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Singapore A FLOURISHING FREE PORT, 1826-67
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Figure 4. Plan of the Town of Singapore by Lieutenant Phillip Jackson, 1828
Source: Based on information from J. Crawfurd, Journal of an
Embassy from the Governor-General of India to the Courts of Siam
and Cochin China, London, 1828, 2, 383.
In the first half-century after its founding, Singapore
grew
from a precarious trading post of the British East India
Company
populated by a few thousand to a bustling, cosmopolitan
seaport of
85,000
(see
fig. 4). Although the general trend of
Singapore's
economic status was upward during this period, the
settlement
endured economic recessions as well as prosperity, fires
and floods
as well as building booms, and bureaucratic incompetence
as well as
able administration. In 1826 the British East India
Company
combined Singapore with Penang and Malacca to form the
Presidency
of the Straits Settlements, with its capital at Penang.
The new
bureaucratic apparatus proved to be expensive and
cumbersome,
however, and in 1830 the Straits Settlements were reduced
to a
residency, or subdivision, of the Presidency of Bengal.
Although
Singapore soon overshadowed the other settlements, Penang
remained
the capital until 1832 and the judicial headquarters until
1856.
The overworked civil service that administered Singapore
remained
about the same size between 1830 and 1867, although the
population
quadrupled during that period. Saddled with the endless
narrative
and statistical reports required by Bengal, few civil
servants had
time to learn the languages or customs of the people they
governed.
Although the European and Asian commercial community
was
reasonably satisfied with the administration of the
settlement
under Bengal, an economic depression in the 1840s caused
some to
consider the merits of Singapore being administered
directly as a
crown colony. The advent of the steamship had made
Singapore less
dependent on Calcutta and more closely tied to the London
commercial and political scene. By mid-century, the parent
firms of
most of Singapore's British-owned merchant houses were
located in
London rather than Calcutta. In 1851, following a visit to
Singapore, Lord Dalhousie, the governor general of India,
separated
the Straits Settlements from Bengal and placed them
directly under
his own charge. In the following sixteen years, a number
of issues
arose that caused increased agitation to remove the
Straits
Settlements completely from administration from India and
place it
directly under the British Colonial Office. Among these
issues were
the need for protection against piracy and Calcutta's
continuing
attempts to levy port duties on Singapore. Mostly as a
result of
the need for a place other than fever-ridden Hong Kong to
station
British troops in Asia, London designated the Straits
Settlements
a crown colony on April 1, 1867.
Data as of December 1989
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