Singapore's British period with its ancient history. When we read in Kwa's introduction the words of near ridicule with which Tregonning dismissed Gibson-Hill and his scholarship (“of antiquarian interest only”; “the eccentric, loveable genius”), we can only wonder what he thought history is supposed to do.
Victor Obdejin's 1942 article near the end of the book is also part of this theme, but it takes a radically different approach than the others. It provides evidence that in the first millennium the Malayan Peninsula probably extended much further south, bringing it close to Sumatra. He suggests that during the early centuries of the second millennium the power of the sea had begun breaking down the peninsula into an archipelago of islands, including Singapore, but one that was still mostly impassable thanks to treacherous currents, sand banks, and coral reefs. By the thirteenth century, however, at least one new passable channel had opened up, and it ran alongside Singapore, thus paving the way for a shift in trade and power from Sumatra to Singapore.
The more military-minded might prefer an account of one of the three chapters about the sea battles fought off precolonial Singapore: Portugal versus Aceh in the 1570s (Ian Macgregor), Portugal versus the Netherlands in 1603 (Borschberg), or Johor-Riau versus Siak in 1767 (Timothy Barnard). The 1603 battle was of particular significance because it marked the beginning of the Dutch challenge to Portuguese hegemony in the region.
For my part, I particularly appreciated the four chapters on the Johorean/Malay governance within which Singapore was operating in the middle of the second millennium: the chapters by David Sopher (first published in 1962), Purnadi Purbatjaraka (1961), Leonard Andaya (1975), and Muhammad Yusoff Hashim (1992).
Most of the book contains material that could or should be used to frame studies and debates about modern-day Singapore, but without overtly drawing those connections. In his concluding chapter, Kwa offers an example of how such connections might be drawn and deployed. In place of the standard Anglocentric narrative of the British “foundation” of Singapore in 1819, Kwa presents a story of a successful negotiated takeover of a going concern. He pictures Malay aristocrats with considerable bargaining power and full agency, but who were undone in negotiations and eventually on the ground, partly because their traditional Malay assumptions about governance, power, and land completely misdirected them in their negotiations with the British.
Studying Singapore before 1800 is not only an important collection of essays but also a handsome and carefully crafted volume. It has been painstakingly edited so that a wide variety of linguistic and referencing styles and practices have been homogenized and smoothed for the twenty-first-century reader, without losing fidelity to the original texts. In addition, a host of ancient maps have been professionally redrawn using the latest technology, and almost every chapter is adorned with wonderful illustrations reproduced either from European and local archives or from Borschberg's impressive private collection. This book should become a standard text for all undergraduate courses in Southeast Asian history—not just those focusing on Singapore.
