Government agencies communicate via. Trusted website s. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Southeast Asia has become an emblem of all that is exotic and colourful, and this is particularly true of the manner in which the region has been depicted in popular fiction and films for the longest time. That these tropes recur time and again in literature and films has something to do with the residual memory of what Singapore — like many other cosmopolitan Southeast Asian commercial centres that developed in the 19th century — once was, and how it was regarded more than a hundred years ago.
Little did the founder of modern Singapore Stamford Raffles realise this when he stepped ashore the island on 28 January The rest, as they say, is history.
These were commercial entities that were given the power to acquire territory in the name of their respective countries, and to project military power across the globe in the search for profit and markets. In the course of doing so, these militarised commercial behemoths permanently altered the socio-economic landscape of the territories that came under their dominion, and in many ways laid down the foundations for what would later become the postcolonial nation-states of Asia that we know today.
Singapore was one of several cosmopolitan commercial centres that emerged during the colonial era, along with Georgetown Penang and Malacca in Malaya; Batavia Jakarta , Medan and Surabaya in the Dutch East Indies Indonesia ; and Manila in the Philippines. These commercial-administrative centres were somewhat unique in the way they performed several functions at the same time: Singapore, Georgetown and Batavia were bustling ports and administrative centres as well as military bases, and developed rapidly as a result of mass migration that was brought about by the advances in communications technology and logistics.
It would be erroneous to think of these places as being completely dominated by Europeans, for in reality most of these colonial centres relied on Asian migrant labour at almost every level of the hierarchy: in the mines and fields, in the ranks of the local militias and guard units, and in the byzantine hive of colonial administration. David Joel Steinberg and others have noted that Batavia — which was the centre of Dutch colonial power across the entire East Indies — had at most a few thousand Europeans serving in its elite administrative corps, while much of the work of governance and commerce was handled by multitudinous Asians, both locals and migrants.
