Although Singapore was a British settler colony in Southeast Asia, the vast majority of settlers were not European, but Asian. The origins of modern Singapore are traced back to a deal between Sultan Hussein Mua'zzam Shah ibni Mahmud Shah Alam (one of the heirs to the Sultanate of Johor), the Temenggong of Johor, Daeng Abdul Rahman bin Tun Daeng Abdul Hamid (the Sultan's chief of security), and the British East India Company (EIC). The EIC was represented by Thomas Stamford Raffles (Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen, in Sumatra) and William Farquhar (the former resident of Malacca). The deal vested sovereignty of Singapore with the Malays, but gave the management of the settlement to the British.
Not long after the colony was founded in 1819, the British colonial government were exerting de facto sovereignty (sovereignty in practice) over the territory. The British worked to transform the Malays from being indigenous traditional owners, in the form of ‘followers’ of the Sultan and the Temenggong, to being subjects of the colonial state. The methods the British used were a mixture of alienation and authoritarian assimilation, but all methods worked to end effective Malay governance within the settlement. By 1823, the EIC had gained de jure sovereignty (sovereignty by law and right) over Singapore by negotiating a new treaty with the Sultan and the Temenggong, both of whom became mere pensioners of the EIC and lost their sovereign status over Singapore.
In his 1975 account, C.H. Wake captured the political struggle between the British on the one hand and the Sultan and his Temenggong on the other.Footnote 1 In this account, Wake focused on the agency of the British officials and the Malay nobles and did not place the political struggle in the wider context of settler demands in Singapore. These settler demands can be regarded as urging the British officials down a path of confrontation with the Malays. This article uses a Settler–Indigenous paradigm to reconsider the creation of Singapore. Understanding the transfer of sovereignty as a Settler–Indigenous interaction means a focus on the political mechanism by which the land was occupied or taken over by new settlers from the previous inhabitants, who could be considered Indigenous or ‘traditional owners’.
There is a long history of settler colonialism being regarded as a distinct form of colonial relationship that is different from the dominant paradigm of colonialism. For example, as early as 1902, when European colonialism was at its height, J.A. Hobson identified settler colonialism as ‘old imperialism’ as compared to the ‘new’ economic imperialism of his own age, in which Europeans colonised the tropical and equatorial areas of Asia and Africa which were unsuitable for European migration.Footnote 2 This division between old and new imperialism has been a lasting one within the historiography of colonialism.Footnote 3 Settler colonialism is often associated with white Europeans settling the temperate regions of North America, Australia and South AmericaFootnote 4 — Hobson's ‘old imperialism’. In comparison, post-1870 imperialism is associated with the economic exploitation of Asian and African labour forces in the tropics.Footnote 5
The settler narrative of colonisation is one of invasion and the supplanting of one people by another. In Australia, the Americas and southern Africa, the settler invasion narrative consisted of Europeans claiming the territories that ‘appeared’ to the Europeans as unused or vacant, which according to their mindset meant that there was no strong political power that exercised authority over the land. Therefore these vacant lands were open for European settlement, despite the Indigenous people living in them.Footnote 6 The Indigenous people were forced off their lands with a combination of violence, disease, misguided paternalism and the enactment of self-serving colonial legal codes. Historian Lisa Ford argued that the settlers developed a particular type of sovereignty based on territory, which subsumed the Indigenous people within the same jurisdiction while at the same time rejecting their traditional landownership rights.Footnote 7 The displacement was violent and extensively marked by frontier wars that progressively expanded the settler colonies across the continents. As we will see, violence was also endemic in early colonial Singapore and should be seen as contributing to the tensions between the traditional Malay owners and the new settlers.
Viewing Singapore as a settler colony transforms our interpretation of settler colonialism in three ways. First, it allows us to see settler colonialism in Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a form of colonial management. It was a management practice that focused on population growth with the creation of property rights to attract new settlers. Second, it allows the interpretation that Asian migrants to the British colonies should also be considered as settlers. Finally, it allows that settler colonialism established a new system of sovereignty in which individuals were allowed to own land and become settlers, and have a feeling of security to build their new commercial enterprises. This new form of ownership was at the expense of Indigenous or traditional owners of the land.
The events of the early 1820s, when the EIC sought to end Malay sovereignty of Singapore, continue to shape the island state today. The post-colonial state of Singapore is built on colonial foundations, both physical and governmental. In 2010, the seminal historian of Southeast Asia, Anthony Reid, proposed to recast how Singaporeans and Malaysians see themselves. He argued that both countries represented migrant societies, noting ‘there is a conceptual gulf between how we think of Australia and America, and how we think of Asian societies …. Some of this difference of perception results from bad habits of thinking in racial or geographical boxes’. Reid proposed that we could get rid of ‘those factors by simply looking at people-as-migrants’.Footnote 8
Unfortunately the indigenous Malay perspective has to be inferred, because we only know the story of the transfer of sovereignty from British and Dutch colonial sources. The only Malay account from this time is Hikayat Abdullah, or Abdullah's history/story. These are the reminiscences of Raffles’ scribe and translator Abdullah bin Abdul al Kadir (also known as Munshi Abdullah), which was written nearly twenty years after the founding of Singapore. Abdullah presents a highly critical view of traditional Malay systems of government.
Abdulah's understanding of events reflected his closeness to the British and his role in the new settler colonial state. While Abdullah worked for the British colonial government as a translator and knew the British Residents ruling Singapore personally, he only had distant connections to Sultan Hussein and the Temenggong.
The Sultan and Temenggong were themselves increasingly removed from power by the British use of administrative practices. The marginalisation of Malay sovereignty began as soon as Raffles took over from Farquhar. It was both a consequence of colonial government policy, and a response to European and then Chinese merchant settlers demanding an end to Malay rule. The interaction of various policies — those of the colonial government, the merchants and the Malays — created an unstable environment. Far from being a directive of the EIC, as the Resident John Crawfurd reported in his dispatches, the final transfer of sovereignty occurred under the threat of Chinese settler-led insurrection, if the EIC did not take control. Responsibility for the usurpation of Malay sovereignty was shared between the EIC and the broader settler community, particularly the European and Chinese settler elite, who migrated to Singapore and purchased land during the 1820s.
Singapore as a new settler society
In 1819, at the time of British arrival, Singapore had between 150 and 300 inhabitants.Footnote 9 By the end of 1821 the colony had expanded to a population of 5,000, and by 1825, it had grown to over 11,800 inhabitants.Footnote 10
During the first years of settlement, many early migrants of Singapore were from the older colony of Malacca. Abdullah called these migrants ‘Malacca men’; their identity would have been a mixture of Malay and Peranakan/Baba Chinese (who were of Chinese male ancestry, but adopted many aspects of Malay culture from the maternal lineages). In addition to this group of Malacca migrants, people migrated directly from China. In 1825, 3,518 people migrated directly from China to Singapore, and the following year the number of new Chinese migrants grew to 5,513.Footnote 11 This quick expansion of people with no prior connection to the local landscape is reminiscent of the settler colonies in the British Empire, in which there were new settlers and displaced indigenous populations.
Previous studies on Singapore have never identified it as a settler colony. In her history of Singapore, C.M. Turnbull called Singapore an ‘immigrant society’, but her argument was descriptive and focused on the ‘wealth and influence’ of the ‘tiny European minority’ who dominated the official positions of authority.Footnote 12 Similarly C.D. Cowan's 1961 study of nineteenth-century Malaya focused on the interactions between British elites in Malaya and Singapore with British imperial actions in London.Footnote 13 In his 1990s book Gentleman capitalists, Anthony Webster drew on the ideas of P.J. Cain and Anthony Hopkins, to employ a metropolitan–periphery framework that explored the links between European merchants and British metropolitan interests. All three historians effectively used different forms of a metropolitan–periphery argument to understand Singapore's development. The problem with metropolitan–periphery approaches is that they focus on the European agents in Southeast Asia as the central actors who interact with the imperial metropole. Focusing on the action of the European elites (which because of colonial records, are the easiest agents to follow) marginalises the role of indigenous and other Asian actors in understanding the settlement's development.
In his study of town planning in early colonial Singapore, Clement Liew has provided one of the most comprehensive accounts of the settlement's early community. He argued that Singapore did not fit colonial models and proposed that:
without the pre-existing indigenous communities and elites as seen in many conquest colonies, the Singapore metropolis should be seen as a unique colonial construct. Aside from the Indian labouring classes, traders and soldiers, most sojourning Chinese, Siamese, Malays from the Malay Peninsula, East Indies islanders and Arab communities had not experienced British colonial rule or imperial aggression in their places of origin before the early half of the nineteenth century. As such, Singapore was for them, a big cosmopolitan market place managed by a British authority whose policies and authority they had to adhere to in order to continue their activities.Footnote 14
Although Liew labels the migrants to Singapore as ‘settlers’ throughout his study, he uses Ronald Robinson's ‘collaborative colonialism’ approach to develop a theoretical framework. Nevertheless, Liew's argument resembles a settler colonial paradigm more than it does ‘collaborative colonialism’ in that it describes a colonial government promoting the transformation of an indigenous landscape through the introduction of a new regime of private property and land clearing, where the settlers are a distinct group but benefit from the new colonial state. Liew proposes that Raffles’ town plan was
a political tool by which he secured the settlers’ symbolic acquiescence to British sovereign authority even before the actual signing of the Cession Treaty of 1824. It was a coup d’état of sorts that he had achieved once the settlers had agreed to bid for land leases, register those grounds and pay the attached Quit Rent (land tax).Footnote 15
Thinking about colonial Singapore as a settler colony requires overcoming some basic premises of what constitutes a settler colony and a focus on the functions of settler colonies and the identities of the people as settlers. The identity of the ‘settler’ has been central to much of the recent analysis, but in focusing on the identity of the ‘settler’ previous literature assumes certain ethnic/geographic characteristics. As Chris Youé blatantly declares, the ‘Meta-narrative of “settler colonialism” is a white story, with pioneers opening up and developing the land with the sweat of their own brows and fashioning a new nation.’Footnote 16 Lorenzo Veracini presents a more nuanced version of a similar argument, but one that places emphasis on dislocation as the essence of the settler identity:
Settler colonial phenomena — circumstances where colonisers ‘come to stay’ and to establish new political orders for themselves, rather than to exploit native labour — are inherently transnational and transcultural: transnational and translocal because the relationship between ‘home’ and settler locale institutes a dialectical tension between ‘here’ and ‘there’; transcultural because the relationship between metropole and settler colony is routinely understood as inherently dynamic.Footnote 17
Although Veracini does not make the same blatant connection as Youé, the identity dislocation that comes to reader's minds is one of European settlers making a new colonial settlement. With this thinking, Singapore fits uneasily within the settler-colonial framework. It was not a colony numerically dominated by Europeans nor did it develop liberal democracy whilst under British rule. However, as we shall see, it did develop the basic foundations of liberal democracy, that is, private property. Therefore to look at Singapore as a settler colony, we need to look at the functions of a settler colony.
Central to the literature around settler colonies, and at the heart of settler colonialism's function, was the disruptive aspect of settler colonies. Settler colonies disrupt people and landscapes. As Veracini has argued, ‘settler collectives make and remake places and are also simultaneously transformed by them’.Footnote 18 The disruptive nature of settler colonialism is what makes it different from standard colonialism. Colonialism needs colonised peoples to work and uses pre-existing endogenous social structures, often employing a system of indirect rule to support extractive industries.Footnote 19 Settler colonialism does not need pre-existing indigenous social structures — settler colonialism brings new people who work and operate in the new social order.
All writing on settler colonialism focuses on the taking of the land, yet the system of private property rights — central to the Anglo settler project — is often assumed and rarely elaborated fully in the overarching literature. Individual studies into property rights and dispossession in North America and Australia have all articulated that the colonial regimes introduced new systems of landownership.Footnote 20 This transformation of property is the new system of authority that the settler colony introduced, and the distinction of the settler compared to others is a commitment to that system. In Singapore we see the introduction of new systems of property rights and landownership supported by a colonial state for the benefit of the settlers.
If the identity of the settler is determined by their commitment to the new system of property rights and systems of authority, the settler colonial state is also faced with what to do with the non-settlers. These non-settlers are the Indigenous people or natives who were already living nearby or on the site that became the colonial state. In a seminal essay for settler colonial studies, Patrick Wolfe identified that ‘Indigenous people obstruct settlers’ access to land’ and flowing from that insight Wolfe argued that a key function of settler colonialism was the elimination of native/indigenous peoples. Wolfe connected this elimination to the creation of property: ‘the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism's specific, irreducible element.’Footnote 21 Wolf did not necessarily mean physical murder but often assimilation, or the transformation of indigenous people into settlers. Wolfe looked to the United States, and in particular the state of Georgia, to demonstrate how settler colonialism transformed Native Americans into settlers, and in so doing indigenous people jettisoned their traditional forms of authority, government and culture and adopted those of the settlers:
The reason that the remaining Choctaw were acceptable had nothing to do with their being Choctaw. On the contrary, it had to do with their not (or at least, no longer) being Choctaw. They had become ‘homesteaders and American citizens’. In a word, they had become individuals.Footnote 22
We can see a similar struggle in 1822–24 Singapore. The colonial project introduced property rights for the new settlers. Raffles, and later Crawfurd, used this system of property rights to encroach on the traditional sovereignty and authority of Sultan Hussein and the Temenggong. Although the legal focus of the struggle was with the Sultan and Temenggong, as we will see, British action to displace the followers of the Temenggong was against a group that the British broadly defined as the Malays. Crawfurd stipulated that he wanted to break the nexus linking the Malays as followers of the Sultan and Temenggong and instead make them individuals, free of obligations to their leaders.
The indigenous inhabitants of Singapore
The Sultan and the Temenggong were the leaders of the pre-existing community that to all intents and purposes were indigenous to Singapore. The problem in understanding the identity of the original population comes as a consequence of a mixture of the EIC's poor record-keeping in the settlement's early years and the British tendency to use the word ‘Malay’ as synonymous with native. The first published population census we have for Singapore is 1824, at which time there were 4,580 people identified as ‘Malays’.Footnote 23
The first Resident of Singapore, William Farquhar, did not keep a register of people coming into the settlement. He made the decision to consider all new inhabitants as settlers, regardless of their ethnicity.Footnote 24 Nevertheless, Farquhar did make a distinction between the Malays and the original population. In his correspondence, Farquhar referred to the Sultan's and Temenggong's people as ‘followers’. In addition, he rarely used the word ‘Malay’ to refer to people in the settlement, preferring the term ‘Natives’.Footnote 25 Over time, the distinction became blurred. Raffles, in his town planning directives of 26 June 1819, ordered the forming of a ‘Malay’ kampong that included the Temenggong's people along with other ‘Malays’.Footnote 26
Anthony Milner has demonstrated that the concept of ‘Malay’ on the eve of the colonial period was not understood in racial terms. We can retrospectively and historically identify a ‘Malay’ culture through a widespread, shared culture across Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula and surrounding islands. Yet a key facet of Malay identity was kerajaan, a political-cultural concept, embodying the world of the sultanate. A common cultural aspect of kerajaan was ‘subjecthood’ or the relationship between an individual and a Raja — this manifestation of ‘Malayness’ was the focus of British thinking in the 1820s.Footnote 27
In British colonial records of Singapore, we have continual mention of the Temenggong's ‘followers’. Crawfurd called the original inhabitants of Singapore ‘Malays’, but also acknowledged the ‘followers’ of the Temenggong as a distinct group. In 1827, John Prince provided legal advice on British sovereignty in Singapore and identified the ‘natives’ living in Singapore before the British settlement as ‘Malays’ who were in a ‘feudal’ relationship with the Temenggong: ‘lands were held by the Malays from the Temaangong [sic] as Lord of the Soil, for the performance of feudal services’.Footnote 28 Raffles, like Prince, called the Malay practice of service ‘principles entirely feudal’.Footnote 29 Similarly Alexander Kyd-Lindsay, in his diary from 1825, wrote ‘Singapoor was one forest inhabited only on the coast of the sea, or on the banks of rivulets by savage and piratical Malays’.Footnote 30 Kyd-Lindsay's account also acknowledged that Singapore was in the ‘Sea and Land of the Malays’.Footnote 31 The British saw the Malays as being the original population of Singapore but this population was identified as followers of the Temenggong, who was the recognised landholder in service to the Sultan of Johor. Consequently, we have an original or indigenous population that culturally defined itself in terms of a relationship to the Sultan and Temenggong; the EIC referred to this population as ‘Malay’. This same indigenous population recognised itself as somewhat amorphous and open to new migrants who acknowledged the Sultan and Temenggong and were connected to the original population.
This amorphous category infuriated Crawfurd, and was one of the reasons he cited for wanting to negotiate for British sovereignty over Singapore. Crawfurd chose to portray the ‘followers’ as ‘slaves’, a point that Crawfurd qualified by reporting his discussion with the Temenggong, in which the latter noted that ‘he [had] no slaves in the sense in which we [the British] understand the term — that is, persons who can be bought or sold for money’.Footnote 32 Yet in Crawfurd's description of the Temenggong's followers as slaves we get an impression of the large population under his control, all of whom saw Singapore and the surrounding straits as their home waters:
The chiefs insist that every person belonging to them is a slave, and in no respect master of his own property or actions, and they by no means confine this monstrous pretension to their mere retainers at Singapore, but make the same claim over every native of the numerous islands and straits in our immediate vicinity, nominally or otherwise dependent upon them, who comes to sojourn or reside at this settlement.Footnote 33
When we look at the description of the people as Malays we get a narrower identification. We have seen that Kyd-Lindsay described the Malay villages in Singapore as being a ‘congregation of boats not intended for moving’, which points to an Orang Laut community living in the straits around Singapore. A similar account is provided by Wa Hakim who named the community as ‘Orang Laut’ with only a few ‘Malays’ at the time of Raffles’ arrival:
About thirty families of ‘Orang Laut’ also lived in boats (dia punya rumah ada prahu) a little way up the Singapore river at the wide part (laut оfis). About half the ‘Orang laut’ lived ashore and half in boats. My sister still lives in a boat there, and has never lived ashore. The place where the ‘Orang laut’ lived was called Kampong Tëmënggong, and it faced the river. There were a few Malays who lived near, their huts facing the sea. Our boat lay where the Master Attendant's Office now is. I myself was born in the Singapore waters.Footnote 34
From both Kyd-Lindsay's and Wa Hakim's accounts, we can see that a significant proportion (or a majority) of the Temenggong's followers were Orang Laut. Although today the Orang Laut are considered a marginalised Southeast Asian Indigenous community on the fringes of the Malay world,Footnote 35 at the time, this population of Orang Laut was central to the Temenggong's power base. According to historian Carl Trocki, in the waters surrounding Singapore ‘there were about ten island suku of sea peoples living here who owed allegiance to the Temenggong’ who ‘numbered close to 10,000’ people.Footnote 36 The British considered the Orang Laut to be Malays. Crawfurd listed the Orang Laut as one of the ‘three classes’ of the ‘Malay nation’. He wrote that the ‘only habitations of these people are their boats, and they live exclusively by the produce of the sea or by the robberies they commit on it’.Footnote 37
Although not all of these 10,000 Orang Laut would have descended on Singapore after the settlement was created, the population of ‘Malays’ did increase. Many of the Temenggong's extended followers must have followed him into Singapore. This does not mean that the new or additional followers of the Sultan or the Temenggong could not be considered part of the indigenous or original inhabitants.
The British also saw the ‘followers’ as a distinct group with rights by virtue of their original status as ‘feudal’ followers of the Temenggong, who was the landholder of Singapore. Farquhar was very conscious that he should not trample on the rights of the ‘followers’, recognising their unique status in the settlement. He saw the ‘followers’ as being part of the treaty agreement, writing in his correspondence to Raffles, that he saw the article of the June 1818 treaty relating to the Temenggong's gardens as applying to the ‘followers’: ‘the Lieut. Governor is pleased to intimate that it was merely intended to indicate a consideration & desire on the part of Government not to interfere with the followers of His Highness, who were then, or hereafter might be so provided for’.Footnote 38
Similarly, Farquhar asked the permission of the Temenggong, when he cleared the ground of vegetation ‘lest it might interfere with his own interest, or that of any of his followers’.Footnote 39 Farquhar did not want new plantations to impinge on the followers’ existing gardens. Similarly, when Raffles introduced actions to end bond slavery in Singapore, Farquhar stipulated that these laws did not apply to ‘Highnesses the Sultan, Tummongong and other Native Chiefs with their immediate followers’.Footnote 40 For the British, the followers had rights that derived from their status as original people feudally connected to the founding treaties.
The idea of follower's rights did not end with Farquhar. Crawfurd also recognised the rights of the followers. After negotiating the transfer of sovereignty from the Sultan and Temenggong in 1824, Crawfurd initiated a long-held government policy to move the Temenggong and his followers from the settlement. The Temenggong appealed to the Governor General of the EIC, who then responded offering more money as an inducement. In the Governor General's reply the ‘followers’ are interpreted as feudal partners of the Temenggong and it was stated that the EIC was paying them through the Temenggong: ‘a Sum of 3,000 Dollars and upwards, has already been paid to you Highness and your followers, on account of the removal in question’ (my emphasis).Footnote 41 The feudal prism that the British used to interpret the Sultan, the Temenggong and his followers, meant that their policies were directed not just at the leadership, but also the broader Malay population to the extent that the Sultan and Temenggong were their leaders.
Creating a system of private property in land
The early British administrators of Singapore saw the establishment of private ownership in land as a mechanism for attracting people and as a means of advancing economic development and social stability in the new settlement. First in Java, and then in Sumatra, Raffles had long toyed with changing land rent laws to create individual private ownership in land to transform societies in Southeast Asia. In Singapore, the early British administrators had an opportunity to construct a new settler system of land tenure, with only limited constraints from a pre-existing land management system.
In 1821, Crawfurd published a three-volume work in Britain which advocated the need for an island-based colony in Southeast Asia, to enable British trade without conquest.Footnote 42 In preparing this book, Crawfurd did not mention Singapore and probably had limited or even no knowledge of Raffles’ actions after 1817; however, he did outline the need for creating a settlement like Singapore in Riau. In his book, Crawfurd stated that he believed property in land created an incentive for individuals to clear, cultivate, and improve their land. In doing so, the individuals would add value to the land, and therefore their attachment to the land would be as much economic as sentimental, which would integrate the different races in the new settler society.
Under Crawfurd's plan, private ownership of land would become the glue that would hold the society together. Drawing on his experience as a colonial administrator in Java, he argued that in Southeast Asia ‘there is no class of the native inhabitants to whom it [the land] belongs, or that has a better claim to it than another’. The problem he felt was that people did not improve the land, because the majority of the profits ‘falls into unproductive hands’ and ‘not a farthing returns to be added to agricultural capital and the improvement of the land’. To encourage improvement in the land, he maintained the land needed to be transferred to private hands: ‘The sovereign's right to the soil, with the reservation of a land-tax, should then be sold to the highest bidder. This would place the proprietary right where it ought to be, in the hands of men of influence and property.’Footnote 43
Crawfurd's plan was to encourage settlers to migrate to the colony, meaning that land could be bought by anybody. Crawfurd did not necessarily think that this migration would be at the expense of the traditional owners. He acknowledged that pre-existing farmers had unique rights that needed to be recognised; this being the case, he recommended that they should have the first opportunity to purchase land: ‘The competition for the first sales of such lands as are in the actual occupation of the natives [and] should be confined to them, but all future sales ought to be unrestricted.’Footnote 44 By limiting the first sales of land to indigenous traditional owners and opening future sales to new settlers, Crawfurd understood that any colonial society with his model was going to be racially/ethnically mixed and that private ownership in land would be its glue: ‘secure[ing] eventually the wholesome and familiar admixture of the different races, the only means of reconciling them to each other’. Although he did not explain why property ownership supported social cohesion, his general belief was that ownership created an interest and commitment to improving the land and created an interest in society. Crawfurd reasoned ‘we have to legislate for Europeans, for Chinese, and for a mixed mass of native inhabitants’. Footnote 45 He saw legal equality of individuals as necessary, and concluded that ‘the Law should make no distinction between them’ and their rights to own property.Footnote 46
However, settlement of ‘unoccupied’ land was open to all. The settlers would clear the land and create new agricultural produce and increase the prosperity of the society:
The competition for unoccupied land should be general. Such lands would, of course, fall chiefly into the hands of strangers whose capitals and industry, notwithstanding the inferior fertility of the possessions, would place them on some equality with the natives. As an encouragement to the clearing and cultivation of such lands, they ought to be, according to circumstances, exempted from taxation for a period of ten, twenty, or thirty years. … Strangers of enterprise and capital, chiefly from Europe and China, would be encouraged to settle; improvement would be rapid; and, long before the sale of the whole lands, the prosperity and wealth of the society would furnish, if necessary, other sources of public revenue. Footnote 47
The problem that the British faced in Singapore was that the ‘sovereign's right to the soil’ was not theirs to sell. As Crawfurd readily admitted ‘when first occupied by us the right of property and sovereignty in it [Singapore] belonged to a native prince’.Footnote 48 Raffles and Farquhar had both sidestepped the issue of the sovereignty of the island in the early days. Initially, the settlement was founded merely as a trading factory with ‘no territorial cession’ or ‘legal right to legislation’, and with the only law being the ‘Malay code’.Footnote 49
After signing the agreement with the Sultan and the Temenggong, Raffles returned to Bencoolen on 6 February 1819, and left the administration of Singapore to Farquhar.Footnote 50 At that time, Raffles and Farquhar did not hold high expectations for the settlement's development. In February 1821, Raffles wrote to Farquhar complaining about the exorbitant expenses that Farquhar had accrued in clearing land for the settlement. In his response, Farquhar proposed that that the settlement had to change based on its success and there was a need to clear land at the public expense, thereby transforming the settlement from one ‘principally of a commercial nature’ into a settlement that could house a large population.Footnote 51 Farquhar argued that ‘in promoting the trade of the port’ he had to offer ‘every practicable convenience and facility to those merchants, both European and Native, who were desirous of taking up their residence at Singapore’.Footnote 52
Farquhar's letter points to him developing an incremental plan of settler colonialism as needs dictated. He offered public money for the initial clearing of land because of necessity: ‘With a view of affording certain facilities to the Chinese merchants and other industrious settlers rushing to establish themselves here, I did not hesitate to assist them at the public expense, in clearing the site for their Campong or Town.’Footnote 53 In answering Raffles’ criticism, however, Farquhar proposed a solution to the high costs borne by the EIC — that the government should sell land tenure rights:
The principal expenses incurred by Government in clearing lands which have, or may hereafter be, appropriated to the care of individuals are likewise recoverable with the utmost facility, either by an annual ground rent or an immediate assessment, according to the extent, nature, and cost of the different lots.
While Raffles went on to adopt Farquhar's suggestion of selling land rights, the Malays (both leaders and followers) were already seen as an impediment to the settlement's development. Raffles believed that Farquhar had worked too closely with the Temenggong, calling the power-sharing agreement an ‘extraordinary principle’.Footnote 54 Raffles even accused Farquhar of having let the Temenggong sell land directly to Europeans ‘under the Authority of his Chop or Seal’ — a charge Farquhar denied.Footnote 55
Despite the close working relationship between Farquhar and the Temenggong, Farquhar too saw the Malays as an impediment to developing a settler-colonial private property regime in Singapore. Unlike Raffles, who became increasingly unhappy with the Temenggong's authority in Singapore, Farquhar was concerned that the Malays were inconveniently located on the best bits of property, and that their settlements posed a fire risk. As he wrote to Raffles in April 1821:
it would be extremely desirable if the Temenggong, who, at present, occupies a large portion of the most valuable ground, could be induced to remove with his followers to some spot further up the river which I conceive might be effected by purchase, either by Government or individuals, and as the security of property against accidents from fire is of the very first importance, particularly where merchandize is likely to be stowed in warehouses.Footnote 56
The relationship between the traditional Malay owners (the Sultan, the Temenggong and their followers) and the British government deteriorated because of the settlers (European, Malacca Malay and Chinese) who came up against the interests of the Malay rulers. The use of land, and who had the right to tax the new settlers, would become the major source of tension during 1822 and 1823.
Haphazard building in the settlement came to an end in October 1822, when Raffles and Farquhar published a notice ordering all builders to discontinue work pending the orders of the town committee.Footnote 57 This new committee became a means for exerting British authority and for vesting power with the new settlers at the expense of the traditional owners. In addition to creating a town committee, Raffles created a new registry of land and then auctioned land to the new settlers. He evicted the merchants who had been squatting on government land, but paid them compensation. He also filled in a swamp that became Boat Quay, which was occupied by what Charles Buckley, in his History of old Singapore, called ‘native traders’ operating out of ‘roomah rackits’ or ‘raft houses’.Footnote 58 These ‘roomah rackits’ were probably those of the Orang Laut, who were the followers of the Temenggong, who had been living in Singapore since before the settlement. Raffles displaced them for the benefit of the merchants. This development generated a land grab, which Raffles facilitated through a public auction of the land taken away from the Orang Laut.
Writing to his mentor and friend William Marsden, Raffles expressed surprise at how quickly land prices rose because of speculation by the new settlers. He said, ‘You will be surprised to hear of the value of land here. A few spots of ground hitherto considered of no value, and passed over by the local resident, sold in the course of an hour for upwards of 50,000 dollars.’Footnote 59 This increase in the land prices occurred at the expense of the traditional inhabitants (the indigenous Malays), who were being marginalised in the new settlement.
A violent settlement
In July 1823, the new Resident of Singapore, John Crawfurd, wrote to his superiors that ‘The number of capital offences committed at this place, since its first establishment, has been extremely small.’ Crawfurd then expressed a conventional liberal view that ‘capital offences’ were few because of ‘the high reward of labour, and to the industry, occupation, and comfort which are the natural consequences, than to any provisions of law or police, which it is within our power to enforce’.Footnote 60 Although Crawfurd was referencing the glowing British liberal ideas that hard work and diligence equals a peaceful society, Abdullah, the Malay translator who worked for Farquhar, Raffles and Crawfurd, recorded a very different reality: ‘every day without ceasing murders took place along the road to Kampong Gelem. There were policemen on duty here and there but they themselves were often murdered’.Footnote 61 The conflict that Abdullah wrote about is only touched upon in the colonial record.
Neither Raffles, Farquhar nor Crawfurd wrote much about the conflict in the settlement in their dispatches. The absence of violence from the reports of colonial officials written for their superiors, however, does not mean there was no violence, but rather that these figures chose not to report it. We have two independent sources that violence was a major problem in the settlement, Abdullah's Hikayat and Baron Huibert Gerard Nahuijs van Burgsthad's reports to Batavia from 1824.Footnote 62 Both these accounts demonstrate that the British were presiding over a contested colony in which the Sultan, the Temenggong and his followers were increasingly coming into conflict with the new settlers.
Abdullah's Hikayat is peppered with mentions of violence in Singapore. He identified theft and murder as the most common crimes; his description suggests that these crimes were not random and opportunistic, but were more akin to gang warfare between the Temenggong's men and the settlers:
All the inhabitants were dismayed by frequent incidents, houses catching fire, robberies taking place in the high noon, people getting stabbed. When morning came people would be found stabbed and wounded to death. The Temenggong's men, the Sultan's men and the foreigners of all races went about fully armed; some of them robbed people in broad daylight, some broke into houses and stole people's property, for they were afraid of nothing.Footnote 63
Abdullah goes on to describe the factions as the Temenggong's men and the Malacca men. Malacca-men was a category that included Chinese, Malays and Indians and therefore was not an ethnic distinction, but rather a grouping of people who had migrated and settled in Singapore from Malacca. Abdullah himself belonged to this grouping. Their common characteristic was their settler identity, as opposed to the Malay community of the Temenggong's followers that lived in Singapore or considered Singapore their traditional territory.
Every day it was the Temenggong's men who started brawls, for their attitude towards the Malacca men was like that of tigers towards goats. The Malacca men were unarmed, knew nothing of dagger tactics, and had never seen bloodshed. In any kind of clash between the Malacca-born, whether Chinese, Malays or Indian, and the Temenggong's men Colonel Farquhar always took the side of the former for he realized that their nature made them shy of fighting with weapons, but that when it came to using fists none of the other races could stand up to them. The two sides were always at loggerheads, and on many occasions violent quarrels flared up between them, not individual combats but free-for-all fights, when a man of one side harboured a grievance against a man of the other.Footnote 64
One of the few incidences of violence that entered the British archive was the attempted assassination of Farquhar. Sayid Yasin, a descendant of the Prophet Mohamed, stabbed Farquhar on 11 March 1823. Farquhar's wounds were not fatal. His guard responded by bayoneting Yasin to death, with such ferocity that the body was no longer recognisable. Farquhar and Raffles brushed off the attack as an amok, which was a term for a frenzied suicidal rampage particular to colonial Southeast Asia, usually a response to a perceived slight of honour. Farquhar had insulted Sayid Yasin, by demanding he pay a debt to another Malay trader. However, initially the British thought that the attack was ordered by the Temenggong, and the British forces immediately surrounded the Temenggong's compound.Footnote 65
As with Abdullah's account of a division within the settlement between the Temenggong's followers and the new settlers, Nahuijs’ account points to a broader indigenous versus settler division in Singapore, with the Temenggong representing the indigenous authority. But unlike Abdullah, who saw the British as separators between the factions, Nahuijs’ account saw the British forces as being impotent, when it came to resolving these tensions.
Nahuijs also points to the Temenggong, not Sultan Hussein, as the central Malay figure behind the violence. It is the Temenggong's men who were committing acts of violence and murders, and therefore the Temenggong was either responsible for orchestrating the violence or negligent in preventing it. Either way, both Abdullah and Nahuijs held the Temenggong responsible:
The Tommaguang [sic] lives with his dependents a short distance away from the European town on a site allotted to him by the British Government of Singapore, on account of the frequent quarrels and murders for which his dependents have been responsible. Over all these people as well as over the Bourinese [Bugis migrants from Sulawesi] settled in Singapore, the British Resident has not the least authority, even when they attack Europeans.Footnote 66
Nahuijs wrote that there was an expectation in the settlement that war was coming, with a belief that the Temenggong would launch an attack:
Many of the residents are not without anxiety that a man like the Malayan Tommagung, tempted by the large treasure, could easily be induced with the underlings and a great many of his friends the pirates, to attack the weak garrison and citizens unexpectedly and then clear off with his booty to places where he could not easily be traced.Footnote 67
These accounts were all written by figures hostile to the Temenggong and the Malays. Yet both accounts point to armed hostility between the Temenggong's followers who had expectations of their rights (derived from their original status), and the migrant settlers who did not recognise those special rights.
Raffles’ regulations and the assertion of authority over the Malays
Raffles had two goals in creating the registry and selling the newly released land: government revenue and displacing Malay sovereignty. The first goal was creating revenue. In selling land, Raffles was creating a system of revenue to support government expenditure on the settlement that was similar to the ideas Crawfurd had outlined. Land auctions and subsequent land rent charges created a regular government revenue stream, which did not require the Company to charge merchants and traders for the use of port facilities, with Raffles writing: ‘I have established a revenue, without any tax whatever on the trade, which more than covers all civil disbursements, and which must annually increase in future years, while these disbursements should remain the same.’Footnote 68
The second goal in creating the land registry was the assertion of EIC administrative sovereignty over the island. Farquhar had operated under the belief that the Temenggong and his followers had special rights outlined in the treaties of 1819. Although Malays were the original owners of the land, had political dominance, and were the largest population group (by 1824, the category of ‘Malay’ represented 4,580 people out of a total Singapore population of 10,683),Footnote 69 when Raffles formed the Town Council in October 1822, he used communal pluralism to marginalise the Malays. Raffles appointed a committee that was dominated by Europeans and the dominant merchant groups from across the archipelago: ‘consisting of Captain Charles Edward Davis of the Bengal Native Infantry, Samuel George Bonham who was a Civil Servant, and Mr A.L. Johnston, to act with a representative from each of the principle classes of Arabs, Malays, Bugis, Javanese, and Chinese’.Footnote 70 This planning committee viewed the Malays as one ethnic group, with the Malays being only one voice among many.Footnote 71 Raffles’ directions to the Town Committee for the allotment of land to various ethnicities emphasised the community he wanted to promote — the Chinese and not the Malays: ‘Your attention however is to be more exclusively directed to the proper allotment of the native divisions of the town, and the first in importance of these is beyond doubt the Chinese.’Footnote 72
Based on the existing number of Chinese, Raffles then went on to declare that the Chinese would constitute the future of the settlement, noting: ‘it may be presumed that they will always form by far the largest portion of the community’.Footnote 73 However, the Chinese only constituted a third of the population by 1824. But in October 1822, when Raffles’ instructions turned to allocating the kampong area for the Malays — who represented just under half the population at the time — he was looking to push the Malays to the fringes of the settlement and relegate them as insignificant:
The Malay population being principally attached to the Tumongong [sic], or engaged in fishing, may not require any very extensive allotment. It is probable the larger portion of the former will settle near Panglima Prang's and the upper banks of the river; and the latter will find accommodation for themselves in the smaller bays and inlets beyond the immediate line of beach reserved for the town.Footnote 74
The assertion of British sovereignty came in the form of Raffles’ ‘Regulation for the Registry of Land at Singapore’, issued on 1 January 1823. That ‘Regulation’ formalised the proposals initiated by the town committee which had used communal pluralism to marginalise the Malays and force them to the periphery of the settlement in late 1822.Footnote 75 Ostensibly, the registry recognised the allotments already issued by Raffles and Farquhar and enabled the subsequent transfer of land between tenure holders — thereby enabling a marketplace in land.
The land register created British administrative authority over Malay areas in Singapore. Prior to the land register, the British had been able to issue land grants only to areas under their authority within the EIC Factory, and the Malay kampong was outside their authority. But by this new regulation, Raffles asserted authority over all of Singapore and acted to restrict the authority of the Sultan and Temenggong:
That the land retained by their Highnesses the Sultan and Tumungang [sic] be not considered as transferable, or to be appropriated otherwise than for their own benefit or that of their families and immediate dependants; and all British subjects are forbidden to have any dealings therein.Footnote 76
This regulation required that the sovereign Malay authority should be beholden to British colonial administration procedures and curtailed the authority of the Sultan and the Temenggong by controlling how they could dispose of their lands. It also prevented the Temenggong selling land to Europeans. These administrative actions by Raffles reduced the power of the sovereign Malay rulers.
The land regulations introduced by Raffles were a response to the fact that control of the land was raising tensions in the new settlement. The ‘Agreement … for the occupation of Singapore, in June 1819’, which established the parameters of the British Factory, limiting the geographic spread of the English ‘from Tanjong Malang on the west, to Tanjong Kattang on the East, and on the land side, as far as the range of cannon shot, all round from the factory’, that is, a couple of kilometres across and a kilometre inland from the EIC Factory.Footnote 77 Nevertheless, in February 1823, Raffles used the original 6 February 1819 agreement, that allowed the EIC ‘to establish a factory or factories at Singapore, or on any other part of His Highness’ dominions’ to act independently of the June 1819 Agreement, asserting British de facto sovereignty across Singapore. Raffles instructed Farquhar that
the company shall be entitled to whatever extent of ground they may require for any Factory or Factories now or hereafter to be established and this stipulation could of course have had no other object … than to vest in the British Government the possession of whatever lands might become necessary for the population.Footnote 78
Raffles’ assertion of de facto sovereignty was one that Sultan Hussein and the Temenggong did not share.
On 7 June 1823 Raffles made a new agreement with Sultan Hussein and the Temenggong, in which the Sultan and the Temenggong acquiesced to Raffles’ assertions of de facto sovereignty. The agreement was principally about granting larger pensions to the Sultan and the Temenggong, but the trade-off was a clause which legitimised Raffles’ administrative declarations and limited the Malays’ authority:
With the exception of the land appropriated to their Highnesses for their respective establishments, all land within the island of Singapore, and islands immediately adjacent, to be at the entire disposal of the British Government.Footnote 79
Despite Raffles’ use of pensions to pay off the Sultan and the Temenggong, when Raffles left Singapore in June 1823, tensions were running high between Sultan Hussein and the British authorities. The Malay rulers (Sultan Hussein and the Temenggong) continued to exercise their rights as sovereigns by taxing Malays and charging taxes for the clearing of land for cultivation despite Raffles’ June 7 Convention.Footnote 80 Sultan Hussein and the Temenggong also imprisoned Malays who failed to adhere to their directives.
Usurping Malay sovereignty
In late 1823, Raffles left Singapore and nominated John Crawfurd as his successor. He advised Crawfurd to keep the status of the Sultan and the Temenggong, believing his de facto sovereignty was adequate and noting ‘the agreement … it is trusted will prove satisfactory to all parties’, but warned Crawfurd ‘to mislead them’ and to be ‘on [his] guard against these’ Chiefs.Footnote 81 Raffles had also advised the supreme government in Calcutta that the existing treaty arrangements were satisfactory.Footnote 82
By 10 January 1823, Crawfurd decided that the British needed full sovereignty over Singapore. Writing to Calcutta, Crawfurd identified the three problems with the Sultan and the Temenggong that justified gaining de jure sovereignty from them. The first was that the Sultan and the Temenggong could bring the EIC into a conflict with the Dutch or other neighbouring states.Footnote 83 The second was that he likened the ‘followers’ to ‘slaves’ and argued that they were an embarrassment to a British colony. However, on a practical level he argued that the problem with the followers was they could not become settlers because they could not ‘own property or [their] actions’.Footnote 84 Crawfurd wanted the followers to be free of the Sultan and the Temenggong and become part of the ‘free labouring classes’; he also wanted the female followers to be able to marry the Chinese male migrants.Footnote 85 The third reason was the Sultan and the Temenggong's demands for extra charges and gifts.Footnote 86
Prior to the treaty, the animosity developed into hostility. Crawfurd would later recount that Malay followers conducted ‘assassinations’ and the culprits ‘claimed exemption from our jurisdiction’.Footnote 87 Crawfurd did not report these events in his colonial dispatches, but rather recounted the events after he had retired from the EIC. Crawfurd has provided us with four different accounts of the events leading up to the transfer of sovereignty.
The first account was derived from his dispatches to his EIC superiors in Calcutta. It began with Crawfurd proposing that the EIC should purchase sovereignty from the Sultan and the Temenggong in the 10 January 1824 dispatch already discussed. After getting permission from Calcutta, on 3 August 1824 he wrote back: ‘In obedience to the instructions contained in your despatch … I lost no time in opening a negotiation with the Sultan and Tumungong [sic] for the cession of this island.’Footnote 88 This account makes no suggestion that there were any problems at all. As we have already seen, Crawfurd does not report unrest in the settlement of Singapore to his superiors.
The second account was published in his 1828 book, Journal of an embassy to Siam, after he had finished working for the EIC. Footnote 89 In this account he stated that the hostility developed in 1825, which would place it after the signing of the Treaty, although before ratification by the EIC:
the assassinations which had taken place among the Malays, the only armed class of the inhabitants, made it necessary, as a measure of prudence, to disarm them. This would have been an easy measure, but for the presence of the native chiefs, whose retainers encouraged their countrymen to resist. This threatened resistance coming to the knowledge of the Chinese, the most respectable of them waited upon me, to say, that they were ready to assist the authorities in carrying the measure of disarming the Malays into effect. Neither their assistance, however, nor that of the military, was necessary; for, in the sequel, the Malays quietly and peaceably acquiesced (my emphasis).
The third account was his evidence to a parliamentary select committee for 1832 and placed the events of conflict in 1824 in the context of the treaty negotiations:
the princes insisted upon and exercised the rights of maintaining slavery; money was extorted from the native commanders of vessels which frequented the port, and their persons were imprisoned for alleged want of respect; heavy fines were levied for felling timber in forests that were inexhaustible; assassinations were committed by the followers of the native chiefs, who claimed exemption from our jurisdiction, and frequent risk was incurred, through their vanity or imprudence, of involving us in altercations or quarrels with the neighbouring governments. The treaty of 1824 put an end to this state of things, by the entire purchase of the rights of sovereignty and property of the island for a pecuniary consideration.Footnote 90
The fourth account occurred when Crawfurd was giving evidence before another select committee in 1847. He recounted that the tension was a product of the treaty negotiations and occurred at the time of the negotiations in 1824.Footnote 91
The chief Chinese merchants came to me, and told me, that if I had any apprehension at all that the military force was not quite strong enough, they were perfectly ready to come and protect the British settlement, and that they had 2,000 of the best young men at my service. Their services, however, were not required. [Chairman question: at what time was that?] In the year 1824, when I was negotiating with the native princes for the cession of the island in perpetuity, with all the islands 10 miles round it. This is the treaty which is now in operation.Footnote 92
These four accounts create an understanding of the events that is very different to the accepted narrative. The first account has dominated our understanding of the events and is the basis for most histories of the transfer from Buckley onwards. Crawfurd presented the conflict and subsequent treaty as a purely British–Malay affair, but his later accounts attributed increasing importance to the role of the Chinese community in demanding action to stop the Malays from abusing their power and also supporting Crawfurd in taking a hard line against the Sultan and the Temenggong to end their authority in Singapore.
Crawfurd's later accounts mean we need to reread the events leading up to the 1824 Treaty. My re-reading of events, in light of Crawfurd's change in story, is supported by an emerging reinterpretation of what constitutes a primary source in historical studies of violence. In her recent comprehensive mapping of over 300 settler massacres of Indigenous people in Australia, Lyndall Ryan has argued that ‘An initial report … of a violent incident, is often denied or glossed over at the time’ and that when it comes to the ‘status of primary sources, in many cases, the later information is often more reliable that the original account’.Footnote 93 Ryan has concluded that when it comes to conflict the early accounts often obfuscate, so that perpetrators avoid blame and repercussions.
The Sultan and the Temenggong controlled a large number of armed personnel that would have outnumbered the token Sepoy force that Crawfurd had at his disposal. Carl Trocki estimated the number of the Temenggong's followers at 10,000. Crawfurd issued a directive for all Malays to disarm, as they were ‘the only armed class of the inhabitants’.Footnote 94 Both the Sultan and the Temenggong urged their followers to resist this campaign. The Sultan told his followers that if any person ‘attempted to do it, he would order him to be krissed [stabbed to death] on the spot’.Footnote 95
The situation nearly resulted in civil war, with the Chinese population offering 2,000 men to support Crawfurd's small garrison against the Malay force. The Malay rulers could rely upon support from a large body of followers, whose previous experience in piracy meant that they were experienced fighters.Footnote 96 Faced with demands from the Chinese community within Singapore for an end to Malay ‘assassinations’ and Malay abuses of power, Crawfurd was confronted with the possibility of having to launch an Anglo-Chinese coup against the Malay rulers. Launching any form of military operation would have resulted in wide-scale bloodshed and destruction of the settlement — a career-ending disaster for any colonial administrator. Faced with this option, Crawfurd used diplomacy to gain full control of the island, by offering to purchase its sovereignty from the Sultan and the Temenggong, making both men very rich. In Crawfurd's words, the standoff ended when the ‘Malays quietly and peaceably acquiesced’ to the order to disarm.Footnote 97
We do not have Crawfurd's account of the negotiations with the Malay rulers. Nor do we have an account from the perspectives of the Sultan or the Temenggong. Crawfurd's translator, Abdullah, left his observations of the negotiations in Hikayat Abdullah. He maintained that Crawfurd tricked the Malay rulers into signing away sovereignty in 1824 for a relatively small amount of money.Footnote 98 Abdullah's editor, A.H. Hill, maintains that the ‘story of the trick played by Crawfurd to force the Sultan's hand is not supported from any other source’; however, Hill is also misleading — because there are no other sources outlining Crawfurd's tactics. Footnote 99
Abdullah maintained that Crawfurd forced the Sultan and the Temenggong to the negotiation table by constricting their monthly pension ‘for three consecutive months’. The Sultan had debts which he needed to service and, according to Abdullah ‘the time had come when the Sultan could wait no longer’.Footnote 100 Abdullah recounted the negotiations as follows:
When the Sultan and Temenggong arrived Mr Crawfurd received them. … After they had been seated a moment the Sultan said ‘At present we are severely pressed for lack of money. Why is it that for the last three months you have not paid us our allowances?’ Mr. Crawfurd at once replied ‘Your Highness and the Temenggong will fully appreciate the circumstances in which I am placed. I can do nothing at all without authority. I have received instructions from the Governor-General of India authoriszing me to ask that full control of the Settlement of Singapore be transferred to the East India Company, so that there is no longer a divided control’. Footnote 101
Crawfurd clearly used the most potent weapon in his arsenal — access to money — to bend the Sultan and Temenggong to his will. As Hill notes, both men drove a ‘hard bargain with Crawfurd’. The Sultan received $33,200 (in 2020 values US$8.5 million) and $1,300 (in 2020 values, US$322,000) a month for life and the Temenggong received $26,800 (in 2020 values US$6,700,000) and $700 (in 2020 values US$173,000) a month for life.Footnote 102
Singapore was still an undeveloped settlement that was only four years old and a town of only 10,000 transient people. It was proving to be a good location for a trading port, but it was not yet the major port that it would become by mid-century. Therefore, these payments and pensions represented lucrative land deals for the Sultan and Temenggong. Both the Sultan and the Temenggong were faced with the equation, that by insisting on their sovereign and ancestral rights and going to war to assert them, they would have destroyed the settlement and lost any chance to earn such a large sum of money, while Crawfurd came up with an offer to appease the Sultan and the Temenggong. Credit for avoiding the conflict belongs to all three of them for working out a financial solution. These payments were the price of avoiding conflict in Singapore and enabled the continued growth of the settlement.
Conclusion
Raffles, Farquhar and Crawfurd all manipulated the situation, to assert first British de facto sovereignty and then negotiate de jure sovereignty. Thousands of people flocked to the new settlement from Malacca, China and the surrounding Southeast Asian islands. Land values increased exponentially and the island became a site for commerce and speculation. Yet this growth was at the expense of the original inhabitants, who were increasingly pushed aside by EIC administrative practices. Although the EIC and its British officials were culpably responsible for alienating the Orang Laut and the Malays, the faceless settler majority supported Raffles, Farquhar and Crawfurd. It was this settler majority that swamped the original Orang Laut and Malay inhabitants of Singapore.
This tension between the growing settler population and the indigenous inhabitants brought the situation to the verge of civil war. A diplomatic solution between the Sultan, the Temenggong and Crawfurd averted a humanitarian catastrophe and prevented a blood-soaked foundation story for Singapore.
These events reveal that Raffles, Farquhar and Crawfurd all worked to construct a settler colony in Singapore in the 1820s. In doing so, these EIC officials were not interested in creating a settler society for Europeans only, but one that gave opportunity to Chinese, Indian and to a lesser extent Malay individuals. These Malay individuals would identify with the colony through landownership and not by personal affiliation with a Sultan or Temenggong.
