Right. Been busy for the past few weeks, apologies for the lack of activity here. Hopefully that is about to change.
To start us off again: an interesting article in the ST, which Juwel flagged. It is an article well worth reading. (I’ve saved it on this page because one requires an ST subscription to read it on the original site.)
I am, of course, hugely excited about the publication of a book about pre-modern Singapore, a topic which, as the article claims correctly, has rarely been covered in much detail anywhere, especially in school (though through no fault of the education system). This is largely the result of a paucity of sources, and the historical discontinuity between the medieval Singapura and the port which Raffles founded.
However, I’m uneasy about certain aspects of the article, mainly about the claims that it makes about the relationship between Singapore’s distant past and its present. However because I have a lot to say about this, and because long web articles makes heads swim (I suffer from it too!) I shall break this up into a few parts. Here’s the first:
The Longue Durée
Let’s begin with some generalities. Heng uses the term ‘the longue durée’.* Without going too much into historiography, the concept was introduced by a French school of historians collectively known as the Annales, and in particular Fernand Braudel. Braudel advocated the study of history over extremely long periods of time in order to discern the relationships between geography, social and cultural institutions, and events. To him time moved in three different speeds: at the deepest level stood the hardly-changing limitations and cycles of climate and geography (which he termed structure); the middle tier of human societies, cultural structures, and institutions (conjoncture); and the surface froth of events (événementielle). Many have seen the longue durée as an apology for geographical determinism, with conjoncture and événementielle inevitably controlled by structure. Indeed, Braudel was somewhat of a determinist; in his magnum opus on early modern Europe, Le Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, he wrote:
Tout effort à contre-courant du sens profond de l’histoire… est condamné d’avance… Ainsi suis-je toujours tenté devant un homme, de le voir enfermé dans un destin qu’il fabrique à peine, dans un paysage qui dessine derrière lui et devant lui les perspectives de la longue durée.
(All efforts made to go against the deepest currents of history… are doomed in advance… Thus I am always tempted, when put before a man, to see him as one imprisoned within a destiny which he hardly creates, in a path which lays out behind him and before him the perspectives of the longue durée.)
There is much merit to this idea. Braudel illustrates, for instance, that the size of Mediterranean empires was limited by the speed of communications. In a more modern use of the longue durée, Jared Diamond has illustrated that the relative lack of biodiversity – especially in the crucial starchy grasses and large domesticable mammals – led to a late start in agriculture for native American civilisations compared to those in Eurasia, and thus the differential rates of development between the two continents. The use of the longue durée thus aids in the formulation of plausible hypotheses to account for certain ‘big questions’ in history, particularly pre-modern history, much more subject to the limitations of geography.
Nonetheless, is the method universally useful? Rapid improvements in the technology of communications and transport, and the cheap cost of energy due to the utilisation of fossil fuels, have combined to shrink distances and rendered the limitations of climate and geography much less restrictive. What held true in the time of Philip II (and throughout most of human history!) no longer holds true today.
Singapore and Geography
Heng uses the perspective of the longue durée to argue that ‘the Singapore of today is very much the same as it has been throughout its documentable history: a port-city par excellence’. The problem with that statement is that it is lacking in nuance: Singapore today is no longer simply a port-city. If anything, the modern economic miracle of Singapore provides a striking illustration of triumphs over geographical limitations achieved through the application of industrial technology and enabled by a fortunate historical conjuncture in the cheapness and availability of energy. After 1965, the economy was completely restructured away from providing entrepôt trade and servicing the British military base and towards industry and later, services, becoming an export-led economy with the help of substantial foreign investment. Today, manufacturing accounts for 26% of GDP, financial services 22%.
It can still be argued that Singapore remains defined by its port. The value of our trade is four times that of our GDP, and the fact that we are dependent on exports to an international market was starkly illustrated by how badly affected we are by the current economic downturn. Nonetheless, there are qualitative differences which make a straightforward comparison untenable. Colonial Singapore and pre-colonial Temasek were entrepôts servicing the archipelago, China and India. Goods were imported, and then exported with little or not refinement or addition of value. The value of an entrepôt depended on the reluctance of merchants to travel the entire length of a shipping route, and this depended in turn on geographical factors. Singapore’s entrepôt port derived its value from the seasonality of the monsoon and the diversity of trading destinations, which made sailing to all of them directly an impractical proposition. Chinese junks caught the northeast monsoon winds in winter, and, instead of continuing on towards India or the archipelago, spent the time trading their goods in Singapore for Indian or archipelagic goods collected over the previous year, before sailing before the southwest monsoos in spring and summer. Indian merchants did the same, but in the opposite direction.
This contrasts starkly with the port of modern Singapore, which depends much less on the geographical cycles of the longue durée. Instead, as anyone who did Social Studies in school would know, the value of our port depends primarily on the strengths of our industries and labour force, which add value onto imports of raw materials and export finished products in demand elsewhere, and only secondarily on geographical factors, such as our position astride the Middle East-East Asian trade route, which puts us at an advantage with regards to oil refining. This is the reason why the modern port of Singapore imports from and exports to all parts of the world (indeed, the far-away USA are our second-largest trade partner).
I am not arguing that geography plays no role at all. Singapore has always been well-placed to be a port. It has a navigable coastline, deep harbours, and a good position along an important waterway. Little wonder, therefore, it has had a port for a large portion of its history. Nonetheless, to claim that modern Singapore is still ‘very much the same’ as pre-modern Temasek simply because they both had ports promotes a misunderstanding, or at best a very simplistic understanding, of history: there are very different economic bases to the pre-modern and colonial ports, and the modern port of Singapore.
The reason for this mistake is obvious. Heng calls on us to ‘put aside… contextual issues such as technology’. As we have seen, in modern history at least, technology is not a contextual issue: it has a large impact on the limitations of structure. The resemblance of the port of modern Singapore to that of pre-modern Singapura, therefore, is a superficial one.
It is on the basis of this superficial similarity that the article proceeds to construct even more superficial similarities with little regard for historical nuance, and use all these to justify a policy prescription.
http://forums.delphiforums.com/sunkopitiam/messages?msg=32735.1
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