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.
Over the past two decades, Singapore has advanced rapidly towards becoming a both a global city-state and a key nodal point in the international economic sphere. These developments have caused us to reassess how we understand this changing nation, including its history, population, and geography, as well as its transregional and transnational experiences with the external world. This collection spans several disciplines in the humanities and social sciences and draws on various theoretical approaches and methodologies in order to produce a more refined understanding of Singapore and to reconceptialize the challenges faced by the country and its peoples.
Comprising a collection of papers written over two decades, this book studies the different aspects of power struggle in colonial Singapore. Topics include Chinese political and community leadership in pre-war Singapore, Tan Kah-Kee: the non-partisan Chinese nationalist, the Malayan Kuomintang Movement in the early twentieth century, and the British colonial elite and its policy toward the Chinese.
What role does race, geography, religion, orthography and nationalism play in the crafting of identities? What are the origins of Singlish? This book offers a thorough investigation of old and new identities in Asia's most global city, examined through the lens of language.
The Graves of Tarim narrates the movement of an old diaspora across the Indian Ocean over the past five hundred years. Ranging from Arabia to India and Southeast Asia, Engseng Ho explores the transcultural exchanges—in kinship and writing—that enabled Hadrami Yemeni descendants of the Muslim prophet Muhammad to become locals in each of the three regions yet remain cosmopolitans with vital connections across the ocean. At home throughout the Indian Ocean, diasporic Hadramis engaged European empires in surprising ways across its breadth, beyond the usual territorial confines of colonizer and colonized. A work of both anthropology and history, this book brilliantly demonstrates how the emerging fields of world history and transcultural studies are coming together to provide groundbreaking ways of studying religion, diaspora, and empire. Ho interprets biographies, family histories, chronicles, pilgrimage manuals and religious law as the unified literary output of a diaspora that hybridizes both texts and persons within a genealogy of Prophetic descent. By using anthropological concepts to read Islamic texts in Arabic and Malay, he demonstrates the existence of a hitherto unidentified canon of diasporic literature. His supple conceptual framework and innovative use of documentary and field evidence are elegantly combined to present a vision of this vital world region beyond the histories of trade and European empire.
More than 80 per cent of the Chinese outside China live in Southeast Asia and many of them have been integrated into the local societies. However, the resurgence of China and ethnic Chinese investment in their ancestral land have caused concern among some non-Chinese Southeast Asian elites. They have begun to question the position and identity of the Chinese population in their countries. Ethnic Chinese as Southeast Asians addresses these ethnic Chinese issues, as well as ethnic Chinese relations with China and with indigenous groups in the region. Written by leading scholars in Southeast Asia, including both ethnic Chinese and non-Chinese, the volume also explores the position of the ethnic Chinese in contemporary as well as the future Southeast Asia, providing readers with a most up-to-date and comprehensive study on the subject.
