'facts' for their reconstruction of Singapore are about the social memories of the officials of the East India Company towards the unwanted settlement that one of their servants, Stamford Raffles established. The tacit memories of the Colonial Office records are about governing a port city and its plural society as part of an expanding British Empire. The consequence of this 'archivalization' of the East India Company and Colonial Office records is that it has fundamentally shaped the writing of Singapore's past as an appendage of the East India Company and British Empire, rather than as the nineteenth century successor to a long series of emporia in the long cycles of the maritime history of the Melaka Straits. Discussing the shifting approach to colonial archives, Ann Laura Stoler suggests that archives should no longer be treated as 'a means to an end.' Instead, archives should be perceived ethnographically, rather than an extraction site of hosted information. The archives should be read 'along the archival grain' - that is, instead of immediately searching for agency of the colonised (against the grain), we should begin to understand the production process of the archives, how they were put together, its 'regularities, its logic of recall, its densities and distributions, its consistencies of misinformation, omission, and mistake....'41 We need to go beyond examining archives for their content, but also consider their context and the consequences of how they were put together and read. This essay now turns to examine the tacit narratives of the post-World War II Colonial Office records on Singapore, and how these Colonial Office narratives interfaces with the PAP and other social memories to create Singapore's understanding of its present. This essay joins the argument that archives are not passive repositories of records for historians and others to mine for 'facts', but through the nature of their collections become active and powerful participants in shaping the reconstruction of our past. The Tacit Narratives of the Colonial Office Post-World War II Records General Arthur E. Percival's surrender to General T Yamashita on 15 February 1942 disrupted the pre-World War Colonial Office narratives of continuing British rule of British Malaya. A revised narrative of what was to be done after the War had to be drafted. Anthony Stockwell has summarised well the writing of this new narrative in his three-volume edition of the Colonial Office records on the end of empire as they were opened in the late 1980s. For the Colonial Office planners the war was an opportunity to reorganise the fragmented administrative and constitutional structure of British Malaya which some three generations of Malayan Civil Service officers had piecemeal and incrementally constructed since Britain started intervening in the affairs of the Malaya states in 1874. The plan was to put in place a more unified constitutional structure in the form of a Malayan Union which would provide for a more efficient transfer of power, which the Colonial Office recognised was inevitable. Singapore was excluded from this plan, as it was needed as a British base in the post-war period. But what the Colonial Office planners thought a rational plan that protected British interests and enabled it to discharge its obligations of colonial rule was otherwise perceived by Malay groups. Their stiff protests forced Britain to withdraw its proposals for a Malayan Union and implement instead a more 136 COLONIAL LEGACY IN SOUTH EAST ASIA - THE DUTCH ARCHIVES 41 Stoler, 'Colonial Archives'.

Periodiekviewer Koninklijke Vereniging van Archivarissen

Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2012 | | pagina 138