Singapore Stories: Language, Class, and the Chinese of Singapore, ...

The manner in which Singapore was regarded as a component of the settlements rather than a distinct colony is reflected by the fact that most early official records from the Colonial Office tend to refer to the inhabitants of the settlements as a whole rather than of Singapore, Penang, or Malacca specifically. The effect of this discourse is evident in the early colonial histories. Attempts by authors such as Begbie and Newbold to map out the history of Malaya only succeeded in providing a simplistic overview of the cultures within the settlements. None paid heed to the possibilities of tracing a separate history of Singapore and its migrant communities. Later works by scholar-administrators such as Frank Swettenham continued along similar lines of thought. ¹² Albert Lau has since identified this as a chief reason in the lack of “a distinctly Singaporean orientation in [Singapore’s early] historiography”. ¹³

John Cook’s Sunny Singapore (published in 1907) and F. M. Luscombe’s Singapore 1819–1930 (1930) rank among the earliest attempts to map a separate history of Singapore, as did an attempted narrative of the events in Singapore spanning 1819 to 1867 in C. B. Buckley’s An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore (1902). ¹⁴ All were vivid narratives in their own right, although none were able to accomplish anything beyond providing superficial accounts based largely on secondary sources or third-hand knowledge of the settlement.

Contributions (particularly in English) to history writing in Singapore from the colonised population were generally rare occurrences. There were exceptions to the rule, when specific members of the colonised community took it upon themselves to document their experiences for posterity. An invaluable historical work is Song Ong Siang’s voluminous One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore. Originally penned in 1923, it provides a striking narrative of life for the Chinese in Singapore at the turn of the last century. ¹⁵ His ethnicity, language skills, and contacts granted him a degree of access to the Chinese communities that was almost unique among English-language writers at the time. Articles appearing in the Straits Chinese Magazine, a short-lived periodical (1897–1907), at the turn of the twentieth century