Temasek
In the fourteenth century a port called Temasek stood at the mouth of the Singapore river. Chinese records describe it, and the Malay Annals tell how a prince from Palembang, Sang Nila Utama, founded Singapura there after seeing a beast he took for a lion. Archaeology has confirmed a thriving settlement trading with China in the fourteenth century. It was attacked by Majapahit or by Siam at the end of the century, and its last ruler, Parameswara, fled north to found Malacca. For the next four centuries the island was a minor part of the sultanate of Johor.
Raffles and the free port
In the early nineteenth century the British East India Company wanted a base at the southern end of the Strait of Malacca to protect its trade with China against the Dutch. Stamford Raffles, lieutenant-governor of Bencoolen in Sumatra, landed on Singapore at the end of January 1819. The sultanate of Johor was in a succession dispute, and Raffles recognised one claimant, Hussein, as sultan, and with him and the local chief, the Temenggong, signed a treaty on 6 February 1819 allowing the Company to set up a trading post. Raffles made it a free port, without customs duties, and the settlement grew rapidly as merchants from China, India, the Malay world and Europe arrived. The Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824 confirmed British possession, and in 1826 Singapore joined Penang and Malacca in the Straits Settlements, governed from Calcutta until 1867 and then as a crown colony.
The colonial port
Singapore became the commercial centre of Southeast Asia, handling the trade of the Malay peninsula in tin and later rubber. Its population, mostly Chinese, with large Malay and Indian communities, many of the Indians from the Tamil country, gave it a plural character that persists. In February 1942 the Japanese army captured Singapore, a defeat that Winston Churchill called the worst disaster in British military history. Tens of thousands of Indian soldiers taken prisoner were recruited into the Indian National Army, and Subhas Chandra Bose proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free India in Singapore in October 1943.
Independence
After the war Singapore became self-governing in 1959 under Lee Kuan Yew's People's Action Party, and in 1963 it joined the new federation of Malaysia. Political and racial tensions between Singapore's leaders and the federal government in Kuala Lumpur led to its expulsion from the federation, and it became independent on 9 August 1965. Under Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister until 1990, it developed into one of the richest countries in the world, with a tightly controlled political system. Tamil is one of its four official languages.
Further reading
- Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press, 1968
- Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000
- Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
See also
- Malacca — Malacca is a port on the strait between the Malay peninsula and Sumatra, the seat of a Malay sultanate founded around 1400 that controlled the trade of the straits, captured by the Portuguese in 1511, by the Dutch in 1641 and transferred to the British in 1824.
- Srivijaya — Srivijaya was a Buddhist maritime kingdom centred at Palembang in southern Sumatra from the seventh century, which controlled the trade of the Strait of Malacca for several centuries and was a major centre of Buddhist learning.
- East India Company — The East India Company (EIC) was an English joint-stock trading corporation, chartered in 1600, that expanded from a monopoly on Asian trade into the paramount political and military power on the Indian subcontinent before its dissolution in 1858.
- Majapahit — Majapahit was a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom based in East Java from 1293 to the early sixteenth century, which under King Hayam Wuruk and his minister Gajah Mada claimed overlordship over much of the Indonesian archipelago.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.