Ceci n'est pas un chameau

In writing my book Fluid Jurisdictions: Arabs and Colonial Law in Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), I approach legal history as a series of ‘portals.’ Each legal system and each legal device opened up a world of possibilities. The more a legal system is used, the deeper the sovereign ruler’s jurisdictions and vice versa. Likewise, each legal device such as a power of attorney echoes other similar or commensurable devices such as a wakala across legal systems and cultures further extending its utility across different jurisdictions. A series of portals connected the western end of the Indian Ocean to the eastern end allowing users to jump across huge spaces to enact various actions ranging from transferring economic power to granting a divorce. By generating links tied to institutional legal bureaucracies between otherwise disjointed points, they broadened the orbits of economic production and family responsibility. The use of colonial legal portals in particular came at high cost for most people because colonial legal systems tend to hold people captive. Before going through a portal, one had options, but once one passed through a door to colonial jurisdictions, it was hard to leave for myriad reasons.

 

I marvel at how little was opaque when it came to law in the eyes of my historical actors - the diasporic Arabs who originated from Hadhramaut in Yemen who seemed to adeptly navigate English common law, Dutch civil law and colonial reformulations of Islamic law in Southeast Asia. They created a scattered accumulation of legal documentation which we inherit today that reveal new-fangled colonial legal systems at every turn that because laws differed from island to island even as they came under a single jurisdiction at times in the vast archipelago in Southeast Asia. Colonial subjects legal practitioners were creating and discovering their own legal systems in ‘real time.’ Just like how I dwell on laws, legal classifications, legal documents, these people in the past also took time to dwell on the same things in multiple languages and idioms with higher stakes of course. To dwell is the first step towards a commitment, a willingness to engage with something strange.

 

Although I eventually turned to legal history as the main framework for my book, my original question focuses on the spaces in Southeast Asia to illuminate what truly happened in specific locations with particular jurisdictions. My starting question a decade ago was “why did Southeast Asian port-cities whose histories are often exalted for being mixed remain ethnically and socio-economically so divisive?” For example, Muslim subjects (later citizens) were divided ethnically even when classified as one community by colonial and national bureaucracies. It is tempting perhaps to merely blame European colonialism for deepening societal rifts in many ways but this is inadequate. I became intent on discovering the exact contours of the relationship amongst colonial subjects within the new colonial environments in the nineteenth century. As I dug further in the archives, I found that the diasporic peoples I was tracing were rooting themselves in Southeast Asia, intertwining their roots with that of colonial jurisdictions which deepened over time with the added weight of subjects’ expectations. Territorial jurisdictions within maritime Southeast Asia became paramount in the stories I tell although personal jurisdictions tied to older forms of sovereignty still traveled within individuals who continued to make unexpected connections across vast geographical expanses under oppressive rule.

 

To open a door, to dwell, to take root – that is the history of law in the colonies.

In the photograph on the cover of my book is a life-sized camel with a jubilant expression made out of wood, cloth and possibly metal on wheels accompanying a procession of Arabs in Surabaya located in Java who were commemorating the inauguration of Dutch Queen Wilhelmina in 1898 whose portrait is on the left. The Arabs in the foreground had their swords drawn as was customary at parades, weddings and special occasions. Amongst them, I spotted one of my main historical actors, the Kapitan Arab (head of the Arabs) of the Surabaya Arab community from the Bobsaid clan, a name I have encountered only in Surabaya. Sech Hasan bin Abdulla Bobsaid stood apart from his community slightly in front of them with his face to the camera. Clearly, he was the one who led the Arab delegation at this parade, flanked by members of his community, and the ecstatic camel and more subdued elephant replicas. The camel embodies this new creature in town – colonial legal forms which were mobile, tractable, reimagined versions of older laws moving forward into the twentieth century. My blog posts this month will focus on other aspects of this phenomenon.

 --Nurfadzilah Yahaya

Siam Officially Renamed Thailand

Richard Cavendish explains how the proposal to change the name of Siam to Thailand was eventually accepted on May 11th, 1949.

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - On July 20th, 1948, the Siamese constituent assembly voted to change the name of Siam to Thailand, the change to come into effect the following year. Muang Thai or Thailand means ‘land of the free’ and the name had been changed before, in 1939 under the fascist military dictatorship of Field Marshal Luang Phibunsongkhram, but the anti-Axis powers refused to recognise the new name after Siam allied herself with the Japanese and in 1942 declared war on the United States and the United Kingdom.

Phibun and his nationalist supporters in Siam took the Japanese side, partly because it initially looked like the winning one, partly because they hoped to recover long-lost territory in Laos, Cambodia and Burma, and partly because of their profound hostility to the Chinese in Thailand. They had already restricted Chinese immigration, closed hundreds of Chinese schools and shut down Chinese newspapers. In any case, when the Japanese late in 1941 demanded free passage across Thailand to invade Malaya and attack Singapore, the Thais were in no position to resist.

As the war went on, however, and it became clear that the country had picked the losing side, the resources of Thai diplomacy were skilfully marshalled to make the country’s peace with the Allies while taking care not to offend the Japanese unduly. Phibun’s regime ended in 1944. After the war the United States decided that the Thai regime had acted under duress and no objection was raised to the change of name. Phibun returned to power in 1948 and his hostility to Communist China now put him in an altogether better light with the Western powers. He lasted until 1957, when his military cronies decided they had had quite enough of him and sent him packing. He retired to Japan and lived in Tokyo until his death in 1964.
 

Richard Cavendish is a longstanding contributor to History Today, having penned dozens of the Months Past columns. He is also author of Kings and Queens: The Concise Guide.

Thailand’s Modernising Monarchs

Tony Stockwell looks behind the exotic facade to examine the role of the kings of Siam and Thailand in modernising their country.  

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - In the days before global tourism, Thailand was for many in the West a faraway country of which they knew little. Siam, to use the country’s pre-war name, conjured up images of imperious cats, white elephants, conjoined twins and oriental despots. These images were reinforced by The King and I, the musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, which was first performed in 1951, released as a film in 1956 and recently revived on stage. Their story was based on Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam which in turn derived from The English Governess at the Siamese Court written by Anna Leonowens and published in Boston, Mass., in 1870. The widow of an officer in the Indian Army, Mrs Leonowens came to Bangkok in 1862 to take up the position of governess in the royal court. For five-and-a-half years she tutored the children of Rama IV, who was also known as Mongkut. The account of her experiences in Siam is a keenly observed, if somewhat sententious, description of life in the enclosed court. She portrays the king as an enlightened though capricious monarch and harps on their differences over the position of women and particularly her own role and status.

The film version of The King and I, with Yul Brynner playing the king and Deborah Kerr as the governess, caused great offence in Thailand and is still banned there. This confection of the exotic and the absurd – like Gilbert and Sullivan’s interpretation of Japan in The Mikado – appeared to patronise, if not to ridicule, King Mongkut. When Twentieth Century Fox embarked on the recent, non-musical re-make, Anna and the King (starring Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-fat), the Hollywood company was prevented from filming in Thailand and instead shot it in various locations in neighbouring Malaysia. On its release in December 1999, the chairman of the Thai censorship board (Police Major-General Prakard Sataman) proscribed the film, although the police estimate that at least 10,000 illegal copies of it have filtered into Thailand. It was, he declared, historically inaccurate and the Thai people, ‘particularly uneducated upcountry villagers’, needed to be shielded from misrepresentations of the royal family. It is true, a romantic imagination runs riot in Anna and the King which deteriorates into an orientalist ‘High Noon’ towards the end of the film when, apparently against all the odds, the king takes on and defeats rebels and reactionaries. Moreover, while it handles with some sensitivity the dilemmas confronting a modernising monarch, it grossly exaggerates the influence of Anna both on Mongkut and on his son and successor, Chulalongkorn.

In the light of Thailand’s reputation for media freedom, such strict controls on historical dramas may seem surprising. Censorship in support of the country’s laws of lèse majesté, however, dates back to the period before the introduction of democracy in 1932 when the priority was to uphold the authority, religion and institutions of the state. A leading Thai documentary producer, one of whose films was banned in 1998 because it was considered damaging to Buddhism, has commented:

The law is an instrument of power – it has nothing to do with protecting the public from bad influence.

Indeed, it remains in the national interest to protect the reputation of the king who still commands enormous popular respect. Even the mildest criticism of the monarchy can incur criminal prosecution and at least two people face up to a year in jail for alleged intent to distribute Anna and the King.

In the month that the film was outlawed, the present king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, celebrated his seventy-second birthday. Bhumibol has been on the throne for fifty-four years and is the world’s longest reigning monarch. His golden jubilee in June 1996 was a great national occasion. His latest birthday was another; for Thais, who believe in the importance of twelve-year cycles, the monarch’s sixth-cycle anniversary was a particularly auspicious event. To commemorate it another film, called Suriyothai, was made, this time by Thais and for Thais. Employing hundreds of elephants and thousands of extras, the director, who is a royal prince, recreated the epic battle between Thais and Burmese forces in the sixteenth century. Although Suriyothai is no less cavalier with history and presents the court in a more lurid light than Anna and the King, it enjoys unreserved official support. Suriyothai has been acclaimed a fittingly heroic tribute to Thailand’s glorious past, whereas Anna and the King has been condemned for traducing the ‘Father of Modern Thailand’ who secured Siam’s independence from Western colonialism and laid the foundations of the nation-state. Indeed, although the monarchy may appear to be a relic of traditional Siam, in fact it has been central to the creation of modern Thailand.

For centuries, the history of Thailand was a chronicle of the rise and fall of dynasties. Kingdoms expanded and collapsed as a result of internal power struggles and periodic wars with the neighbouring Burmese. In the fourteenth century the kingdom of Sukhotai was succeeded by another at Ayudhya, further south on the Chaophraya river. When in 1767 Burmese forces captured and destroyed Ayudhya, P’ya Taksin, who had been a provincial governor under the former regime, took advantage of Thai disarray to seize power. Taksin defeated the Burmese and founded a new capital at Thonburi, fifty miles south of Ayudhya and across the Chaophraya river from present-day Bangkok. Constant military campaigning to expel the Burmese, unify his kingdom and eliminate rivals, however, unhinged P’ya Taksin and provoked rebellion. In 1782 he was overthrown by one of his own generals, Chakri, who, taking the title of King Rama I, inaugurated the Chakri dynasty with its capital at Bangkok.

The origins of modern Thailand – the structure and bureaucracy of the state, the centrality of Bangkok to the economy, the development of the army, the flexibility of Thai foreign policy – date from this time when the independence of the indigenous kingdoms of Southeast Asia was threatened by Western imperialism. Like contemporary regimes in Burma and Vietnam, as well as in China and Japan, the Siamese at first tried to keep European traders and diplomats at bay. But, whereas the Konbaung kings of Burma, the Nguyen emperors of Vietnam, and sultans of the Malay states succumbed to foreigners’ demands, successive Chakri rulers managed to preserve Siam’s independence. Indeed, as the Dutch, British, French, and from 1898 the Americans, established various forms of empire over, respectively, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, Indochina and the Philippines, Siam was the only country in Southeast Asia to escape formal colonial rule. This was in large measure due to the policies of Rama IV or Mongkut (r.1851-68) and Rama V or Chulalongkorn (r.1868-1910). Father and son adjusted to alien pressures in ways similar to those adopted at the same time by the advisers to Emperor Meiji of Japan.

Thus, in 1855 Mongkut abandoned the closed-door approach characteristic of so many Asian monarchies and concluded a free-trade treaty with Britain. This was followed by similar agreements with many other Western governments. Moreover, determined to secure the heartland of his kingdom, he surrendered territory on the periphery, notably conceding to France in 1867 his claim upon that part of Cambodia to the east of the Mekong river. Furthermore, in order to anticipate criticisms of ‘oriental misrule’, which might have been used as excuses for foreign intervention, he embarked on a programme of reform. For example, he relaxed court ritual which had so frustrated foreign diplomats in the past. He also employed Western advisers, astutely recruited from a range of countries to avoid becoming excessively beholden to any single foreign power. These advisers played a leading part in improving the administration, the army and the infrastructure, such as the construction of canals in the Bangkok area.

Chulalongkorn continued this strategy. Like his father, he pursued a subtle foreign policy: by ‘bending before the wind’, accommodating foreign interests and making appropriate territorial concessions, he secured Siam as a buffer between the empires of Britain and France. He also employed foreign advisers, and carried modernisation much further than had his father: he abolished slavery, bureaucratised hereditary provincial government, built railways, and sent royal princes overseas to be educated in the ways of the West. By the time Chulalongkorn died in 1910, royal absolutism was underpinned to an extent never achieved by previous regimes in Siam by a country-wide bureaucracy and a standing army.

Mongkut and Chulalongkorn are revered by Thais for having saved their country from colonial rule. Ironically, they were greatly assisted in this feat by those very imperial rivalries which were carving up Southeast Asia. The reason for this lies in Siam’s geographical position between French Indochina and British Burma and Malaya. Given Siam’s strategic location, it was a cardinal principle of British foreign policy to preserve its ‘independence’. Yet, although the country did not fall under the colonial rule of any great power, it was drawn into a Western web of economic and diplomatic interests. Indeed, its so-called independence was gained at a price: Britain and France were bought off with land over which the Thais had once been suzerain; Western (especially British) business interests established control of Siam’s banking, shipping and the import-export trade in, for example, rice and teak; foreign nationals occupied key positions in government and enjoyed special privileges (known as extra-territoriality). Finally, by the end of the nineteenth century Britain to all intents and purposes directed Siam’s external relations.

Modernisation from the top created tensions in Thai society. First of all, the old order resented the loss of patronage and privileges. Chulalongkorn’s modernisation programme adopted colonial models and, like colonial rulers elsewhere in Asia, he ran into opposition over the centralisation of power and restrictions on the historic autonomy of vassal regions. Attempts by the Ministry of the Interior to assert control over out-lying areas, where warlords were prepared to show allegiance to the king but were hostile to direct intrusions by carpet-baggers from Bangkok, led to a number of rebellions in 1902 affecting Pattani in the south, the north-east region bordering upon Laos and the area abutting the northern frontier with Burma’s Shan states. Moreover, although the traditional order may have been inefficient and heavy-handed in its exactions, it still commanded considerable support from a peasantry which was fearful that drastic change would threaten the very order of things, even bringing about the end of the world. The military and civil arms of the new Thai state quelled this provincial unrest, displaced old ruling families and re-educated their sons for service in modern government. A second group that grew increasingly restless under the absolute monarchy comprised military officers, civil servants and professionals. These elites, which in large measure were the product of enlightened absolutism, now aspired to greater influence and felt frustrated by the royal monopoly on power. At the end of Chulalongkorn’s reign, for example, nearly all ministerial appointments were still made from his own family.

Chulalongkorn’s successor, Vajiravudh or Rama VI (r.1910-25) who had been trained at Sandhurst and educated at Oxford, encouraged these new forces in Thai society. Wishing to escape the overbearing influence of his uncles and brothers at court, he built up a personal following ostensibly to defend ‘nation, religion and king’. Recruited from the civil service, yet operating outside the bureaucracy, his Wild Tiger Corps not only antagonised members of the royal family but also incited junior military officers to conspire to clip the powers of the king. Although their attempted coup in 1912 failed, it goaded Vajiravudh into making changes; he appointed commoners to senior posts and embarked on a populist campaign to arouse Thai nationalism. Education, cultural initiatives and sheer propaganda were harnessed to the task of binding Thais in allegiance to their king, country and religion. Vajiravudh’s targets were, firstly, the unequal treaties granting Westerners extra-territorial rights and economic privileges. By 1926 Siam had successfully renegotiated these engagements. Another object of his loathing was Thailand’s community of immigrant Chinese, who had achieved an economic importance out of all proportion to their numbers (they amounted to 12.2 per cent of the population by 1932). The king roundly condemned them as ‘Jews of the East’. Vajiravudh’s brand of xenophobic nationalism did not, however, hold out the prospect of more inclusive or representative government. On the contrary, it remained restrictive and hierarchical. Moreover, his habit of advancing favourites together with financial extravagance fuelled criticism of the monarchy and not just the person of the monarch.

Succeeding his brother in 1925, Prajadhipok, who had been educated at Eton and at the Woolwich Military Academy, was unable to cope with growing financial and economic problems or, despite attempts to liberalise government, to appease the opposition. Prajadhipok had not expected to become king and was ill-prepared for the task, which was made all the more difficult by a lack of personal authority, the legacy of his predecessor’s wild policies, princely squabbles and, ultimately, the depression of the 1930s. Notwithstanding institutional experiments such as the introduction of the Supreme Council of State, Cabinet of Ministers and Privy Council, the press and intellectuals who had experience overseas now openly criticised royal absolutism and government inefficiency. Nonetheless, an opportunity to challenge the regime did not arise until the world depression in 1930-32 punched gaping holes in both government finances and the staple rice economy. In a desperate attempt to appease disaffection caused by crisis measures to retrench expenditure and raise taxation, Prajadhipok produced plans for constitutional reform. It was too late. A combination of army officers (led by Colonels Pahol and Pibul Songkram) and civilians (organised as the People’s Party by Nai Pridi Phanomyong) brought the absolute monarchy to an end in a peaceful coup on June 24th, 1932.

Prajadhipok remained king. He complied with the provisional constitution, which was largely drafted by Nai Pridi Phanomyong, who was professor of law at Chulalongkorn University as well as leader of the People’s Party. Although the king was stripped of his prerogatives and ministers were to be responsible to an elected legislature, he retained immense symbolic authority. As it happened, the liberal experiment did not last long. Constitutionalists were soon marginalised by army officers who, with their common background, shared values and sense of hierarchy, formed a more coherent leadership group than did any political party. In 1933 Nai Pridi was condemned as a socialist and forced to live in France for a time. Two years later, Prajadhipok abdicated; he found military dominance intolerable. He was succeeded by his nephew, Ananda Mahidol (r. 1935-46). But the new king was only ten years old and spent most of his reign in Switzerland. The army was now in the ascendant and propagated military values and a populist nationalism. Xenophobic and racist towards Siam’s Chinese, the military aspired to a greater Thai state embracing all people of ethnic T’ai stock, whether they lived in Siam or Laos or the Shan states of Burma. In keeping with this nationalism, Field Marshal Pibul Songkram (prime minister 1938-44) changed the name of the country from Siam to Thailand. In 1941-42 Pibul followed the traditional strategy of bending before the wind, and negotiated agreements with Tokyo whereby Japan had access to key resources and overland routes while Thailand avoided occupation and even regained territory formerly surrendered to the French. Just as fifty years previously it had reached a modus vivendi with imperialists from the West, Thailand now established a similar position within Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.

The upheavals of war and its aftermath to all intents and purposes swept the Thai monarchy to the sidelines. As the Pacific War ended, the military briefly gave way to constitutionalists, while Americans assumed the influential position which had once been enjoyed by the British. Although Ananda Mahidol returned from abroad, in June 1946 he died of a gunshot wound in circumstances which have never been explained. Ananda was succeeded by his nineteen-year-old brother, Bhumibol, who immediately departed for Switzerland. He did not return for his coronation until 1950 by which time, it might be thought, there was no significant place for the monarch. After all, one king or another had been absent from the country more or less continuously for fifteen years and the military were back in the saddle. Thailand was now a front-line state in Asia’s Cold War and monarchical trappings seemed vestiges of a bygone era. In fact, during the last fifty years the king has been of immense significance as a symbol of national unity, an arbiter at times of political crisis and a revered guardian of the people.

The reinstatement of the king in public affairs started in 1957 when Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who in that year seized power from Pibul Songkram, started to groom Bhumibol for a much more active role. Beginning with ceremonial and civic duties, Bhumibol soon took up the promotion of rural development and welfare schemes. In addition, although he regularly aligned himself with the forces of law and order, at moments of crisis the king has intervened to safeguard democratic institutions from being entirely overwhelmed by the armed forces. For example, in October 1973 he mediated to end the bloodshed that resulted from the violent suppression of student demonstrations on the streets of Bangkok and was consequently responsible for an interlude of parliamentary politics. When, however, Communist successes in Indochina led to the victory of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the fall of Saigon, as well as the overthrow of the monarchy in Laos, Bhumibol sided with the military against student protesters. On October 6th, 1976, a student demonstration at Thammasat University protesting against the return from exile of Field Marshal Kittikachorn was savagely broken up. Well over forty-six (the official death toll) were killed, hundreds wounded and thousands arrested. The massacre was used as a pretext for a military coup which Bhumibol condoned. The king’s popularity plummeted.

From time to time thereafter he cautiously interceded in the interests of more benign military rule and greater probity in public affairs. In February 1991, although he did not dissent from the military coup which ousted the elected government of Chatichai Choonhavan, he distanced himself from the in-coming junta. When, the following year, the army opened fire on protesters against the return of a military regime, he brought an end to violence by holding talks between the principal protagonists at the palace. He was then instrumental in the restoration of civilian rule through democratic elections held in September 1992. Bhumibol’s contribution to political stability is widely recognised as a major factor in fostering Thailand’s rapid economic growth in the 1980s and also in assisting the country to weather the economic storms of the late 1990s. Indeed, no matter the differences between them, all aggrieved groups actively profess loyalty to the crown. As one minister has recently put it: ‘The present king provides the bridge between traditional politics and democracy.’

Although Bhumibol has grown in stature and respect, the future of the monarchy is by no means assured. While the people of Thailand still regard the king as a semi-divine figure linking them with the cosmic order, they are increasingly inclined to expect from him the attributes of a ‘just king’. Judged according to the standards of the ‘just king’, the dutiful Bhumibol scores well, as was demonstrated by the celebrations of his golden jubilee. He has emerged as a figure of virtue, publicly taking to task politicians for neglecting Bangkok’s horrendous traffic and flooding problems and regularly calling for greater honesty and less corruption in government. His son and heir apparent, Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, on the other hand, is held in far lower esteem on account of his extravagance and frivolous lifestyle. Since Bhumibol is only too aware of the history of succession crises and the chaos that in the past regularly engulfed the country on the fall of a dynasty, he has tried to reinforce the institutions of civil society so that the stability of Thailand will in future be less dependent on the personal qualities of the king. In so doing, he has moved from being a more or less passive upholder of the forces of conservatism to endorsing the 1997 constitution. Known as ‘The People’s Charter’, this constitution has devolved more power to the public and promises greater transparency in government. Meanwhile, the majesty of kingship is rigorously preserved: few Thais openly discuss the future of the monarchy; the law preserves the royal family from the obsessive media coverage that has afflicted the House of Windsor; and the authorities proscribe foreign films like The King and I and Anna and the King.

Empowering the people to question traditional authority, however, is a risky strategy. Indeed, Bhumibol is facing today the same dilemma encountered by Mongkut 150 years ago: How to keep change within bounds? Since the 1850s the monarchy has been a symbol of both tradition and modernity. But it has been more than that; it has acted in turn as a dynamo for and as a brake upon change. If it is to survive, the Chakri dynasty cannot opt for one role or the other, but will have to continue straddling the contesting forces of conservatism and reform.

Further reading:

• Nicholas Tarling, ed., The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol 2 (Cambridge, 1992) 


• D.J. Steinberg and others, In Search of Southeast Asia: A Modern History (Honolulu, 1987)


• David Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History (New Haven, Conn., 1982)


• Ian Brown, (Singapore, 1989)


• Patrick Tuck, The French Wolf and the Siamese Lamb: The French Threat to Siamese Independence, 1858-1907 (Bangkok, 1995)


• Judith A. Stowe, Siam becomes Thailand: A Story of Intrigue (London, 1991) 


• For current affairs see the weekly Far Eastern Economic Review published in Hong Kong and Michael Leifer, Dictionary of the Modern Politics of South-East Asia (London, 1995).

Singapore's Token Conservation

Ann Hills examines the reconstruction of Singapore's 19th-century buildings to accommodate tourism.

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - Under the arches of nineteenth-century houses along the Singapore River – only yards from where Sir Stamford Raffles landed in 1819 and founded the British colony – a barber was shaving a client. He has been in the same spot for thirty years, but within months he will be moved. The houses where generations of traders have lived alongside packed quays are being variously renovated as showpieces or destroyed to make way for developments in a tiny country short of land and with mixed views on preservation.

The riverside statue to Raffles is safe; so too is the nearest building – Empress Place, until recently an office for the immigration department. At a cost of nearly £4 million, the 1860s neo-classical structure with a central hall supported by a double row of Doric columns, is to become a museum of Chinese cultural relics by 1988. This is one of the first steps in creating a Heritage Link (linking sites of historic, notably colonial value). The proposals have the backing of Dr George McDonald, director of the Canadian Museum of Man in Ottawa. Didier Reppellin, leading French architect and official adviser to the government on historic buildings, was also summoned last autumn to advise on specific projects including Empress Place, and will monitor renovation.

The most famous of all the Singaporean buildings – the Raffles Hotel, which celebrated its centenary in 1986 – is likely to be restored to its original appearance enhancing its reputation, endorsed by the famous: Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and Rudyard Kipling. More recently it was a setting in the wartime Tenko series. Visitors soon learn its history, including the hotel's role in providing shelter to people rescued from internment camps after liberation in 1945; the saga of the tiger shot under the billiard table, the origins of the Singapore Sling, and how the silver roast beef trolley was hidden from the Japanese, buried in the garden. A centenary brochure has been published.

Forty years after the war, the world's tallest hotel, the seventy- three storey high Westin Stamford has risen a stone's throw away on the Raffles City complex. It occupies the site of the Raffles Institution, founded in 1823. Ironically, too, the Archives Department and Oral History Department with a total of forty-two staff, is cataloguing a changing world as fast as possible. A few weeks ago, as houses and shops were being bulldozed in the street outside, a party inside marked the opening of Singapore lifeline: the river and its people – a photographic exhibition and book. Tapes are being made on vanishing trades, the cultural diversity, on the river-life that passes. I listened to the recording of a British survivor describing the sinking of the war- ships Repulse and Prince of Wales.

The river has been tidied up: that entailed removing all the bum boats, clearing store rooms, resurfacing quays and taking anti-pollution measures. Next September a fortnight of celebrations with fireworks and cruises will mark a decade of renovation. Gone from the vicinity are pig and duck rearing, boat yards, squatter colonies and hawkers. What do exist, are modern hawker centres where independent food traders are allocated space to serve meals and fresh fruit drinks through the day.

Nearby, Chinatown is still flourishing, even though newer buildings dwarf the bustling streets where families peer from shuttered balconies above crowded shops. The future of Chinatown is being- debated by a national steering committee whose members are said to be sensitive to traditional skills from medicine making, to specialist food stalls, calligraphy and fortune telling. But the government refuses to comment yet on steps being taken to amend rent acts, which have depressed the cost of living for tenants and restrained capital investment by owners in the past decades.

The old Indian sector retains its hectic oriental atmosphere, but rows of old houses are being torn down in side streets off Serangoon Road. Temples have better chances of lasting – like the extraordinary statue- studded 1844 Hindu temple called Sri Mariamman.

Some colonial buildings retain their functions: Victoria Hall is the concert hall, and across the road is the Cricket Club at one end of the sward with a backdrop of skyscrapers housing banks, offices and hotels. Modernisation continues in a country noted for its financial empire, vast expansion of hotels and emphasis on education under the rule of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Another area of investment is transport. Within a year or two the 2.6 million Singaporeans will have their own subway- the Mass Rapid Transit system, entailing massive excavations, tunnelling and raised routes.

History has to take a back-seat, allocated to the realms of tourism. Fort Canning Park, on a hilly, central site, is being developed with a 'historical zone' containing relics of an old Christian cemetary, the grave of the last ruler of ancient Singapura, Sultan Iskandar Shah with bunkers from the Second World War, and the site of Raffles' house.

Haw Par Villa, one of three; built by the Aw brothers for private residences, is being redeveloped at a cost of £10 million to offer visitors a sophisticated introduction to Chinese history, myths, legends and traditions with a mythological theme park, including 'encounters' with the spirit world through a ride in the dark, and incorporating the latest in laser and holographic technology.

Beyond the town centre, out in the diminishing countryside, the last of the Malay kampungs – tropical jungle villages – are threatened with the incursion of satellite towns with numerous blocks ten storeys high. A model kampung will be recreated in Geylang Serai, a still predominantly Malay-populated district, combining cultural and commercial activities from bird-singing contests to kite marking. The buildings, including prayer hall or 'surau', will be clustered and linked with covered walk- ways.

Second hand, nostalgic experiences may have to suffice for the visitor in future; such is the price of progress. Destruction is rampant – a fact the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board would prefer to turn a blind eye towards as they present packages for future conservation.

Lee Kuan Yew becomes Singapore’s Prime Minister

June 31st, 1959 - Richard Cavendish remembers how a former-British colony gained a long-serving leader. 

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - After the expulsion of the Japanese in 1945, British plans for a united Malaya left Singapore, the island at the foot of the Malay peninsula, out because its population was heavily Chinese, not Malayan. It became a separate British colony run by a governor with a mainly appointed, mainly Chinese council. Pressure for independence grew and in 1954 the socialist politician Lee Kuan Yew founded the People’s Action Party (PAP).

Lee came from a rich Chinese family which called him Harry and brought him up speaking English, but he was bent on bringing an end to British rule.

In 1955 Singapore was given an elected legislature and its own administration in charge of all matters except foreign policy and defence. Lee’s party won only three seats in that year’s election. But in 1958 he helped to negotiate in London for a Singapore with a fully elected government responsible for all internal affairs. His party won 43 of the 51 seats in the subsequent 1959 election and, after securing the release of imprisoned communist colleagues, Lee took office as Singapore’s prime minister in June.

The PAP had called for union with Malaya and in 1963 Lee crushed the communists, who opposed it, and Singapore joined the new Federation of Malaya. It did not work. The island’s Chinese character proved an impossible obstacle and the federation asked Singapore to leave two years later. It became a separate, sovereign republic and in the elections from 1968 to 1980 the PAP won every single seat in the legislature. Lee became one of the most important political figures in south-east Asia and by the time he stood down in 1990 he was the world’s longest-serving prime minister.

Richard Cavendish is a longstanding contributor to History Today, having penned dozens of the Months Past columns. He is also author of Kings and Queens: The Concise Guide.

Time for Dutch Courage in Indonesian

Paul Doolan looks at the continuing controversy over Dutch 'police operations' post-1945 in Indonesia.

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - Last year marked the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Dutchman, Cornelis de Houtman, on the island of Enganno, off the coast of Sumatra in Indonesia. Now, over four centuries later and nearly fifty years after the ending of their rule in Indonesia, the Dutch are engaged in a soul-searching debate concerning their colonial past.

Between 1946 and 1949 two military campaigns, euphemistically called 'police actions', resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 Indonesians and, according to one Financial Times Service report, 6,000 Dutch soldiers. However, the colonial power found itself politically isolated as well as economically near bankruptcy, and independence was reluctantly conceded in December 1949; a fact that even today causes controversy.

Criticism of Dutch colonial policy dates back at least to the appearance of Edward Dakker, the Dutch master known as Multatuli's Max Havelaar . At the time of its publication, in 1860, this 'J'accuse' was considered a biting attack against the exploitation and abuse of the poor majority of Javanese by their European and local masters. Today, the novel is generally regarded as a classic work of nineteenth-century Dutch literature, its criticisms been neutralised and made safe due to the passing of time.

The period 1945-49 in Dutch colonial history, however, is still highly sensitive. Indeed, this chapter is conspicuous among colonial studies by its absence. Unlike Vietnam, which Hollywood has transformed into an icon of contemporary culture, post-Second World War Indonesia constitutes something of a collective blind-spot in the Dutch psyche. The case of one of the Netherlands' leading historians, the late Jan Romein, is enlightening. His wife, Annie Romein-Verschoor, had grown up in colonial Dutch East Indies. They were both self-confessed Communists, progressive idealists and committed to Indonesian independence. Yet when Jan Romein published his major study of decolonisation, De Eeuw van Azie (The Asian Century) in 1956, Indonesia earned only a superficial mention. Of the 300 pages, twenty-five were on Indonesia, while the bibliography of 267 titles contained only ten relating to it.

In 1980 a leading Indonesian historian, Taufik Abdullah, referring to the loud Dutch silence, remarked that international historiography was the monopoly of the conquerors. After all, far more works have appeared analysing German and Japanese brutality during the Second World War than the Dutch police actions – actions which took place while Nazi leaders were standing trial for crimes against humanity in Nuremburg. If the Dutch historians were not prepared to do it, announced a historian from Singapore, Yong Mung Cheong, then he would attempt his own analysis of the complex events of 1946-49.

A significant breakthrough in terms of Dutch historiography occurred in 1988 when a new volume of L.de Jong's The Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Second World War appeared in Dutch bookstores. Each volume of de Jong's massive work had been awaited with anticipation, not only by professional historians, but also by the Dutch reading public. Bestseller status was assured. Of the eleven volumes the arrival of each invariably led to praise, criticism and open discussion in the national press. When the 1988 addition appeared, however, the outcry from some veterans of the colonial army and the conservative press was bitter and the ensuing debate more heated than usual. De Jong, who is considered a figure of national importance, had dared to criticise the atrocities that the Dutch had inflicted during their police actions.

Another writer, Ewald Vanvught, published Legal Opium in 1983 in which he argues that the control and expansion of the opium trade was a prime motor in Dutch colonial policy. Vanvught says that his work has been inspired by the inertia of the professional historians – he himself is a freelance author. More recently he has claimed that the record of the Dutch presence in Indonesia is one of systematic and continual atrocity, while he accuses Dutch historians of disguising this fact under a cloak of silence. He has cited certain established historians as presenting misinformation as a science, and of forming a tradition in which painful features of the past have been deliberately suppressed.

A number of incidents in recent years have further highlighted how painful this whole issue really is. Ponke Princen was a young Dutch man drafted into the army in 1946 and sent to Indonesia. There he deserted and switched sides, fighting for Indonesian independence. For Indonesians he became a hero but to the Dutch he was a traitor. As the decades slipped by many progressive Dutch citizens began to see Ponke Princen as a principled individual who had been sickened by the immoral acts he was ordered to carry out. But when he applied in Jakarta for a visa to revisit his former homeland for the first time in nearly fifty years, all the old cries of 'traitor' were heard again. Despite having the support of the Dutch Minister for Foreign Affairs Princen was initially refused entry into the Netherlands. In 1992 Gra Boomsma published the novel The Last Typhoon . It was the first fictionalised account of the police actions to have appeared in Dutch. In a newspaper interview the young writer made the mistake of saying that Dutch soldiers, while certainly not the same as the SS, could be compared to the SS in some ways. Both he and the interviewer attracted the wrath of the colonial veterans and were charged in court with slander. In June 1994 they were acquitted.

January 1995 saw the appearance of a book of photographs of the Indonesian campaign taken by the late Dutch photographer, Hugo Wilmar. These included shots that had been banned by the military censors at the time. A leading national weekly carried excerpts from the book and the Dutch Photo Institute in Rotterdam held a five-week exhibition. These pictures are in some ways reminiscent of images that we are familiar with from Vietnam; wounded and dead lie on the jungle floor, guerrilla suspects are being interrogated and manhandled by Western troops. For a country that has enfolded a significant part of its past in silence, these are disturbing reminders.

This was followed in July 1995 by the publication of Verboden voor honden en inlanders (No Dogs or Natives), a collection of interviews in which Indonesians who had experienced Dutch colonial rule were given the opportunity to tell their stories. The following month, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands arrived in Jakarta for a ten-day official visit. At home, her visit had been preceded by a bitter debate over whether she should apologise to the Indonesian people for 350 years of colonial rule. Her main speech stopped short of an outright apology. Instead she spoke of feeling 'very sad' at the deaths that had been caused by colonialism.

Ironically, the majority of the Indonesian population are barely aware of their historical link with the Netherlands. The Dutch left little cultural heritage behind and many Indonesians are more interested in the future, rather than in any study of the past. However, for the Dutch, the integration of their recent past with the image of their country as a bastion of tolerance and human rights is a dilemma not yet resolved.

The well-known Dutch cultural critic Ian Buruma recently published his The Wages of Guilt , an excellent analysis of how the Germans and the Japanese have reacted and coped with the horrors of their not-too-distant past. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before his countrymen feel able to turn the lens to their own past too.

Paul Doolan is the Head of History at the International School of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo.

Independence For Indonesian

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.com - When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the East Indies nationalists seized the opportunity to throw off the colonial yoke of the Dutch and proclaim the independent state of Indonesia which the Japanese had promised them. Neither Communism nor Islam much appealed to the nationalists, who were led by Achmed Sukarno and Muhammad Hatta. Sukarno, the son of a school-teacher and Theosophist, had little time for religion or ideology and believed himself a man of destiny. He had been imprisoned and exiled by the Dutch. So had Hatta, a Sumatran with a Rotterdam University degree in economics. Both had collaborated with the Japanese and helped to organise a Japanese-backed Indonesian army.
 

Equipped with Japanese weapons, the nationalists waged an armed struggle against the Dutch, who had powerful economic reasons for recovering the East Indies and believed that most Indonesians wanted them to return. Dutch forces made substantial headway in Java and Sumatra, but there was fierce criticism in the United Nations, and the United States pressed for a negotiated solution. Eventually a conference of 120 delegates assembled at The Hague in August 1949 under the chairmanship of the Dutch prime minister, Willem Drees. 

 

The nationalist delegates were skilfully led by Hatta. On November 2nd, after ten weeks of haggling, the conference reached an agreement which transferred Dutch sovereignty to the United States of Indonesia, with Queen Juliana of the Netherlands as titular head of a new Netherlands-Indonesian Union, Sukarno as Indonesian president and Hatta as prime minister. The thorny question of Dutch New Guinea (Irian Jaya) was put aside for later. The Dutch released thousands of political prisoners before independence was formally celebrated on December 27th. The new Indonesia, with a population of 78 million on an archipelago approaching 2 million square kilometres of land, immediately became an important factor in the Southwest Pacific.

Richard Cavendish is a longstanding contributor to History Today, having penned dozens of the Months Past columns. He is also author of Kings and Queens: The Concise Guide.