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During the latter part of the nineteenth century and until after the First World War the imperial cities of the Indian Ocean became thriving centres for cultural exchange and intellectual debate. Entrepôts like Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon and Singapore witnessed the emergence of a non-European, western-educated professional class that serviced the requirements of expanding international commercial interests and the simultaneous growth of the imperial state. Learned elites drawn from the ranks of civil servants, company clerks, doctors, teachers, public inspectors, communications workers, merchants, bankers and (above all) from the legal profession began to form themselves into intelligentsias by immersing themselves in discursive activity, and quickly developed habits of intellectual sociability that became organized and systematic. The Bhadralok of Calcutta, the Theosophists of Madras and the peranakan (local born) Chinese reformers of Singapore, to name but three of these groups, shared similar concerns for reform and oversaw parallel campaigns for religious revival, social and educational improvement and constitutional change. Associational life and journalism flourished in this environment, both in the bureaucratic centres of the British Empire and beyond, in such places as the Dutch port of Batavia and French-administered Saigon, to such an extent that one can fairly speak of a transformation in the public sphere across the Indian Ocean region.

In 2013, the Government of Singapore confirmed a long although mostly private assumption that it intervened through its immigration policy to maintain the city-state's racial "balance"that is to say, the ethnic ratios that had existed from before Singapore's political independence and that placed its Chinese community in a demographic ascendancy at three-quarters of the total population. 1 Grace Fu, a Minister in the Prime Minister's Office, stated:It is our policy to maintain the ethnic balance in the citizen population as far as possible…. We recognize the need to maintain the racial balance in Singapore's population in order to preserve social stability. The pace and profile of our immigration intake have been calibrated to preserve this racial balance. (Straits Times, February 5, 2013)Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong soon after issued a statement of his own: "We will preserve the Singapore character of our society. In particular, we will maintain the ethnic balance of our citizen population" (Straits Times, February 9, 2013).Official explanations of the determinants of Singapore's immigration intake had, until these announcements, remained opaque. In 2009, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, while serving as Minister Mentor, explained that the government was conscious that it needed "to keep the character and values of Singapore society" by "carefully controlling" the island's resident population through its regulation of Permanent Residents (PRs) and new citizens. 2 Most other official utterances gave little hint that migrant selection, permanent residency, or

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