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ID:
073068
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Publication |
2006.
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Summary/Abstract |
This paper looks at life in Singapore during the Great Depression in the early 1930s from the perspectives of the ordinary people who lived through it. Besides discussing the slump's impact on businesses, wages and employment, it examines how effectively people responded to the crisis. Their distress was alleviated by immigration controls and a fall in the cost of living at the societal level, and also by mutual help, based on family and kinship ties, at the individual level. It appears that life for many people was not as difficult as might be supposed. The quality of life, reflected in indices such as mortality and crime, seemed generally satisfactory after 1930, while the island was also spared serious social and political upheaval.
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2 |
ID:
090706
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Publication |
2009.
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Summary/Abstract |
An important but little-studied act in the history of postwar Singapore was played out at the margins of the city. Here, the state was involved in a major campaign to socialise the 'squatters' of urban kampong into citizens of a high modernist state. The fire hazard in these settlements also contributed significantly to the process, as the residents were mobilised into fire-fighting squads and politicians acted on behalf of the victims of infernos by rehousing them in emergency public housing. This article proposes a new approach to postwar Singapore historiography at the interface between politics and social developments. It underlines the social agents, spatial dimension and historical continuity uncovered in the venture.
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