alt Hacker News>Stamford Raffles stands – according to the plaque attached to the plinth – on the ‘historic site’ where he first landed as an agent of the British East India Company on 28 January 1819 and, thereafter, ‘with genius and perception changed the destiny of Singapore from an obscure fishing village to a great seaport and modern metropolis’.
This is one of the greatest lies ever told, that Singapore was an obscure fishing village when the colonial powers came to "modernise" Singapore.
Read the history books, Singapore is bang in the middle of ancient super powers of India and China. It's has been and always has been for most of its history a successful entreport for several thousand years before the colonials first visited, and the later Chinese immigrants settled in Singapore.
The founder of Malacca, where the Strait of Malacca name originated from, was himself a prince from Singapore and at the time better known as Temasek.
The people who originally settled in the Malay Archipelago several thousands years ago were successful maritime explorers. Their descendents discovered and migrated to wider Austronesia including Madagascar to the west, and New Zealand and Hawaii to the east several thousand years before the colonial powers "re-discover" these places. They also who speak their ancestors derivatives languages until now, that at one time US government tried to ban.
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By the time the Europeans arrived Singapore had long since declined:
> However, by the time the Portuguese arrived in the early 16th century, Singapura had already become "great ruins" according to Alfonso de Albuquerque.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Singapore
How far back and how much context is required for a simple narrative to not constitute lying? And for a narrative about national origin, is it not also misleading to insinuate that successive settlements and polities constitute a singular, shared history?
And Europeans were not the first colonial powers to land on and assert control over the peninsula. In fact, the incumbent Muslim powers the Europeans encountered had colonized the peninsula only a couple of centuries beforehand. Aboriginal peoples (pre-history "colonizers") still live in Malaysia, and they're still as isolated and impoverished by the state as they were before Europeans arrived. Malaysia even has its own Plymouth Rock-like monument (on the coast somewhere near Malacca, IIRC), and it's not where Europeans first stepped ashore. And it seems a little odd to presume Singaporeans would identify with the political and social history of their Malay and aboriginal predecessors when Singapore, a majority Chinese community, was kicked out of Malaysia precisely because of racist and xenophobic sentiments of many Malays.
The racial politics of Malaysia and Singapore are at least as complicated as in the US if not more so. I count South Africa and Malaysia as the two countries where racial politics are not only as complicated, but open and explicit as in the US, and like the US the relationship between European colonizers and the "native" groups constitutes only a portion of that complexity. Many other countries have similarly diverse groups, but usually one group is unchallenged in its power and there's very little open discourse about the subject. But contemporary anti-colonial rhetoric whitewashes (figuratively and literally) all of this.
> The people who originally settled in the Malay Archipelago several thousands years ago were successful maritime explorers.
That comment upset me as a Melanesian. I'm sorry, but I need to challenge the above statement as it is factually incorrect. What you are claiming is widely spread in a politicized way in Malaysia and Indonesia, and in a similar but different context in Thailand and Phillipines. Firstly, I'm sure you know that the actual original first peoples (called as "orang asli negrito" or "sakai" (derogatory) by "Malay" settlers) are Melanesian/Negrito/Aboriginal tribes. Again, Malay settlers are not the the 'people who originally settled' as you claimed, they took the land from Melanesians. To be precise, the original people are MT Haplogroup P, MT Haplogroup M/sub-R, Y Haplogroup K/F. They have predominantly jet black skin and curly hair or straight hair in the case of some Aboriginal tribes in Australia. These are the genuine first peoples. They were in South and South East Asia, Papua and Australia first prior to the Toba eruption 70ka ago. Today, they have been mostly genocided by 'Malay' (sometimes used to cloud the term Austronesian term) settler populations. You can see this process happening even today in West Papua where 'Malay' soldiers and settlers brought over from Java, Indonesia are genociding Melanesian men in West Papua and taking over their land. The indigenous Melanesians are now a minority in their own land. There's brutal horific videos you can find online of Javanese settlers attacking and skinning a Melanesian man alive inside an oil drum. Truly barbaric stuff. It is a slow genocide but you don't hear much about it, probably because the mines of Freeport McMoran and Grassburg supply a huge chunk of the copper/gold that's key for EV and other modern technologies. That's as much time as I can spend on communicating this right now. I hope this information will help you and others correct your misunderstanding and stop spreading such disingenous claims intended to enable land grab by settlers. Thank you.
European powers had taken over shipping in that region since the 17th century because their sailing ships were superior to anything the locals built.
That’s a different kind of misleading narrative, the “$PLACE was rich in pre-modern times” narrative. Places decline. Heck, by the middle ages, Rome’s population had dropped to just 30,000.