Stamford Raffles and the ‘founding’ of Singapore: the politics of commemoration and dilemmas of history
Abstract
Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826) landed on the shores of the island of Singapore in January 1819. With its growing commercial success, he was celebrated by the British colonial authorities and mercantile community as the visionary founder of an excellent entrepot between East and West. Despite their participation in the anti-colonial struggles, Lee Kuan Yew and his People’s Action Party, which led Singapore into self-government in 1959 and independence in 1965, allowed Raffles to remain crowned as the founder of modern Singapore in school history textbooks and the public psyche. However, the recent launching of Bicentennial planning has unleashed an exceptional wave of scholarly and public interest in the tensions and contradictions embedded in such a commemoration. The spirited discussion has included issues on whether such a moment should be commemorated, the island’s state of being in the longue duree stretching back for 700 years, and comparisons of Raffles with Lee Kuan Yew. Underlying the politics and dilemmas of the Bicentennial is an on-going tussle about how the history of a young nation state should be scripted.
Summary
Huang Jianli examines the Singapore Bicentennial—the state-led commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Stamford Raffles’ January 1819 landing—as a pressure valve through which multiple, often contradictory, historiographical and political tensions have erupted simultaneously. The article traces how the Bicentennial Office, constituted under the Prime Minister’s Office in January 2018, attempted to navigate between the PAP’s long-standing “Singapore Story” (which enshrines Raffles as visionary founder and frames British colonialism as benign and exceptional) and a growing body of revisionist scholarship that challenges both premises. The commemoration thus became a contested arena where questions of who “founded” Singapore, whether colonialism should be celebrated, and how the post-Cold War left-wing anti-colonial past should be treated all collided in public view (pp. 103–104, 114–115).
A central analytical move is the article’s demonstration that the Bicentennial was strategically subsumed by a 700-year longue durée narrative stretching back to Temasek/Singapura (c. 1299–1399), effectively displacing Raffles from the centre of national history. Yet this expansion created its own problems: the “black hole” between the fall of Singapura in 1399 and Raffles’ arrival in 1819 remains poorly evidenced, and the popular “sleepy fishing village” metaphor—first coined by John Crawfurd and cemented by Mary Turnbull—continued to lend credence to the founding narrative even as archaeology at Fort Canning complicated it (pp. 107–109). The article further shows how the Bicentennial’s stated commitment to “warts-and-all” history and pluralism was undercut almost immediately by the government’s heavy-handed parliamentary interrogation of historian Thum Ping Tjin in March 2018, revealing a deep structural tension between the commemoration’s inclusive rhetoric and the party-state’s resistance to revisionist accounts of Operation Coldstore and related security operations (pp. 115–119).
Drawing on newspaper editorials, parliamentary transcripts, ministerial statements, academic publications, and public forum exchanges, Huang constructs a portrait of a nation at a crossroads in its historical self-understanding. The Bicentennial, he argues, has functioned less as a clean commemorative event than as a catalyst forcing both the state and its citizenry to confront foundational questions about pre-Raffles past, colonial legacy, and the legitimacy of alternative historical narratives (pp. 119–120).
Key Findings
- Raffles spent only 38 days in Singapore between 1819 and his return to Britain in October 1822; it was his associate William Farquhar who performed the administrative “heavy lifting” in the colony’s early years (p. 112).
- The Bicentennial’s institutional framework included a Ministerial Steering Committee (co-chaired by Josephine Teo and Desmond Lee), a 16-member Advisory Committee, and 3,800 trained volunteers; its budget was deliberately kept below that of SG50, at roughly 30 per cent of the latter (pp. 105–106).
- Archaeological excavations at Fort Canning since 1984, led by John Miksic, established evidence of a thriving settlement circa 1299–1399 as the kingdom of Temasek/Singapura; additional excavation was sanctioned in September 2018 for a Bicentennial on-site exhibition (pp. 107–108).
- The “black hole” between the sacking of Singapura (c. 1399) and Raffles’ landing (1819) remains a period of contested interpretation: Peter Borschberg’s analysis of Portuguese and Dutch sources found evidence of a substantial settlement inconclusive, with the majority of references pointing to a maritime gateway rather than a continuous community (pp. 108–109).
- The Shanmugam–Thum parliamentary interrogation of 29 March 2018 lasted approximately six hours; the Select Committee’s final 176-page report (September 2018) made 22 recommendations on deliberate online falsehoods and declared Thum’s views not credible, while implicitly invoking the Bicentennial and the “yoke of colonialism” (p. 117).
- The National Gallery Singapore was forced to abandon its “Empire Ball” theme for an October 2016 fund-raising gala after public criticism that the term “empire” was “insensitive and dismissive of the violence and scars of imperialism”—a controversy that directly informed the Bicentennial organizers’ categorical denial that the commemoration was “in any way a celebration of colonialism” (p. 114).
Conclusion
Huang Jianli’s definitive takeaway is that the Bicentennial, for all its top-down institutional control, has served as an unintended engine of historical reckoning. By forcing the one-party dominant state and its increasingly well-educated citizenry to publicly negotiate the island’s pre-Raffles past, its colonial and anti-colonial legacy, and the changing epistemology of history itself, the commemoration has raised historical consciousness to a level that will outlast any single event. In the long run, these tensions—however confusing in the short term—will be valuable for forging deeper reflective bonds between the state and its citizens as Singapore enters its next phase under new political leadership (p. 120).
Context
- The article draws primarily on public-domain sources—newspaper editorials (Straits Times, Lianhe zaobao), parliamentary transcripts, ministerial press statements, and recent academic publications—rather than a single archival collection, reflecting the article’s focus on the politics of public commemoration rather than primary document analysis.
- Historiographically, the piece contributes to the growing literature on the “scripting” of Singapore’s national history (building on Hong Lysa and Huang Jianli’s 2008 The Scripting of a National History) by situating the Bicentennial within the broader post-Cold War contest between the PAP’s official narrative and revisionist, left-wing, and subaltern historiographies.