It seems fitting that, on the occasion of the commemoration of the founding of modern Singapore 150 years ago, we should look further back than the year 1819 and see whether another examination of ancient documents can bring to light new data on the early history of Singapore. Accordingly it is here submitted that a previously unrecognised reference to Singapore, under another name of course, is to be found in a well-known Indian document written nearly 950 years ago. Such a discovery gives immediate rise to further speculation regarding the possibility that this island was also known to Chinese and Arab geographers and merchants as an important trading centre and possibly known as such as early as the second century of the Christian era.

The full story of the Indians in Malaya has yet to be told. Here an attempt is made to assemble the information relating to some aspects of their settlement in Singapore over the last one hundred and fifty years.

The existence of diplomatic and military relations between Ottoman Turkey and some Muslim states of Southeast Asia has been known for centuries. The Portuguese chroniclers, notably Couto and Pinto, kept the idea alive in the West; oral traditions and a few chronicles kept it more vividly before the imagination of the Atjehnese; and in Turkey there has been a revived interest in the connection since at least 1873. An attempt therefore seems overdue to seek greater precision on these remarkable events, by considering at least the most notable of the sources from the three sides.

The ideas of the ancient Khmers about the connection between kings and gods, as known from sources bearing on the Angkorian kingdom, have received considerable attention from modern scholars. As early as 1904, Aymonier in the third volume of his history described the cult of the Devarāja as “une sorte de déification aux divinités brahmaniques, des rois et même des personnages de distinction, hommes ou femmes, qui érigent des temples ou contribuent d'une façon quelconque à rehausser le culte de ces divinités.” The stele of Sdok Kak Thom, edited by E. F. Aymonier in 1901, by L. Finot in 1915, and again by G. Coedès and P. Dupont in 1946, is particularly important in yielding fragmentary information about the history of the devarāja cult, and the introduction to the last-named of these editions contains a discussion of the cult, which appears to link the person of a king to the god Siva, or some other. G. Coedès has discussed aspects of royal divinity in several places, his most general and best-known account of the subject, originally presented as “Cultes Personnels à l'Epoque du Bayon” appearing as the third chapter of Pour mieux comprendre Angkor. The scholarly literature describing the statuary and architecture of the Angkor monuments abounds in references to the apparent deification of kings and their relatives, as represented in statues and in titles attributed to them. J. Filliozat's notable study of the symbolism of the Bakheng may be mentioned as an example of the attention which has been devoted to Khmer architecture as a reflection of ideas associating a king with a god. Among other relevant discussions, J. Przyluski's views on the nature. of the Angkorian monuments and B. P. Groslier's analysis of the kings' religious functions in the light of their social, political and economic rôles may be mentioned here. The representation of kings as gods is a theme commonly recognized in Angkorian studies, and even in other periods of Khmer history. A comparatively recent article suggests the existence of the “god-king” in pre-Angkorian times.

In continental India the East India Company subjected European immigration to tight restrictions. Private Europeans had to obtain a licence to live in India and were forbidden to buy land. When the trade of India was thrown open to private merchants in 1813, the restriction on settlement was retained. The same licensing system applied in theory to European immigrants in the Straits Settlements, but in practice it was not enforced. In 1797 when Calcutta first enquired by what authority the European inhabitants had settled in Penang, few of them could produce licences, but no steps were taken to evict them, and in 1823 the Recorder ruled that the possession of land entitled them legally to remain in Penang.

No reputable historian nowadays maintains that the Portuguese 16th- century thalassocracy in the Indian Ocean was always and everywhere completely effective. In particular, it is widely accepted that there was a marked if erratic revival in the Red Sea spice-trade shortly after the first Turkish occupation of Aden in 1538, though much work remains to be done on the causes and effects of this development. The Portuguese reactions to the rise of Atjeh have been studied chiefly in connection with the frequent fighting in the Straits of Malacca; and the economic side of the struggle has been less considered. The connection of Atjeh with the revival of the Red Sea spice-trade has been insufficiently stressed; though Mrs. Meilink-Roelofsz and Dr. V. Magalhaes Godinho have some relevant observations on this point in their recent and well documented works (Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago, 1500–1630, The Hague, 1962, pp. 142–46; Os Descobrimentos e a Economia Mundial, Vol. II, Lisboa, 1967, pp. 111–171). The purpose of this paper is to amplify the facts and figures which they give there, in the hope that someone with the necessary linguistic qualifications will be incited to make complementary researches in the relevant Indonesian, Arabian, or Turkish sources.

The records of Singapore abound in population censuses which have been quoted by demographers, historians and other writers. These censuses can be broadly divided into those taken before 1871 and those conducted since that year. In the first period census counts were undertaken rather haphazardly, mainly by the police at fairly regular and short intervals, viz. annually from 1824 to 1830 and from 1832 to 1834, and then in 1836, 1840, 1849 and 1860. The original publications pertaining to these census counts are no longer available and the figures can only be obtained from secondary sources. In the second period proper and systematic censuses, as understood in the modern sense, were conducted by trained enumerators at regular but longer intervals and the results published in their original form are still available. The first census of this kind was held on 2 April 1871, and thereafter censuses were conducted every ten years up to 1931. Owing to the Second World War the 1941 census was postponed until 1947, followed by one held in 1957. By and large, it can be said that the census records gradually improved in comprehensiveness and accuracy.

Historians have long recognised the fundamental importance of the withdrawal of Vietnamese mandarins from Cochinchina following the French colonial invasion. The departure of these scholar officials, first from the eastern provinces in the initial phase of the French advance which ended in 1862 and then from the western provinces after these were occupied in 1867, forced the French colonial administration to adopt a policy of direct rule. There has been some confusion over the nature of this rule, not least because various French officials in the eighteen sixties were able to convince themselves that the use of Vietnamese names for the positions filled by French administrators somehow represented a continuation of the Vietnamese pattern of administration. In particular the impression has remained that Vietnamese officials continued to play an important part in the administration of justice in Cochinchina until the advent of civil government for the colony in 1879.

For almost a century before 1629, the sultanate of Acheh in north Sumatra was the most formidable indigenous state on either side of Malacca Strait. A stalemate had developed between Acheh and the Portuguese in Malacca, with the Portuguese unable to maintain sufficient forces locally to invade Acheh, and the Achinese unable to press their numerous sieges of Malacca to a successful conclusion before the Portuguese relief fleet arrived from India. Under additional Dutch pressure early in the seventeenth century, the Portuguese seem to have been unable to render the assistance against Acheh which they had given the Malay states on occasion in the sixteenth century. In 1613–20 Johore, Pahang, Kedah and Perak were conquered by Sultan Iskandar Muda (1607–36) of Acheh. In most cases, the defeated sultan was carried off to Acheh and a relative installed as a vassal of Acheh. Sultan Ala'ud-din Ri'ayat Shah II of Johore escaped when the Achinese overran Batu Sawar in June 1613, but died a few years later. His half-brother, Raja Bongsu or Raja Seberang, was taken to Acheh, married to Iskander Muda's sister, and sent back to Batu Sawar as Sultan Abdu'llah Ma'ayat Shah (1613–23). When Abdu'llah rejected Iskander Muda's sister and married a daughter of the Sultan of Jambi about 1617, he also rejected the Achinese tradition of hostility to the Portuguese. For this, the Achinese pursued him from his new capital at Lingga to Tambilan, where he died of “hartseer” (despair) in 1623. Carpentier, the Dutch governor-general at Batavia, assumed that the once mighty Johore empire had come to an end.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had established a firm foothold in Burma. As a result of the Second Anglo-Burmese War which broke out in 1852, Britain acquired the delta area of the country's most important river, the Irrawaddy. This, added to what she had previously gained from the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824, had placed under her control, the entire Burmese seaboard.

The shipping conference system in Singapore was under severe and sustained criticism three times in the last 60 odd years. In 1910 the colonial Straits Settlements legislative council in Singapore passed the Freight and Steamship Bill whose lengthy preamble contained the indictment that the conference system was ‘injurious to the trade of the colony and inconsistent with the public welfare’. In 1930, during the annual general meeting of the Singapore Branch of the Straits Settlements Association, a leading lawyer, Roland Braddell, launched a bitter attack on the conference. Subsequently a public meeting was held which called on the colonial government to see ‘if we cannot rid ourselves of this octopus which is strangling this Colony’.

The transfer of the former Royal Navy dockyard to the Government of Singapore, at a ceremony on 8 December 1968, went almost unnoticed in the press of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Yet twenty-seven years earlier, to the very day, the Japanese landings at Kota Bahru, followed immediately by the bombing of Pearl Harbor, inspired alarming headlines. In Australia and New Zealand, where for twenty years the Singapore naval base had been given the central place in all defence planning, the Japanese attack gave rise to the first real fears of invasion. As they faced this possibility they regarded the ‘impregnable fortress’ of Singapore as their first line of defence.

The west Sumatran coast between Barus in the north and Inderapura in the south, which came under Achehnese rule, was originally part of the Minangkabau kingdom which developed in the fourteenth century and reigned supreme in central Sumatra up to about the end of the following century The Padang lowlands and the coastal region up to the northern border of Silebar were considered in the Alam Minangkabau as part of the rantau, or acquired territories, as different from the darat, or nucleus of the kingdom formed by the 3 luaks (or districts) of Agam, Tanah Data and Lima Puloh Kota. The important distinction between the darat and the rantau was that the former was administered on genealogical principles with a penghulu at the head of each negeri in the luak while the rantau was divided into several parts and was under the territorial rule of various rajas who were members of the royal family.2 Beneath the rajas appointed by the central administration at Pagarruyong were minor rajas and penghulus selected from amongst the local inhabitants who were in charge of the various districts. In return for the help and protection provided by the darat, especially in times of trouble, the negeris in the rantau were obliged to pay homage and tribute to Pagarruyong, a duty which they evaded during periods of weak central control, as at the end of the fifteenth century.

Anglo-Burmese relations during Mindon Min's reign (1853–1878) fluctuated between settlement and unsettlement, between friendly gestures and frustrated hopes. By the early 1870's the Burmese ruler had given up dreams of regaining territories captured by the British in the second war, and was busy preserving the independence of his truncated kingdom. However, a Burmese mission failed to secure either direct relations with the British Government or diplomatic support from other European powers. All this while British commercial interests clamoured for the implementation of the Anglo-Burmese treaties of 1862 and 1867, and for the investigation of new trade routes via Burma to China.

The trade between India and the Malay Peninsula was an important link in the inter-Asian trading system. It took in a wide assortment of goods, embracing not only the produce of these two countries but also serving as a vehicle for the transhipment and distribution of goods from neighbouring and even distant regions that are assembled at these centres of trade. Thus the import trade from India to Malaya had cotton piece-goods as its staple and other produce of India in lesser quantities such as rice, wheat, butter, sugar, oil, hemp, leather and sometimes slaves. Among the items of import, goods that have an obviously non-Indian origin are Arabian incense, amber, red corals, rhinoceros horns and most of the elephant tusks. The articles exported show an even wider area of distribution. From the Malay peninsula itself and neighbouring regions there was tin, pepper, cloves, tortoise shells, sandal wood, sappan wood, benzoin, gumlac, coconut fibre, white and brown sugar, diamonds, besoar stones, quick silver and elephants. Chinese porcelain and copper were obviously brought from the far east. Even allowing for some exaggeration in Tome Pires's figures of Gujerati merchants in Malacca and of his account of the trade from Coromandel, Malabar and Bengal, there seems no doubt of the economic importance of the trade to societies on the two ends of the Bay of Bengal. Indeed the Bay seems to have formed a wellknit commercial unit exchanging surplus produce from its various regions for which the Indian traders were an invaluable medium. The main participants of this trade were the Muslims of the Gujerat ports, Muslims of Bengal and Golconda and Hindu and Muslim traders settled in Coromandel and Malabar coasts.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Britain converted her paramountcy into effective control in the central and southern states of the Malay Peninsula (except Johore) through the device of British Residents whose advice the several Malay rulers were obliged to accept in “all matters of administration”. But strong local pressure for the extension of this system northwards into the Siamese part of the Peninsula was neutralized by the Foreign Office which sought alternative means of safeguarding British interests there. This paper examines the various arrangements considered when the intrusion of another European power appeared likely, culminating in a secret convention between Britain and Stem signed in April 1897.

From the time modern Singapore was founded its Chinese population comprised Malacca-born (later Singapore-born) “Straits Chinese and China-born immigrants who came from various districts of South China. While the latter belonged to various speech groups and in the early days were clannish in outlook, they regarded themselves as hua-ch'iao (overseas Chinese) and remained Chinese citizens. They were either China-oriented in their political loyalty, or else were apolitical. In contrast the Straits Chinese were local citizens with no second homeland. The earlier residents were Babas who had emigrated from Malacca. Their remote ancestors had come mainly from the province of Fukien, but had settled in Malacca and married local Malay women. After Singapore, Penang and Malacca became the Straits Settlements in 1826, the Babas and their descendants came also to be known as the Straits Chinese.

Few areas of recent Thai history have been the target of as much guesswork as have Thailand's foreign relations in the years immediately preceeding the Pacific War. The educated guess has been the only resort of the historian who would venture into this field, for vernacular documentation has gone unexploited. As a result, the usual treatments of the Thai role in the 1940 Franco-Thai border dispute have followed unreliable or hostile Western sources and the Thai policies of the time have been viewed in an unfavourable light. In a real sense, the French view of the affair has been adopted, for lack of other alternatives.

Singapore became a distinct crown colony in 1946. Two years later the British Government began to introduce constitutional reforms in the island in accordance with its pledge in 1943 to foster the growth of “(Malaya's) capacity for self-government within the British Empire”. This colonial tutelage assumed two forms. Firstly, the government started to prepare for a fully elected legislature through which to transfer power to the people in the future. Secondly, the people were trained to work a system of democratic elections based on universal suffrage for all British and (after 1948) British Protected Subjects. The process, however, was fairly slow with the result that the governmental system of a normal crown colony remained basically intact in Singapore until 1955. Assisted by an advisory executive council and a legislative council, the governor continued to rule the colony with almost unlimited powers, subject only to the control of the Secretary of State for the Colonies at Whitehall. The legislature did not even have an elected majority until the Rendel Constitution was introduced in April 1955. Under this new constitution, the Labour Front-Alliance coalition government became the first elected government to assume office with a considerable degree of power in its hands.