March 12, 2020

As part of a monthly feature, ‘Singapore Shelf’, Ms Olivia Ho from The Straits Times spotlights eight hot-off-the-press books authored by local writers. Among them are Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore (NUS Press, 2019) by Associate Professor Timothy Barnard (NUS Department of History) and Thomas Stamford Raffles: Schemer or Reformer (NUS Press, 2020) by the late Professor Syed Hussein Alatas (previously from the NUS Department of Malay Studies).

In Imperial Creatures, A/P Barnard nicely charts the effect of imperialism on the island’s fauna. Some animals were cherished as pets and even research assistants, while others were abused for sport and routinely slaughtered. A marked contrast from a largely untamed land before the British arrival, animals were monitored, regulated, slaughtered, and ultimately controlled under the British. A/P Barnard chooses the stories of animals as the vehicle to reflect on the effects of colonial rule in Singapore because he feels that they make it easier to comprehend the ways in which the British colonisers enforced their power over a distant land.

As for Thomas Stamford Raffles, the book is actually a revised version of Prof Alatas’ 1971 work under the same title. In it, he argued for a more critical appraisal of the colonial founder and the need to examine, more closely, Raffles’ political philosophy and his motives behind colonising Singapore. Amidst unabated contentions over Raffles’ legacy even as the Singapore Bicentennial commemoration drew to a close last year, the book is a timely addition to the debate. This edition comes with a new preface by his son, Professor Syed Farid Alatas (NUS Department of Sociology).

Read the article here.