No abstract

This article recounts the unusual history of a national idea in late colonial Singapore from the 1930s to the early 1950s before Singapore's attainment of partial self-government in 1955. Using two different concepts, namely ‘colonial nationalism’ and ‘imperial citizenship’, it offers a genealogy of nationalism in Singapore, one that calls into question the applicability of prevailing theories of anti-colonial nationalism to the Singapore-in-Malaya context. Focusing on colonial nationalism, the article provides a historical account of English-mediated official multiculturalism through tracking shifting British colonial priorities, ideologies of governance and challenges to its authority in Singapore. This account is rarely appreciated in Singapore today given official scripting of national history that abets particular amnesias with regards to its multicultural nationhood.

The Chinese Protectorate was first established in Singapore in 1877 with the limited objective of preventing abuses in Chinese labour migration, but it evolved multiple functions dedicated to governing Chinese migrants and residents in colonised Malaya. The Protector possessed extensive statutory powers and he was regarded as the official authority on all matters ‘Chinese’. This was an important yet under-studied colonial institution in the history of Chinese migration and settlement in Singapore and Malaysia. This article narrates the history behind the establishment of the Protectorate in the 1870s when ‘racialised governmentality’ of the Chinese population was institutionalised in colonised Malaya. The article underscores the significance of imperial and local contexts of the Protectorate's creation, arguing that it was a product of flexible adaptation of empire-wide practices of ‘protecting’ and governing liberated slaves, indigenous peoples and subsequently, indentured Indian labourers ‘humanely’. It is notable, therefore, that there was a coeval and conjoined discussion of migration control of Chinese as well as Indian labour migrants in Malaya during this period, but this history is hidden from plain sight by popular approaches studying labour migration as components of ethnic diasporas migrating from a single point of origin.

No abstract

No abstract