Studying Singapore Before 1800

Singapore’s history is a story of changing fortunes. This anthology’s studies illustrate three approaches to the study of Singapore before 1800. They entail, first, searching for classical texts; second, pursuing a much closer reading of those texts and records; and, third, contextualizing the integration of Singapore’s pre- and post-1800 pasts within the long cycles of history. The challenge of studying Singapore both before 1800 and after 1800 depends on whether alternative framings of Singapore within a 700- or a 200-year timeframe are used. The 200-year timeframe leads to the historical trajectory of Singapore’s beginnings as a non-nineteenth-century colonial state, transformed by twentieth-century decolonization into a post-colonial nation-state, but which, after 1965, had to disconnect from the Malay world after it tried but failed to merge with it. The 700-year time frame, in contrast, focuses on the sea, and the cycles and circuits of maritime trade in the South China Sea and the Straits of Melaka as the driving forces of Singapore’s raison d’etre. The before-1800-and-after-1800 problem is more than about different ways of thinking about Singapore and having to decide about the “correct” way to think about Singapore’s past, it is about the tensions inherent in locating Singapore in the intersections of these two ways of thinking about Singapore’s past in a global-historical context versus an autonomous history of local pasts. Annotation ©2019 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)