This collected volume of 18 chapters is unique in its demonstration of evolving Singapore historiography from the 1920s to the present, with a focus on pre-1819 British Singapore. The book consists of re-publications of significant studies by notable Western and Asian scholars, representative of the shifts in Singapore historiography over time. An accessible introductory overview (chap. 1) is followed by the first set of 11 Straits of Melaka historical macro-studies (1921–1992). The overview chap. 12 follows by locating Singapore's place in the periodic cycles of regional Straits of Melaka history, followed by a mix of micro-studies (1942–2004) and a concluding chapter by co-editor Kwa Chong Guan. This volume documents the pre-1965 evolution of Singapore in a manner that is consistent with the primary and secondary sources available at the time of the authors’ original studies.
The earliest chapters demonstrate that there were limited known primary sources for the period prior to Singapore's founding as a colonial port in 1819, as the British became a presence based on the island's strategic location for maritime transit between South Asia and East Asia. The concluding chapter addresses recent recoveries of oral and written retrospective eighteenth-century Malay texts linked to archaeological findings that collectively pair with Portuguese and Dutch post-1500 historical accounting. These newly mined sources confirm the transition of the once prominent regional fourteenth and fifteenth-century Melaka court to pre-Singapore Johor (on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula) as the rightful heir to the foundational Srivijayan (6th to 13th century) southeast Sumatran trading port network. This network included a period of wider China and Java Seas and Eastern Indian Ocean commercial and cultural importance after the Portuguese seized Melaka in 1511, and subsequently lost power in the area to the Dutch (1641–1825) — followed by the British establishment of the Crown Colony of Singapore in 1819.
As several chapters confirm, recent archaeological findings, revisionist studies of Malay court chronicles and oral texts, Asian (especially Chinese court records and diaspora) accounts, and European maritime sojourner journals collectively substantiate modern Singapore as the successor to the late thirteenth and fourteenth-century Temasek port-polity based on the hilltop overlooking what is today the site of the courts, government buildings, museums, and marketplaces.
The historical centre of Singapore has been recovered by substantive archaeological excavations since the 1980s. According to historical texts (most notably the Sejarah Melayu) Temasek was the legacy court of Srivijaya; it would in time transition to become the prominent lower Malay Peninsula maritime crossroads to the Bay of Bengal, and the South China and Java Seas prior to significant European presence. In the fourteenth century the Temasek court re-centred at the then more strategic Melaka, which became the major Indian Ocean stopover and market centre during the inter-monsoon period. When the better-armed Portuguese seized Melaka in 1511 the Melaka Sultanate relocated to Johor on the southern tip of the Peninsula; subsequently Portuguese Melaka was taken by Dutch East India Company naval and infantry forces in 1641. In response, most of Johor's multi-ethnic residents retreated to the small southernmost island of agricultural settlements, fishing villages, along with littoral floating villages consisting of residents and sojourners who were transiting during the seasonal Asian monsoon. This territorial mix collectively incorporated as British Singapore in 1819.
While the volume as a whole provides a useful historiographical collection that brings together earlier and recent published studies, perhaps the book's greatest contribution is in the final six chapters that focus on Singapore as the legatee and continuator of the Melaka and Srivijayan realms that began in the seventh century. These final chapters portray Singapore as the strategic culmination of the historic Straits of Melaka passageway, and most notably the base of a multi-ethnic Straits community. The pre-1819 era chapters are notable revisionist approaches to early Singapore history, as they contest prior studies based on limited early Western and linguistically accessible written and oral regional accounts of the island-state's origin. The book's later chapters assert that Singapore under British rule initially focused on and legitimised the post-1819 centred port-city — as the base of first Britain's and subsequently independent Singapore's rightful command over the islands off the southernmost coast of the Peninsula.
Under the leadership of Stamford Raffles, then lieutenant-governor of Bencoolen, the new Crown Colony succeeded the coastal sovereignty of the Johor Malay sultanate, consolidating its hold over numbers of small Straits islands — populated by Malay orang laut and orang kaya, and maritime and multi-ethnic Asian diaspora (notably Javanese, Chinese, Bugis, Chams), who made their living as seamen and in times of scarcity as pirates. While the book's second set of chapters (13–18) focus on later political issues, several of these studies provide societal details based on the newer local and regional sources that allow historians to undertake a much-needed extended revisionist examination of the complexity of British Singapore beyond 1819 to or from c.1850.
