This important overview explores the connections between Singapore's past with historical developments worldwide until present day. The contributors analyse Singapore as a city-state seeking to provide an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of the global dimensions contributing to Singapore's growth. The book's global perspective demonstrates that many of the discussions of Singapore as a city-state have relevance and implications beyond Singapore to include Southeast Asia and the world. This vital volume should not be missed by economists, as well as those interested in imperial histor.
This important overview explores the connections between Singapore's past with historical developments worldwide until present day. The contributors analyse Singapore as a city-state seeking to provide an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of the global dimensions contributing to Singapore's growth. The book's global perspective demonstrates that many of the discussions of Singapore as a city-state have relevance and implications beyond Singapore to include Southeast Asia and the world. This vital volume should not be missed by economists, as well as those interested in imperial history, business history and networks.
Singapore gained independence in 1965, a city-state in a world of nation-states. Yet its long and complex history reaches much farther back. Blending modernity and tradition, ideologies and ethnicities, a peculiar set of factors make Singapore what it is today. In this thematic study of the island nation, Michael D. Barr 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. In doing so he rejects the official narrative of the so-called 'Singapore Story'. Drawing on in-depth archival work and oral histories, Singapore: A Modern History is a work both for students of the country's history and politics, but also for any reader seeking to engage with this enigmatic and vastly successful nation.
"Once a centre for international trade and finance, Singapore has become a "global city." Singapore from Temasek to the 21st Century: Reinventing the Global City examines its evolution from trading port to city-state, showing how Singapore has repeatedly reinvented itself by creating or re-asserting qualities that helped attract capital, talent and trade. In the 14th century, the island's prosperity rested on regulating the regional carrying trade passing through the Straits of Melaka. In 1819, after a long period of decline, the British East India Company revived the island's fortune by making Singapore a "free" port, and trade sustained the city until the Japanese occupation and the postwar collapse of colonial rule. After independence, Singapore resumed its role as a major commercial and financial center, but added facilities to make the island a regional centre for manufacturing. More recently, it has transformed its population into an educated and highly-skilled workforce, and has made the island an education hub that is a magnet for research and development in fields such as biotechnology. Singapore's dramatic evolutionary struggle defies description as a sequentially unfolding narrative, or merely as the story of a nation. In this volume, an international group of scholars examines the history of Singapore as a series of discontinuous and varied attempts by a shifting array of local and foreign actors to optimise advantages arising from the island's strategic location and overcome its lack of natural resources."--publisher website.
A General History of the Chinese in Singapore documents over 700 years of Chinese history in Singapore, from Chinese presence in the region through the millennium-old Hokkien trading world to the waves of mass migration that came after the establishment of a British settlement, and through to the development and birth of the nation. Across 38 chapters and parts, readers are taken through the complex historical mosaic of Overseas Chinese social, economic and political activity in Singapore and the region, such as the development of maritime junk trade, plantation industries, and coolie labour, the role of different bangs, clan associations and secret societies as well as Chinese leaders, the diverging political allegiances including Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary activities and the National Salvation Movement leading up to the Second World War, the transplanting of traditional Chinese religions, the changing identity of the Overseas Chinese, and the developments in language and education policies, publishing, arts, and more.With 'Pride in our Past, Legacy for our Future' as its key objective, this volume aims to preserve the Singapore Chinese story, history and heritage for future generations, as well as keep our cultures and traditions alive. Therefore, the book aims to serve as a comprehensive guide for Singaporeans, new immigrants and foreigners to have an epitome of the Singapore society. This publication is supported by the National Heritage Board's Heritage Project Grant.Related Link(s)
Will the rise of China change the international system built by the industrial and constitutional democracies of the West of the past centuries? Should China be content with the maintenance of that system: one of competing nationstates of absolute sovereignty and relative power? Does the Confucian past contain a moral vision that may connect with universal human values of the modern world? And will the rising China become an engine for a renewed Chinese civilization that contributes to the equity in the international system? Pondering these fundamental questions, historian Prof. Wang Gungwu probes into the Chinese perception of its place in world history, and traces the unique features that propel China onto its modern global transformation. He depicts the travails of renewal that China has to face and betters our understanding of China's position in today's interconnected world. This collection of Prof. Wang Gungwu's thoughts is a mustread for us to contemplate China's root and routes along its modernization trajectory.
This open access book considers a pivotal era in Chinese history from a global perspective. This book’s insight into Chinese and international history offers timely and challenging perspectives on initiatives like “Chinese characteristics”, “The New Silk Road” and “One Belt, One Road” in broad historical context. Global History with Chinese Characteristics analyses the feeble state capacity of Qing China questioning the so-called “High Qing” (shèng qīng 盛清) era’s economic prosperity as the political system was set into a “power paradox” or “supremacy dilemma”. This is a new thesis introduced by the author demonstrating that interventionist states entail weak governance. Macao and Marseille as a new case study aims to compare Mediterranean and South China markets to provide new insights into both modern eras’ rising trade networks, non-official institutions and interventionist impulses of autocratic states such as China’s Qing and Spain’s Bourbon empires.
When C.M. Turnbull's A History of Singapore, 1819-1975 appeared in 1977, it quickly achieved recognition as the definitive history of Singapore. A second edition published in 1989 brought the story up to the elections held in 1988. In this fully revised edition, rewritten to take into account recent scholarship on Singapore, the author has added a chapter on Goh Chok Tong's premiership (1990-2004) and the transition to a government headed by Lee Hsien Loong. The book now ends in 2005, when the Republic of Singapore celebrated its 40th anniversary as an independent nation. Major changes occurred in the 1990s as the generation of leaders that oversaw the transition from a colony to independence stepped aside in favour of a younger generation of leaders. Their task was to shape a course that sustained the economic growth and social stability achieved by their predecessors, and they would be tested towards the end of the decade when Southeast Asia experienced a severe financial crisis. Many modern studies on Singapore focus on current affairs or very recent events and pay a great deal of attention to Singapore's successful transition from the developing to the developed world. However, younger historians are increasingly interested in other aspects of the country's past, particularly social and cultural issues. A History of Modern Singapore, 1819-2005 provides a solid foundation and an overarching framework for this research, surveying Singapore's trajectory from a small British port to a major trading and financial hub within the British Empire and finally to the modern city state that Singapore became after gaining independence in 1965.
Two hundred years ago, Sir Stamford Raffles established the modern settlement of Singapore with the intent of seeing it become ‘a great commercial emporium and fulcrum’. But by the time independence was achieved in 1965, the city faced daunting problems of housing shortage, slums and high unemployment. Since then, Singapore has become one of the richest countries on earth, providing, in Sir Peter Hall’s words, ‘perhaps the most extraordinary case of economic development in the history of the world’. The story of Singapore’s remarkable achievements in the first half century after its independence is now widely known. In Planning Singapore: The Experimental City, Stephen Hamnett and Belinda Yuen have brought together a set of chapters on Singapore’s planning achievements, aspirations and challenges, which are united in their focus on what might happen next in the planning of the island-state. Chapters range over Singapore’s planning system, innovation and future economy, housing, biodiversity, water and waste, climate change, transport, and the potential transferability of Singapore’s planning knowledge. A key question is whether the planning approaches, which have served Singapore so well until now, will suffice to meet the emerging challenges of a changing global economy, demographic shifts, new technologies and the existential threat of climate change. Singapore as a global city is becoming more unequal and more diverse. This has the potential to weaken the social compact which has largely existed since independence and to undermine the social resilience undoubtedly needed to cope with the shocks and disruptions of the twenty-first century. The book concludes, however, that Singapore is better-placed than most to respond to the challenges which it will certainly face thanks to its outstanding systems of planning and implementation, a proven capacity to experiment and a highly developed ability to adapt quickly, purposefully and pragmatically to changing circumstances.
