A Brief History of Singapore

Author(s):  
Nicole Tarulevicz

This chapter provides an account of Singapore's recent history, interwoven with key culinary and gastronomic developments. The conventional periodization of Singapore's history into the pre-colonial, Japanese occupation, merger, and independence eras highlights some of the forces that have shaped the nation, but it also privileges state actors. From the early colonial period onward, the ordering of space and place has been a priority that has been demonstrated at the bureaucratic, regulatory, and physical levels. In the past 200 years, Singapore has been radically remade; technological innovation has been one of the mechanisms by which order is achieved. Indeed, Singapore's engagement with the global economy—be that the economy of the British Empire or of the twenty-first-century world of food security fears—has been relentless, and food has been central to the process.

This book looks at the history of Indian migrants in Australia and New Zealand over a period of two and a half centuries. It looks at the history of their migration, settlement, and encounter with racism. Indians now constitute a significant ethnic minority in Australia and New Zealand. According to the most recent census figures, they number slightly more than half a million, but represent a successful ethnic community making significant contributions to their host societies and economies. The histories of their migration go back to the early colonial period, but rarely do they find any space in the global literature on Indian diaspora, probably because of their small numbers. This book covers their history over the past two and half centuries, covering both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ diaspora; the ‘old’, consisting of the labourers who migrated under pressure of colonial capital, and the ‘new’ representing the post-war professional migrants. It also looks closely at the host societies which over this period have been receiving and interacting with the Indian migrants and the contributions of a few Antipodeans who travelled to India in the early twentieth century bringing their ideas and service. However, this book is not just about the diaspora; it is also about the circulation of ideas between the Antipodes and India and the contribution of this circulation to both the British Empire and the Commonwealth.


Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.


2014 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 169-185
Author(s):  
Jarosław Źrałka ◽  
Katarzyna Radnicka

The Ixil Maya area is located in Quiche Department of the north-western part of the Guatemalan Highlands. It has witnessed a continuous occupation since the 1st millennium BC till today. This archaeologically interesting region has provided many important discoveries of rare cultural mixture, with distinct features typical for both Maya Highlands and more distant Lowlands. Recently, the scholarly interest has focused on Chajul where a few years ago, in one of the local houses, well preserved wall paintings dated to the Colonial period were exposed by the house owner during the process of its renovation. With this extraordinary finding a question emerged - are we able to confirm the cultural continuity between the pre-Columbian settlers and modem Ixil who claim «to be always here»? This paper presents a brief outline of the history of the Ixil Maya. It also presents results of some recent and preliminary studies conducted by Polish scholars in this region.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 354-369
Author(s):  
Stephen Skowronek ◽  
Karen Orren

Faith in the resilience of the US Constitution prompts many observers to discount evidence of a deepening crisis of governance in our day. A long history of success in navigating tough times and adapting to new circumstances instills confidence that the fundamentals of the system are sound and the institutions self-correcting. The aim of this article is to push assessments of this sort beyond the usual nod to great crises surmounted in the past and to identify institutional adaptation as a developmental problem worthy of study in its own right. To that end, we call attention to dynamics of adjustment that have played out over the long haul. Our historical-structural approach points to the “bounded resilience” of previous adaptations and to dynamics of reordering conditioned on the operation of other governance outside the Constitution’s formal written arrangements. We look to the successive overthrow of these other incongruous elements and to the serial incorporation of previously excluded groups to posit increasing stress on constitutional forms and greater reliance on principles for support of new institutional arrangements. Following these developments into the present, we find principles losing traction, now seemingly unable to foster new rules in support of agreeable governing arrangements. Our analysis generates a set of propositions about why the difficulties of our day might be different from those of the past in ways that bear directly on resilience and adaptability going forward.


2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Hardy

The history of the rat and the wider rodent family in relation to bubonic plague suggests multiple ways in which different research disciplines can contribute to the understanding of mortality, morbidity, and epidemics in the past: For instance, demographic approaches can can clarify long-term trends in, and disruptions to, patterns of mortality; the study of psychological responses to disease since 1850 can lend insights into past disease behaviors; and archaeological discoveries and the still-developing technology of ancient dna analysis can help in the determination of causes and effects. As the link between the black rat and bubonic plague shows, without the collaboration of interdisciplinary methods, our understanding would surely suffer. The history of plague and the Black Death encompasses far more than the involvement of rats, but the enduring sylvatic reservoirs of plague infection that the rats and their many rodent cousins constituted in the past, and still constitute, should not be blithely discounted.


Author(s):  
Kyungmee Lee

This article reports eight distance teachers’ stories about teaching at two open universities over the past two decades with a focus on their perceptions and feelings about the changes in their teaching practice. This qualitative study employed a methodological approach called the autoethnographic interview, aiming to document more realistic histories of the open universities and to imagine a better future for those universities. As a result, the paper presents autobiographical narratives of distance teachers that dissent from the general historical accounts of open universities. These narratives are categorized into three interrelated themes: a) openness: excessive openness and a lost sense of mission; b) technological innovation: moving online and long-lasting resistance, and c) teaching: transactional interactions and feelings of loneliness. The paper then presents a discussion of useful implications for open universities, which can serve as a starting point for more meaningful discussions among distance educators in a time of change.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 275-296
Author(s):  
Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi

AbstractIn early colonial Lagos, struggles over race, place and identity were played out over ownership of land, and ended with the displacement of sections of the indigenous population. “Africa for the Africans” combines texts and maps to narrate the history of 1860s Lagos. This article demonstrates how, with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), European colonial maps can be used to analyze the significance of changing urban spatial relationships in 1860s Lagos. Though much of this analysis employs GIS, it also leans heavily on other tools for making timelines, story maps and vector diagrams. This process of creating digital representations of the past also has pedagogical applications, as these methods can be extended to the classroom for undergraduates learning about African history.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-90
Author(s):  
Brooke Holmes

Abstract This essay examines, from a position within Classics, different angles on critiques of historicism and the turn to anachronism in History, Art History, Medieval Studies, and Queer Theory before proposing the idea of ‘kairological history’, on the model of the artist Paul Chan’s ‘kairological art’. On this analysis, ‘kairological history’ engages the critical and creative resources of anachronic thinking alongside tools of historicism (e.g. empiricism, successionism, periodization, alterity) in making choices about ‘telling time’. These choices reflect a critical understanding of how temporality shapes the valuation of the past, particularly in relation to a ‘classical’ past; the negotiation of identity and difference between past and present; and the kinds of communities that history aims to support. The second half of the essay examines two instances of anachronism within the history of anatomy, one from Galen and one from the early twenty-first century. Both cases represent problems that historicism can correct. But the modality of correction, in itself, is anaemic and risks the very teleology that linear history is so often faulted for. The essay therefore explores what gets lost and what gets found when temporality is aligned with linearity, as well as non-linear modes of telling time.


2014 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 127-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxine Berg

ABSTRACTIt is time to reexamine craft and small-scale manufacture within our histories of industrialisation, both West and East, and to reflect on the long survival and adaptation of artisanal production even within our globalised world of production and consumption. Historians since the 1950s have addressed craft, skill and labour-intensive production in historical frameworks such as ‘the rise of the factory system’, ‘proto-industrialisation’ and ‘flexible specialisation’. More recently, they have devised other concepts which include labour and skill-intensive production such as ‘industrious revolution’, ‘the great divergence’, ‘knowledge economies’, ‘East Asian development paths’ and ‘cycles of production’. This paper surveys this historiography of craft and skill in models of industrialisation. It then reflects on small-scale industrial structures in current globalisation, emphasising the continued significance of craft and skill over a long history of global transitions. It gives close examination to one region, Gujarat, and its recent industrial and global history. The paper compares industrial production for East India Company trade in the eighteenth century to the recent engagement of the artisans of the Kachchh district of Gujarat in global markets. It draws on the oral histories of seventy-five artisan families to discuss the past and future of craft and skill in the industry of the global economy.


Author(s):  
Katharine M. Donato ◽  
Douglas S. Massey

Also labeled undocumented, irregular, and unauthorized migration, illegal migration places immigrants in tenuous legal circumstances with limited rights and protections. We argue that illegal migration emerged as a structural feature of the second era of capitalist globalization, which emerged in the late twentieth century and was characterized by international market integration. Unlike the first era of capitalist globalization (1800 to 1929), the second era sees countries limiting and controlling international migration and creating a global economy in which all markets are globalized except for labor and human capital, giving rise to the relatively new phenomenon of illegal migration. Yet despite rampant inequalities in wealth and income between nations, only 3.1 percent of all people lived outside their country of birth in 2010. We expect this to change: threat evasion is replacing opportunity seeking as a motivation for international migration because of climate change and rising levels of civil violence in the world’s poorer nations. The potential for illegal migration is thus greater now than in the past, and more nations will be forced to grapple with growing populations in liminal legal statuses.


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