Scholar, Banker, Gentleman Soldier


Book Description

Dr. Yap Pheng Geck was well known in the Banking and Finance circles of Singapore. He layed a prominent part in the early days of Chinese banks, especially in the establishment of the present Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC). In these reminiscences he vividly recalls his childhood, his early schooldays and the vicissitudes of the Japanese war in Southeast Asia, bringing back nostalgic memories of Singapore forty years ago.




World War II and Southeast Asia


Book Description

From December 1941, Japan, as part of its plan to build an East Asian empire and secure oil supplies essential for war in the Pacific, swiftly took control of Southeast Asia. Japanese occupation had a devastating economic impact on the region. Japan imposed country and later regional autarky on Southeast Asia, dictated that the region finance its own occupation, and sent almost no consumer goods. GDP fell by half everywhere in Southeast Asia except Thailand. Famine and forced labour accounted for most of the 4.4 million Southeast Asian civilian deaths under Japanese occupation. In this ground-breaking new study, Gregg Huff provides the first comprehensive account of the economies and societies of Southeast Asia during the 1941-1945 Japanese occupation. Drawing on materials from 25 archives over three continents, his economic, social and historical analysis presents a new understanding of Southeast Asian history and development before, during and after the Pacific War.




Diaspora at War


Book Description

Much of what has been written on Singapore's wartime past is set against the Japanese invasion and occupation of the island. In Diaspora at War: The Chinese of Singapore between Empire and Nation 1937 - 1945, Ernest Koh maps a war history that is far wider in geographical and temporal scope. From the skies over Western Europe and the Mediterranean to the Burma Road, from the Atlantic Ocean to the cities of China, individuals and small groups of Chinese from the British colony worked, fought, and flew in a variety of fighting and labour units. Drawing from oral history accounts and archival sources, Koh recovers a rich and insightful historical reality that has long been submerged under the weight of a teleological national narrative.




Singapore Street Names (4th edition): A Study of Toponymics


Book Description

Place names tell us much about a country — its history, its landscape, its people, its aspirations, its self-image, The study of place names called toponymics unlocks the stories that are in every street name and landmark. In Singapore, the existence of various races, cultures and languages, as well as its history of colonization, immigration and nationalism has given rise to a complex history of place names. But how did these places get their names? This revised and expanded 4th edition of the book incorporates additional information, from archival research as well as interviews that have come to light since the last edition. Also included are many new entries that have presented themselves as Singapore’s built environment undergoes redevelopment. Expanded by over 100 pages.




Tan Kah-kee


Book Description

This is an in-depth study of not just about Tan Kah-kee, but also the making of a legend through his deeds, self-sacrifices, fortitude and foresight. This revised edition sheds new light on his political agonies in Mao's China over campaigns against capitalists and intellectuals.




The Economic Growth of Singapore


Book Description

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the economic development of Singapore, easily the leading commercial and financial centre in Southeast Asia throughout the twentieth century. This development has been based on a strategic location at the crossroads of Asia, a free trade economy, and a dynamic entrepreneurial tradition. Initial twentieth-century economic success was linked to a group of legendary Chinese entrepreneurs, but by mid-century independent Singapore looked to multinational enterprise to deliver economic growth. Nonetheless exports of manufactures accounted for only part of Singaporean expansion, and by the 1980s Singapore was a major international financial centre and leading world exporter of commercial services. Throughout this study Dr Huff assesses the interaction of government policy and market forces, and places the transformation of the Singaporean economy in the context of both development theory and experience elsewhere in East Asia.







The Management Of Success


Book Description

A collection of analytical reflections on how the island of Singapore has been transformed from a colony in a crumbling empire into a thriving, modern, secular, independent republic. These are the results of a five-year project by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.




Strenuous Decades


Book Description

The movement of goods and passengers between port cities not only stimulates growth in coastal trading networks and centers but also inevitably changes the social and economic lives of people in these port cities and, subsequently, of their fellow compatriots farther inland. Studies of port cities have focused on the interactive political and economic relationship between trading centers. The center of attention in this book is socioeconomic life and cultural identity, which are shaped by the movement of goods, people, knowledge, and information, particularly when the community faces a crisis. Transnational studies focus on cross-border connections between people, institutions, commodities, and ideas, with an emphasis on their global presence. This book looks at the responses of different localities to the same global crisis. It gathers a selection of the fifty papers presented at the conference on "Coping with Transnational Crisis: Chinese Economic and Social Lives in East Asian Port Cities, 1850-1950," held in Hong Kong on June 7-11, 2016. The period from the 1850s to the outbreak of war in the Pacific in the late 1930s encompasses two major transnational crises with significant impacts on the Chinese population in Southeast Asian port cities in terms of their way of living and the construction of their identity: the emergence of bubonic plague in the 1880s and 1920s and the global economic crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The authors discuss the social and economic lives in various South East Asian port cities where many residents had to cope with these transnational crises. They do so through examining institutional measurements, rituals and festivals, communication, knowledge and information exchange as well as identity (re)construction. In addition, they explore how local communities responded to knowledge and information between the port cities and cities as well as inland locations. The chapters in this book offer solid grounds for future comparisons, not only based on a specific time or event but also on how society reacted over time, space, and various types of crises.




Distant Shores


Book Description

A pioneering history that transforms our understanding of the colonial era and China's place in it China has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the mid-eighteenth century. Distant Shores challenges this view, showing that the economic expansion of southeastern Chinese rivaled the colonial ambitions of Europeans overseas. In a story that dawns with the Industrial Revolution and culminates in the Great Depression, Melissa Macauley explains how sojourners from an ungovernable corner of China emerged among the commercial masters of the South China Sea. She focuses on Chaozhou, a region in the great maritime province of Guangdong, whose people shared a repertoire of ritual, cultural, and economic practices. Macauley traces how Chaozhouese at home and abroad reaped many of the benefits of an overseas colonial system without establishing formal governing authority. Their power was sustained instead through a mosaic of familial, fraternal, and commercial relationships spread across the ports of Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Swatow. The picture that emerges is not one of Chinese divergence from European modernity but rather of a convergence in colonial sites that were critical to modern development and accelerating levels of capital accumulation. A magisterial work of scholarship, Distant Shores reveals how the transoceanic migration of Chaozhouese laborers and merchants across a far-flung maritime world linked the Chinese homeland to an ever-expanding frontier of settlement and economic extraction.