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'. 137

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2012 | | pagina 139