To browse Academia. The brothel business flourished parallel to industrial and commercial growth in colonial Singapore during the early twentieth century. This article explores the British Empire's role in proliferating prostitution in colonial Singapore as depicted in James Gordon Farrell's historical novel, The Singapore Grip It argues, as the novel describes, that the British administration in Singapore played a vital role in promoting prostitution for its ulterior economic and political motives.
Fuelled by a fallacious notion of racial supremacy, the British authorities in colonial Singapore compromised the livessocial, economic and physical of girls and women inducted into prostitution. The article concludes with a section on the role and contribution of the prostitutes in the making and sustaining of Singapore, which has been overlooked in traditional, patriarchal historiography. Philip Howell. Chua Ai Lin. Kenneth Paul Tan.
At least two significant obstacles today prevent Singapore from progressing economically: a population unable to reproduce itself; and a people that generally lack creativity and entrepreneurship. Both are unintended consequences of earlier authoritarian policies of a paternalistic and patriarchal postcolonial government.
Subsequently, an Asian values campaign helped to form a conservative, censorious and electorally significant moral majority. Today, Singaporean society is described as sexually repressed and repressive. Kenzie McKeegan. This paper examines the historiography of nineteenth-century female prostitution in the British Empire. Ratnabali Chatterjee. Liat Kozma. Claire Lowrie. The s to the s marked a time of change and upheaval across the colonial world. While small numbers of white women had long played a role in empire as wives, missionaries, travelers and workers, the period saw significant increases in the numbers of British, European, American and Australian women visiting and settling in colonies throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific Bulbeck ; Knapman Stoler Colonial administrators regarded the increasing numbers of white women visiting and settling in the colonies as a welcome development; however, these women were publicly condemned in the local press and often by their own husbands and fathers as unsuitable colonizers see for example Knapman Negative assessments of white women were certainly prolific in the neighboring British colonial ports of Singapore and Darwin for which there exists a wealth of memoirs, travel accounts, newspaper articles and oral histories produced about and by British and white Australian women.
Drawing on these sources, this chapter explores how white women in Singapore and Darwin pursued household management with vigor, perhaps in part as an attempt to prove their worth to the colonial venture in the context of intense public criticism.
