Greed, guns and gore: Historicising early British colonial Singapore through recent developments in the historiography of Munsyi Abdullah

Abstract

<jats:p>Munsyi Abdullah and his better-known writings, <jats:italic>Kisah Pelayaran Abdullah</jats:italic> (1838) and <jats:italic>Hikayat Abdullah</jats:italic> (1843), are much-discussed in the historiography of early British colonial Singapore. However, Amin Sweeney's efforts to historicise some aspects of Abdullah's life and writings have established that Abdullah was much more than a sharp social critic of Malays and their rulers. He is better understood as a subtle critic and even a manipulator of his European interlocutors who craftily used his occidental contacts and connections alongside his local knowledge to preserve his role as a cultural intermediary in a burgeoning port settlement. Sweeney's efforts bring into focus a multifaceted imperial experience where notions like ‘interactions’ and ‘connections’ become viable descriptive categories in making sense of the intersections of Abdullah and empire, thereby strongly resonating with networked conceptions of imperial space propounded by ‘new’ imperial history. Taken alongside the recent literary and theoretical efforts of Jan van der Putten and Sanjay Krishnan respectively on Abdullah, and the carefully circumscribed historical efforts of Ian Proudfoot, the recent historiography of Abdullah offers fresh interpretive possibilities of early colonial Singapore. Leveraging such developments to engage with Mary Turnbull's scripting of a gruesome episode in 1823 indicates that Turnbull's historiographical dominance of Singapore's early colonial history can be transcended to better represent British coloniality, warts and all.</jats:p>