Conventional histories have seen the Singapore–Riau area as a relatively low-pressure zone for the centuries between 1400 and 1819, as the politico-commercial centre of ‘central Southeast Asia’ (the Peninsula, eastern Sumatra, western Java and Borneo) moved first to Melaka and later to Batavia (Jakarta). The genius of Raffles in selecting Singapore as the ideal centre for British commercial and military operations in Southeast Asia from 1819, therefore, is rendered even harder to explain. If the site was indeed so well selected for dominating east–west and north–south traffic, why was it neglected for so long?

Peter Borschberg's answer, in effect, is that it was far from ignored. He shows clearly how large the Singapore Straits loomed in Portuguese and Dutch calculations, as the most dangerous choke point for all shipping between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. The Portuguese contemplated building strongholds in and around Singapore to guard the Straits, but basically lacked the resources to defend any such posts against both local and Dutch attackers. The exceptional abundance of island and estuarine refuges for raiders preying on the through traffic made this an expensive place to police. Instead the Portuguese tended to favour two other options: stationing a fleet at the entrance to the narrower Straits to escort their own ships through and prevent those of their rivals; or when such fleets were unavailable, using the overland portages from Muar to Pahang to avoid the dangerous Straits.

The bulk of Borschberg's book concerns a short period (1603–16) of intense contestation for control of these waterways following the arrival of Dutch fleets determined to break the trading monopolies claimed by the Portuguese. His detailed discussion begins with the Dutch seizure of the Portuguese carrack Santa Catarina in the Singapore Straits in February 1603. This was the biggest prize taken by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and its rich cargo when taken for auction at Amsterdam yielded the huge sum of 3.5 million guilders, enough to ensure the viability of the VOC and its shareholders. It was in justifying this seizure as legal that a young Hugo Grotius made his name as one of the founders of the concept of international law. Borschberg has already written much on the case and on Grotius, but here his interest is in the incident as the beginning of the battle for control of the Straits which might be said to have ended when Portuguese Melaka fell to the Dutch in 1641. Borschberg has a kind of postscript on this event in the final chapter, discussing the Dutch blockade of Melaka from 1633 which eventually resulted in such losses by famine and disease that the city surrendered in 1641. His detailed narrative from both Portuguese and Dutch documents, however, ends in 1616, when the Spanish Governor of the Philippines, Juan de Silva, led a fleet from Manila intended to link up with Portuguese forces in the Straits area and eventually break the power of the Dutch throughout the Indies. The disaster of this episode, ending with the death from unspecified disease of de Silva and many of his men, would make it difficult for the Iberians to recover.

Although not really discussed here, except in terms of the advance planning represented in Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge's influential Discours of 1608 (see pp. 162–4), the successful establishment of a permanent VOC headquarters at Batavia (Jakarta) in 1619 might have been a more appropriate end point for the book. Matelieff had already foreseen that even had he succeeded in taking Melaka at the first Dutch attempt in 1606, it would not have been the ideal place for the Company's Asian centre because of the difficulty for its big ships in negotiating the approaches. The Dutch had already discovered that they could reach Banten (west Java) more readily from Europe by using the Sunda rather than Melaka Straits, and the decision in favour of Batavia in 1619 made sure that this route would prevail. Other factors, mentioned in Borschberg's chapter one though not as explanations for the reduced significance of the area, are the discovery of the modern Singapore Strait highway as the ‘Governor's Strait’ in 1616 (named after the Spanish Governor de Silva, above), and the flight of the Johor sultan southward to Lingga after the Acehnese conquest of his capital. These factors together make the intensity of the Dutch–Portuguese rivalry around Singapore in 1603–16 unique to that period, which ought to feature more prominently in histories of Singapore.

Its main contestants, who provide almost all Borschberg's sources, are the Portuguese and Dutch. But in this period Johor was seen as a vital third player in control of the Straits, alternately wooed and bullied by both Portuguese and Dutch. As Dutch documents portrayed it, the Johor elite was split between the Sultan and his heir apparent Raja Bongsu on the Dutch side, and most of the orangkaya elite on that of the Portuguese. One suspects that the reality from within Johor had more to do with how the Johor elite perceived at different points that it could best manipulate either or both of the European powers, first in the hope of recovering Melaka, but more fundamentally in the quest for supremacy over its real enemy, Aceh. Aceh attacked and conquered Johor in 1613, and insisted that it cease its friendship with the Portuguese, without, however, welcoming the Dutch as more than traders. For Borschberg the interest is in the way all these four parties understood the vital nature of the sea lanes around Singapore. In the process of these contests, the region of these Straits ‘became one of the best-explored and best-mapped pelagic spaces in Southeast Asia’ (p. 188).

This comment may seem contradicted by Borschberg's chapter one, devoted to the early European imaginings of the shipping passages and the geography of Singapore, showing the persistence of myths such as the shipping channel running across the Peninsula from Muar to Pahang (which decorates his cover). The explanation is of course that Portuguese (especially, because of their monopoly claims) and Dutch navigators kept their routes as secret as possible, so that published maps were a century or more behind current knowledge. This chapter discusses many of the illusions, but most importantly it documents the shifts of the Singapore channel, beginning with the ‘old channel’, known to earlier Chinese navigators as the ‘dragon-tooth gate’, between Sentosa and the main island of Singapore, and described by Linschoten (1595) in a passage that Borschberg reproduces and translates in full. In the 1580s the Portuguese surveyed a ‘new channel’ hugging the southern coasts of Sentosa and Singapore, because then-hostile Johor had sunk ships sufficient to block the narrow old channel. Finally the ‘Governor's channel’ became the main modern pathway from the 1620s, rendering Singapore itself less critical.

Peter Borschberg has written an historian's history, abounding with Portuguese and Dutch source material both in the original language and in translation. A total of 202 pages of text, 50 of which are illustrations of maps, engravings and documents, are supplemented by 52 pages of documents in the appendices and 85 pages of notes. The book is well worth the price for the 22 reproductions (many in colour) of maps and plans alone, scoured from numerous archives around the world. The fact that this can all be presented to readers for a reasonable paperback price no doubt owes something to the generosity of the Nicholas Tarling Fund, which the book acknowledges. It will not be an easy read for the uninitiated, since it stays close to the sources and eschews any strong narrative or thematic line. Fortunately it has a good index, and will prove a boon and a joy for those interested in these issues to consult. The field is much enriched by the addition of someone with Peter Borschberg's linguistic skills to the small band of specialists on these difficult sources.