Raffles Of Singapore
SEPTEMBER 01, 1959 by GEORGE WINDER
Mr. Winder, formerly a Solicitor of the Supreme Court in New Zealand, is now farming in
Singapore, an island 27
Raffles Of Singapore
SEPTEMBER 01, 1959 by GEORGE WINDER
Mr. Winder, formerly a Solicitor of the Supreme Court in New Zealand, is now farming in
Singapore, an island 27 miles long by 14 miles broad, on which is situated one of the great cities of the world, has this year become a self-governing state, although it remains nominally within the British Empire and allows the British to retain certain defense bases on its territory.
With the abdication of the British, more than a century of free enterprise on the island has come to an end.
A year or so ago, when the people of Singapore first obtained a great measure of self-government, they introduced protective customs tariffs. Now, with the victory at the polls of the left-wing Socialist People’s Action Party, the first Premier of the independent state—Cambridge-educated Lee Kuan Yew—has announced his intention to "industrialize" the island, a process which will require high tariff barriers, combined with the introduction of an unprecedented measure of state control over the economic system.
The history of Singapore’s century and more of free enterprise is surely one of the greatest practical vindications of libertarian beliefs. The city was born of free enterprise, and practiced it—with its concomitant, free trade—even before the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 established that system in Great Britain; and it continued to do so after free enterprise had ceased to be the economic policy of the protecting power.
The man who first foresaw the commercial advantage of this tiny island at the end of the Malay Peninsula, with its fine roadsteads for shipping, and established there a great free port, was Stamford Raffles. The son of a British sea captain, he joined the East India Company at the age of fourteen as an office boy at its Leadenhall street headquarters in London.
When twenty-four, he was sent out to the Company’s office at Penang. Here he studied the native languages, and soon advanced himself in the esteem of his superiors. In 1810, he visited Calcutta, where he won the confidence of the Governor-General, Lord Minto. In 1811, a British force set out from Malacca to capture the island of Java from the Dutch, who had been forced to ally themselves with Napoleon Bonaparte. Raffles was appointed Intelligence Officer to this expedition.
Six weeks later the expedition had accomplished its task, and Lord Minto, to the surprise of some of his more orthodox officials, appointed Stamford Raffles as Lieutenant-Governor of the newly-acquired territories. Certainly, this was a great advance in life for a young man of thirty, with only six years experience in the East, and before that an office boy in Leadenhall-street.
After Waterloo, Java was returned to the Dutch, and Raffles received a knighthood. But—owing, it is believed, to the jealousy his rapid rise had aroused—the only position found for him was that of Resident for the East India Company at Bencoolan, an unimportant trading post in Sumatra. Here, however, he busied himself with the project of finding a suitable port for Great Britain’s growing traffic with the East.
In 1819, he entered into a contract with the Sultan of Johore for the sale of the island of Singapore to the East India Company for 60,000 Spanish dollars (£13,500) and a life annuity of 24,000 dollars. (Incidentally, it is from this same Spanish dollar that the American currency is derived.)
But this straightforward purchase of the island was nothing compared with Raffles’ difficulty in persuading the British government to recognize the transaction. As soon as Lord Hastings—the successor to Lord Minto—heard of the matter, he wrote to the Governor of Penang saying that, in face of the protests received from the Dutch, Raffles had no right to seek a trading post in such an area, and instructions were given that, "if the post has not yet been obtained, he is to desist from any further attempt to establish one."
We are told that the British Cabinet was also "excessively angry," and Raffles would almost certainly have been forced to abandon the port except for the influence of the commercial community in The Straits which stood behind him solidly. Frank Swettenham, onetime Governor of the Straits Colony, in his book, British Malaya, tells us concerning the establishment of Singapore:
"In all this, no British party and no British government can claim to have taken part, except by grudgingly assenting to what had been done, almost 