East India Company

In January 1819 Sir Stamford Raffles of the English East India Company, searching for a trading site, forestalled by the Dutch at Riau, and finding the Carimon (Karimun) Islands unsuitable, landed at Singapore. He found only a few Chinese planters, some Indigenous people, and a few Malays and was told by the hereditary chief, the temenggong (direct ancestor of the sultans of present-day Johor, Malaysia), that the company could purchase land. The temenggong, however, was a subordinate of his cousin Abdul Rahman, sultan of Riau-Johor, who was under Dutch surveillance. Furthermore, Abdul Rahman was a younger son and not a sultan de jure. Raffles, disobeying instructions not to offend the Dutch, withdrew his own recognition of Abdul Rahman’s suzerainty over Singapore and installed Abdul Rahman’s elder brother, Hussein (Husain), to validate the purchase of land there on behalf of the company. The Dutch protested. In London the company’s court of directors, though it decided that Raffles had contravened instructions, took no action.

In 1824 an Anglo-Dutch treaty left Malaya and Singapore in the British sphere, and in August the whole of Singapore Island was ceded to the British for a monetary payment. Two years later Singapore, Penang, and Malacca (Melaka) were combined as the Straits Settlements to form an outlying residency of India. In 1830 they were reduced to a residency under Bengal, and two years later Singapore became their capital. When the East India Company lost its monopoly of the China trade (1833), it also lost its interest in Malaya. The settlements were transferred to the direct control of the governor-general of India in 1851. In 1867 they were made a crown colony under the Colonial Office in London.

Development of the port

Meanwhile, Singapore’s trade had suffered after 1842 from British development of a rival port, Hong Kong, as later it was to suffer from the French occupation of mainland Southeast Asia and their development of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and Haiphong in Vietnam and from the establishment of Dutch ports and shipping lines in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the advent of steamships, however, an era of prosperity began that led eventually to the construction of 3 miles (5 km) of wharves at Tanjong Pagar and finally, in 1921, a naval base. The economic growth of the Malay states after they became British protectorates enlarged transit trade.

The demand of the industrial West for tin and rubber was what made Singapore one of the greatest ports in the world. After World War I, steps were taken to modernize Malayan defenses and, with the lapsing of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, to build a large naval base in Singapore.

World War II and the end of colonialism

In early December 1941 the Japanese landed in northern Malaya and southern Thailand on the Malay Peninsula. They quickly gained air and naval superiority in the region, and by the end of January 1942 they had overrun the peninsula and were opposite Singapore Island. The Japanese crossed the Johor Strait on February 8, 1942, and the British command surrendered the island and city one week later. Singapore remained in Japanese hands until September 1945.

Postwar British political plans for Malaya excluded Singapore from a proposed Malayan Union and later from the Federation of Malaya, mainly because it was thought that Singapore’s predominantly Chinese population would be an ethnic obstacle to common citizenship. As a separate crown colony (from 1946), Singapore made constitutional progress despite the communist insurrection in Malaya. Elected ministers and a Legislative Assembly with an elected majority assumed government responsibility in 1955, except for matters of defense and foreign policy. In 1959 the official and nominated elements were eliminated, and Singapore became self-governing, although Britain still retained control of defense and foreign policy.

First decades of self-government

Singapore joined the Federation of Malaysia on its formation in September 1963. The ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), led by Lee Kuan Yew, had refused in 1959 to form a government until extreme left-wing leaders of the party who had been detained by the colonial authorities were released. Those leaders opposed the concept of Malaysia and broke away from the PAP to form the Socialist Front (Barisan Sosialis), which was accused of being a communist front organization. The PAP faced fresh dangers of subversion when Indonesian opposition to Malaysia took the form of military and economic confrontation (1964).

Confrontation ended in 1966, but Singapore had seceded from Malaysia in 1965 (at the invitation of the Malaysian government) because of political friction between the state and central governments. That conflict had ethnic overtones and continued to affect relations between Singapore and Malaysia until the mid-1970s, when relations became more cordial.

In January 1968 the British government had announced that all British defense forces would be withdrawn from East and Southeast Asia (except Hong Kong) by the end of 1971. In April Singapore’s unprepared major opposition parties boycotted an election called seven months before it was due. The ruling PAP termed its sweep of all parliamentary seats a mandate for its plans for reducing the economic effects of the British military withdrawal.

At the end of October 1971, British military presence in Singapore came to an end. The Anglo-Malayan treaty concluded in 1957, which had committed Britain to the defense of the region, was terminated, and in its place a five-power defense arrangement—involving Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Singapore as equal partners—came into force.

Beginning in the 1970s Singapore pursued an aggressive policy of economic growth based primarily on export manufacturing and trade. Gradually, it also took a more active role in regional diplomacy. Singapore was a founding member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967, and by 1980 it had emerged as one of ASEAN’s leaders. The PAP continued to dominate Singaporean politics after Lee stepped down as prime minister in 1990, and between 1981 and 1991 opposition parties gradually increased their number of seats in Parliament from one to four. Yet, despite the country’s phenomenal economic success, resultant high standards of living, and subsequent goal of internationalization, the government’s policies of developmental paternalism bred some discontent among those who had come to expect greater openness to new ideas and a freer flow of information.