Singapore Unlikely Power Chapter 4 Part 2 - Tin Rubber and the Melting Pot
The first half of this chapter was all about Suez, steam, and how Singapore found itself at the center of a shrinking world. This second half gets into what actually flowed through that center. Tin. Rubber. People. Some came voluntarily. Many did not.
And that’s what makes this part of Perry’s book hit harder. It’s not just economics. It’s human beings getting ground up by the machine of empire.
Tin: The Metal That Changed Everything
People have wanted tin for thousands of years. But in the late 1800s, demand went through the roof. Why? Someone figured out how to plate steel with tin, which made canning food possible. Suddenly the world needed a lot more tin.
Lucky for Singapore, the Malay Peninsula was loaded with it. Rich deposits sat in the river valleys on the western side, especially in Perak. Chinese miners had been working the ore with basic methods for a while, but now British capital and industrial machinery showed up. Bucket dredges. Gravel pumps. Steel piping. The small operators got squeezed out.
Here’s the thing about this kind of progress. The environment paid the price. Mining left ugly scars across the landscape. Topsoil gone. Tailings everywhere. But nobody was counting environmental costs in the 1890s.
The British placed “advisors” with local Malay princes. Officially it was about law and order. Really it was about creating a stable environment for mining profits. New roads and railways went in. Cheap Chinese labor kept costs down. And all that tin flowed through Singapore to the world market. By World War I, Singapore had the world’s largest tin smelting works. Its very first real industry.
Mad Rubber Ridley
If tin was Singapore’s first big commodity, rubber was its second. And the story of how rubber got to Malaya reads like a heist movie.
Seeds were smuggled out of Brazil. They were grown into seedlings at Kew Gardens in London. Then transplanted to Sri Lanka, and eventually to Malaya and Singapore. For years nobody cared. Not until 1888, when a botanist named Henry Nicholas Ridley got obsessed with rubber’s commercial potential.
This guy would roam the Malay Peninsula with pockets full of rubber seeds, trying to convince planters to ditch coffee and grow rubber instead. They called him “Mad Rubber Ridley.” Perry describes him as someone “always ready to discuss horticulture and economic botany, although perhaps properly appreciated only by scientists.” Translation: everyone thought he was a bore. But he was right.
By 1914, half the world’s raw rubber came from Malaya. Millions of rubber trees in neat rows replaced messy jungle. And all of it passed through Singapore.
One clever detail I loved: rubber saplings take six years to mature. That’s a long time to wait for returns. So planters grew pineapples between the rows. Pineapples only take eighteen months and need a small investment. When the rubber trees were ready, you dropped the pineapples. And thanks to tin canning, the pineapple fruit had a ready market too. That’s just smart business.
Ships, Scorpions, and Crocodile Honor Guards
Singapore’s position as a hub depended on ships. Lots of them. Perry spends significant time on the coastal steamers that connected Singapore to the rest of Southeast Asia.
The conditions on these small ships sound nightmarish. Hot, cramped, dirty. Mice and centipedes everywhere. One American missionary passenger recorded: “I killed nearly thirty scorpions in the cabin.” Thirty! And a ship captain named William Brown described navigating a narrow river with monkeys jumping aboard, “parrots screaming in the rigging, and the crocodiles lying like a guard of honour on either shore.”
The bigger oceanic shipping lines are fascinating too. By 1914, more than fifty shipping companies used Singapore. Only Hong Kong and Colombo were bigger ports in Asia. The French Messageries Maritimes became the world’s largest shipping company. P&O dominated British routes. The Blue Funnel Line named all its ships after Homeric heroes. The Germans built a clubhouse called the Teutonia that later became the Goodwood Park luxury hotel.
Perry makes an interesting observation about competition. Shipping magnate John Samuel Swire of Liverpool once wrote that “competition is an expensive luxury.” He organized shipping conferences where rival companies agreed on freight rates. Critics called it collusion. But it kept the industry from destroying itself.
Coolies: The Human Cost
This is the section that stays with you. The word “coolie” comes from an Indian word. In Chinese it can mean “bitter strength.” Both meanings are accurate.
Singapore needed labor. The tin mines needed labor. The rubber plantations needed labor. And the Malays themselves weren’t interested in either industry. So employers looked to China and India.
Some Chinese came voluntarily, driven by poverty and hoping for a better life. But many were kidnapped. “To be Shanghaied” entered the English language for a reason. On a dark night along the China coast, a man walking alone near the waterfront might be grabbed, thrown into a holding pen called a barracoon (a word borrowed straight from the African slave trade), and shipped off to forced labor.
Perry quotes a Canton resident who was snatched off a small boat and ended up in a Macau barracoon. “The unwilling ones are flogged into acquiescence; I was so flogged myself … some in despair committed suicide with opium, and others hung themselves.”
The governor of Hong Kong saw it firsthand. Hundreds of men “stripped naked, and stamped or painted with the letter C (Cuba), P (Peru), or S (Sandwich Islands) on their breasts.” Like cattle being branded.
Chinese people at the time called these laborers “human pigs.” The barracoon was the “pig pen.” Those shipped to Singapore were luckier than those sent across the Pacific to shovel bird dung on desolate Peruvian islands. At least the voyage was short. And many could eventually finish their contracts and find something better. But the system was brutal.
A City of Smells, Chits, and Cricket
By the turn of the century, Singapore had about three hundred thousand people and was thoroughly cosmopolitan. Perry paints a vivid picture of what it was like.
The British lived in airy bungalows on the outskirts. They played cricket on the padang in tropical heat. They used chits instead of money. These little scribbled promissory notes were so common they even showed up in the Sunday collection plate at St. Andrew’s Cathedral.
Racial hierarchy was rigid and ugly. Europeans looked at everyone else as “Asiatics” and mixed with them only for business. They sneered at Eurasians. Sport was the one area where people occasionally met as equals.
The Chinese, who had no tradition of athletics, were puzzled by British sports obsession. One European noted with bewilderment that the Chinese man “requires no exercise to preserve his health.” But both groups loved horseracing, because both groups loved gambling.
And the smells. Perry describes the stink of “night soil” (human waste collected as fertilizer) mixed with tropical odors and the musty smell of rubber at the port. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, visiting as an eight-year-old in 1952, remembered “sweetness and rot, both overwhelming.”
The Coming Storm
Perry ends this chapter on an ominous note. By 1914, cracks were showing in the British Empire. Singapore’s trade with the United States had already passed its trade with Britain, driven largely by rubber and the American automobile industry. The commercial master and the colonial master were no longer the same country.
The Great War brought more disruption. German merchants vanished from Singapore. German ships disappeared from the seas. And in February 1915, a regiment of Indian Muslim soldiers mutinied, killing forty British people before being crushed. The British executed forty Indians in return. Thousands watched.
Perry quotes a maritime historian writing in 1914: “The world is on the eve of great things full of great possibilities, probably the greatest being the awakening of the Orient.” Most British people couldn’t see it yet. Complacency ruled. But the shift had already begun.
Singapore would survive all of this and come out stronger on the other side. But the storms ahead would be far worse than anything it had faced so far.
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