acceptable Federation which fundamentally shaped the nature of Malay politics.
The decision to detach Singapore from the Straits Settlement and put it in a
separate path of development also had unintended consequences on political
developments in Singapore.
This decision however challenged the social memories of the entire spectrum
of political parties from the MCP to the PAP whose experience of Singapore
was its dependence upon the Malay peninsula as its hinterland and so lead
them to argue that Singapore could not survive on its own and its future as an
independent entity lay in some form of federation or merger with Malaya.
A second theme running through British archives was the imposition of
Emergency rule in response to the armed insurrection launched by the
Communist Party of Malaya in 1948. British suppression of the spread of that
insurrection to Singapore also fundamentally shaped the political development
of Singapore. What emerges in Stockwell's selection of the British documents on
their response to the MCP insurrection is their uncertainty, expressed in disputes
over assessments of the MCP's intentions and capabilities, and grasping for
solutions, and their social memories of how they had in the first instance built
their empire through collaboration with local groups lead them to search for new
collaborators to maintain the empire.
The overarching tacit narrative which Stockwell and others following him,
including Tim Harper, Karl Hack and Tan Tai Yong have inferred from the
colonial archives is that of a drained and exhausted Britain after World War
II struggling without the means to regain its status as a global power. Britain
recognised that some form of transfer of power was inevitable, but intended to
effect the transfer in a way that would allow it to maintain its influence in its
former colonies and so continue to qualify as a global power.
The archives are a record of Britain's search for responses to the rejection of its
Malayan Union scheme, muddling about what to do about an escalating armed
insurrection while searching for collaborators to join in the construction of a
new Dominion of Southeast Asia to which Malcolm MacDonald was appointed
High Commissioner. Britain, as Stockwell and Tan Tai Yong among others have
argued, was not in total control of events to dictate the formation of Malaysia
as a 'Neo-colony,' but neither was it totally powerless. Britain continued to
underwrite the security of Malaya after its independence in 1957 and revived its
vision of a 'Grand Design' for a dominion of Singapore with Malaya and its other
colonies in Borneo to contain the communist threat.42
Reconfiguring Archived Memories
This essay has argued that we need to go beyond reading the archive for its
'content' of why what happened at what place and time to examining the
'context' of the archives as the formation of social memories of its communities.
Reading the Colonial Office archives for content assumes an attempt to
document a rational policy-making process that identifies and defines an
emerging situation as a policy issue, analyses the options for its solution and
follows the selection and implementation of a preferred solution. Reading the
archives for the context of its records suggests an alternative understanding
KWA CHONG GUAN AND HO CHI TIM ARCHIVES IN THE MAKING OF POST-COLONIAL SINGAPORE
42 Stockwell, 'Malaysia: the making of a grand design' and Tan Tai Yong, Creating 'Greater Malaysia'.
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