Central to the rise of the island of Singapore as one of the world’s most important cities are its location on one of the planet’s most important waterways and crossroads and its potent mix of the behavioral values of two cultures—British and overseas Chinese.
There’s no other place quite like Singapore, which goes back hundreds of years to a once-prosperous city called Temasek that essentially disappeared. Singapore’s long colonial status started in 1819—when it was founded by Sir Stamford Raffles as a British trading post—and ended in 1963, when Singapore briefly merged with Malaya, only to anxiously turn into an independent city-state in 1965 when it became clear that a Malay marriage with a city dominated by overseas Chinese was doomed.
But then, Singapore has always been a site of grand reinventions, some gradual and some fast. And John Curtis Perry, emeritus professor of history at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, provides a (usually) engaging history of this complicated place. Most important for us, he explains cogently why Singapore has become so successful. And he works in some glamour and romance, too, about a place that people of a certain age still see as “exotic,” like something from a Somerset Maugham story.
Being part of the British Empire, which was held together by the Royal Navy and British commerce (based on free trade), was essential to Singapore’s 19th-century development. It wove Singapore into an international system that swiftly made it into a major entrepôt and gave the rapidly growing city stable, competent, and fair government that promoted prosperity:
Singapore was very profitably linked to two powerful networks: “Regional in the case of the Chinese, global in the case of the British. .  .  . Trade linked the small world of Anglo-Chinese Singapore to the globe. .  .  . How pleased [Raffles] would have been to see contemporary Singapore’s embrace of much of British tradition,” Perry writes. But Chinese entrepreneurialism, which has always included large doses of risk-taking leavened with self-discipline, including the willingness to delay gratification in order to save and invest, was also crucial: “British dominion over the seas provided the foundation,” Perry explains. “But upon this foundation stood the sturdy Chinese middleman, with Straits-born Babas [so-called Straits Chinese] leading the way with their knowledge of English and their ability to connect with other Asians.”
A lot of Singapore’s revenue was once derived from opium, although the place has been rigorously, sometimes even frighteningly, anti-drug since independence. While once having the reputation among Westerners as a den of iniquity, Singapore has long since been notoriously puritanical about certain behavior, perhaps most famously expressed in its ban on chewing gun and its use of caning to punish crimes such as vandalism.
The helmsman of its progress from poverty to wealth was Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015), the most important person in Singapore from before independence, through the city’s unhappy marriage with Malaya, and then in its gutsy decision to try to survive and prosper as a maritime-based city-state, recalling Venice and Genoa. Perry provides an engrossing analysis of what drove this intensely ambitious, brilliant, ascetic, and authoritarian ruler as he and his colleagues made Singapore into a major world city, first as a port/supply center, then as a manufacturing hub, now as a technological dynamo as well. As he led his crowded jurisdiction as prime minister (1965-90), and then continuing as Singapore’s dominant figure until his death, Lee kept driving his people to work hard, be clean, be honest, restrain their desires, and plan for decades ahead. Don’t get soft in this dangerous world, he warned: Be anxious!
(I know quite a few people who worked in Singapore, and a couple of them wrote for me when I was finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, which had a bureau and printed in Singapore, and was sometimes censored. They either loved its cleanliness and order or hated the Big Brotherism that promoted those qualities. A cousin of mine, a merchant banker, couldn’t wait to move out of “boring, stifling” Singapore and move to the messy, manic, raucous, and sometimes seamy life in Hong Kong, its big rival in the 1980s.)
Singapore’s leaders worry a lot. They fear that the island could lose much business if, as has long been proposed, a canal is built across narrow southern Thailand, diverting much ship traffic from the Straits of Malacca. They worry that an oil pipeline might be laid across the Malay Peninsula, undermining Singapore’s status as a huge petro port and refining center, and that new technologies will leave them behind. And as officials of an implausibly tiny, very vulnerable state, they’re especially alert to political, social, and economic conditions in their often-unstable neighbors Malaysia (on which they depend for much of their fresh water) and Indonesia. Perry quotes the historian Ian Buruma on Singapore’s existential tenseness: “It corresponds to a deep primordial fear of being swallowed up by the jungle, a fate that can only be avoided by being ever more perfect, ever more disciplined, always the best.”
More accurate, perhaps, is Perry’s point that leaders of the new nation, “anxious to build a sense of identity, seized upon a notion of shared values, articulating and organizing them into a collective ethos, formally approved by Parliament.” The ethos says that citizens “must defer to the needs of the community .  .  . with consensus taking precedence over contention .  .  . and individualism .  .  . disparaged as selfishness. .  .  . The prescribed ethic lauds hard work, frugality, and social discipline, with emphasis on the practical and the specific. .  .  . Discipline is equated with being civilized.”
The people of Singapore have mostly accepted its rigorous and honest autocracy/technocracy because it created such widely shared prosperity. And as Perry writes, the Singaporean government “is not tyrannous. Instead it is clearly dedicated to the ideal of popular welfare.” Still, Singapore’s recent move into the knowledge industry raises questions about how long this new endeavor can flourish in an authoritarian state, especially one no longer led by Lee Kuan Yew.
Sir Stamford Raffles would have approved of Perry’s remark that a marriage of convenience between “shrewd Chinese entrepreneurship and stable British colonial governance spawned Singapore’s vitality [and] continues to nourish it today.” I would add that this city-state provides strong lessons to other governments on how to maximize the welfare of their citizens—as long as you don’t care much about real democracy. Which raises the question of whether Singapore’s future leaders, assuming that they’ll also be autocratic, will be as honest, competent, and public-spirited as Lee Kuan Yew—or his son Lee Hsien Loong, prime minister since 2004. If not, Singaporeans may finally demand major political change, and things may get messy in this hyper-orderly place.
Robert Whitcomb is a partner in a health-care-sector consultancy and editor of NewEnglandDiary.com.
