'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'.