Social history and the photograph: glimpses of the Singapore rickshaw coolie in the early nineteenth century
Jim Warren’s 1985 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society examines the social world of Chinese rickshaw pullers in colonial Singapore from the 1880s through the 1930s, arguing that photographic archives constitute an underutilised primary source capable of recovering the lived experience of a labouring class otherwise rendered invisible in official colonial records.
Summary
Warren’s central intervention is methodological. He contends that the history of Singapore’s Chinese labouring population — the “subject people” of a colonial plural society — has been neglected in favour of elite and commercial narratives, and that a “coolie town” perspective is essential to understanding how migration and colonial capitalism shaped the city. The rickshaw puller serves as his focal case: a figure who was simultaneously ubiquitous in the urban landscape and systematically marginalised in the historical record.
The article’s argument proceeds on two tracks. First, Warren demonstrates how colonial administrative sources — housing reports, licensing records, traffic surveys — can be read against the grain to reveal the material conditions of coolie life: overcrowded windowless cubicles, inadequate nutrition, and the physical toll of the trade. Second, and more innovatively, he develops a framework for “reading” photographs as historical evidence, while simultaneously critiquing the medium’s limitations. He shows how European photographers routinely staged rickshaw pullers as ethnographic curiosities against scenic backdrops, thereby robbing them of their humanity and distorting the reality of their labour. Yet he also argues that even these compromised images, when read carefully, yield information about clothing, vehicle design, spatial organisation, and the rhythms of daily work that no textual source can provide.
The article thus functions as both a social history of the rickshaw trade and a methodological treatise on the use of visual sources in colonial historiography. Warren draws on a wide range of photographic materials — postcards, newspaper files, personal collections, and period publications — to reconstruct the physical and social environment of the puller: the dawn rituals of preparing rickshaws in Sago Lane, the traffic chaos of the Padang, the congregation of pullers at hotel steps and temple precincts, and the itinerant food hawkers who followed them.
Key Findings
- The Chinese labouring population of Singapore grew from approximately 86,000 in 1880 to nearly 316,000 by the second decade of the twentieth century (p. 30).
- A twelve-hour traffic survey conducted in 1917 at six main bridges in Singapore recorded 72,772 rickshaw crossings (p. 34).
- The rickshaw was introduced to Singapore in 1880, with the first batch arriving from Shanghai and subsequent consignments imported from Japan the following year (p. 30).
- The Emergency Housing Commission Report of 1918 recommended systematic action against the cubicle housing system, yet the windowless, unventilated conditions documented in Dr. Simpson’s 1907 housing report persisted until the last rickshaws were removed from the streets in the 1950s (p. 37).
- A dedicated Rickshaw Station for licensing and inspection was opened in 1903 by the Jinrikisha Department at the junction of Neil and Tanjong Pagar Roads (p. 41).
- Legislation was enacted requiring rickshaw pullers to wear specified clothing, shifting their typical attire from bare-chested running shorts to the addition of a loose coat-shirt by approximately 1914 (p. 36).
Conclusion
Warren’s definitive takeaway is that the rickshaw coolie occupied a paradoxical position in Singapore’s history: omnipresent in the visual record yet “hidden” from the historical narrative. The photographs, for all their distortions and the complicity of their European makers, are now the sole surviving traces of a world that has been entirely erased from the urban landscape. The article thus issues an implicit challenge to historians to engage with these “fugitive images” as legitimate evidence for the social history of colonial labour.
Context
- Primary archival collections consulted include the photograph and postcard collections of the National Archives and Record Centre (Singapore), newspaper photo files, and period publications such as British Malaya; a notable photograph was sourced from the personal papers of Reg Harrison in the Battye Library, Western Australia (p. 42, n. 4).
- Historiographically, the article contributes to the emerging field of social history of colonial Singapore’s Chinese labouring classes and offers one of the earliest sustained methodological arguments for the use of photography as a primary source in Southeast Asian historical writing.