Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300-1800

Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300-1800 presents Singapore’s history in the context of Asia’s long-distance maritime trade in the years between 1300 and 1800—it amounts to a dramatic new understanding of Singapore’s pre-colonial past, not as the primitive fishing village it was believed to be, but as the multiethnic trading centre it was. Beneath the modern skyscrapers of Singapore lie the remains of a much older trading port, prosperous and cosmopolitan and a key node in the maritime Silk Road. This book synthesizes 25 years of archaeological research to reconstruct the 14th-century port of Singapore in greater detail than is possible for any other early Southeast Asian city.

The precolonial history of Singapore is an area of wilful ignorance and self-denial among many residents and scholars of the nation-state. To acknowledge that the island has a history prior to the landing of Thomas Stamford Raffles and the English East India Company in 1819 would open the door to numerous contestations that do not fit neatly into the dominant state narrative of a small, insignificant fishing village that British guidance and the modern developmental state has willed into modernity, and has been largely ignored in official accounts and textbooks in the nation-state until recently. With this work, the author has meticulously presented a history of Singapore prior to 1819 that places it within larger networks of trade as well as given it a prominence that will influence Singaporean and Southeast Asian historiography for decades to come.

Following an introduction that outlines archaeological research in Singapore since 1819, the author divides the book into three sections. The first section consists of four chapters that summarise much of the research on coastal Southeast Asian trade ports prior to 1300 and then focuses on what is known about Singapore through ancient historical texts. This section makes up the first half of the book, and provides much needed context, as early Singapore was part of this network of trade ports that linked East and South Asia with Southeast Asia. The following section of the book focuses on archaeological evidence from Singapore. Archaeological digs, often under the supervision of the author, have taken place in Singapore since 1984. The third section focus on what the archaeological and textual evidence tells us about the relationship between Singapore and various regions in the precolonial era.

Southeast Asia is presented as the core of a system of connectivity that overflows its own boundaries, reaching India in the west and China in the east, and whose influence is traceable as far as the Mediterranean, as evidenced by the use of Moluccan cloves in Roman-occupied Egypt around the fourth Century AD. The concept of the Silk Road of the Sea, a maritime analogy to the overland trading route that connected the Mediterranean and China through central Asia, is depicted as the vehicle that enabled the development of the aforementioned system of connectivity. Throughout the book, the author stresses the various facets of this route, whose nature goes beyond its mere commercial role. Politically, the Silk Road of the Sea functioned as means of diplomatic negotiation between Southeast Asia and prominent nations like China. Socially, it also favored the creation of communities of Chinese immigrants outside of China. At the religious level, it provided Islam a way to expand.