Singapore

The Colonial City

A product of British mercantile capitalism, urban settlement in Singapore grew from small beginnings as a trading post established in 1819 by Stamford Raffles, an agent of the East India Company, to become the commercial capital of the British Far Eastern Empire and a clearinghouse for commodities and labor in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The emergence of a world market and a system of trade oriented toward the needs of the industrializing West in the late nineteenth century confirmed Singapore's position as a premier transaction point for the east–west trade route and a base for trading agencies and merchant houses handling the financial, commercial, shipping, insurance, and other related services connected to the rapidly expanding import–export [Page 724]trade. In demographic terms, rapid urbanization during the colonial period was fueled primarily by labor migration: Despite the fact that natural increase was negative prior to 1921 (because of gross imbalances in sex ratios and the prevalence of high mortality rates), the population grew rapidly from less than 100,000 in 1871 to over half a million in 1931, and further to over a million in 1951 when Singapore attained official city status. The colonial city of Singapore was essentially a polyglot migrant world constituted by immigrants from China, India, and the Malay archipelago, dominated by a small European imperial diaspora. The plan of the town of Singapore, more commonly known as the Jackson Plan, had been drawn up as early as 1822, designating residential, commercial, and administrative zones and laying out the colony in a grid pattern. Residential areas were ethnically segregated. The Chinese resided southeast of the river (present-day Chinatown), Malay and Arab residents lived in the Kampong Glam and Bugis areas, and Indian residents were located farther north of these areas in Chulia Kampong. European traders and administrators lived in the European town, located adjacent to the administrative and commercial districts such as Commercial Square, the financial and trading hub of the colony with mercantile offices, banks, and trading companies. Apart from a brief interlude under Japanese occupation (1942–1945) during World War II when the city was renamed Syonan-to (Light of the South), urban governance was in the hands of the municipal authority tasked with bringing order and control to the urban environment, including regulating housing forms, public health, utilities systems, public places, and burial grounds. Right through the postwar decades of the colonial period and until independence, the urban built-up area was confined to the south-central part of the island; large tracts on the other parts of the island remained largely rural or forested landscapes. In less than 20 years after independence, however, Singapore became almost completely urbanized.

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