By charting the history of the University Socialist Club, this book has offered a new approach to understanding the making of post-colonial Singapore and Malaya. The period has typically been viewed as one of ideological conflict, between the British and nationalists, between the nationalists and communists, between Singapore and Malaysia. It is also one where the necessity of social, economic and political change which the contending parties advocated has been accepted without question, where the “old order” and the “culture” of the masses were held to be not only obsolete but injurious to the making of new states and societies.

What this study has done, rather, is to locate the forces of conflict and change within an ambitious modernist project undertaken after World War II. Using Partha Chatterjee's idea of nationalism as a derivative discourse originating from the post-Enlightenment rationalism, this book frames the various parties involved in the remaking of post-war Singapore and Malaya as tangled strands of modernity – differing in their approaches and methods but agreeing on the basic need to reorder the countries along rationalist-scientific lines into new nation-states. Rather than construct a narrative of contestation between the PAP and its left-wing opponents, this book underlines their shared optimism in the future and their common pursuit of a nationalist modernity. The struggle to establish a new nation-state was largely defined, as T.N. Harper notes, by the Second Malayan Spring experiment from roughly 1953 to 1959. As suggested by the decolonisation thesis advanced by Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, the experiment involved a return to informal empire, commercial priorities and Britain's search for new collaborators who could better serve its interests in the postcolonial era. The Socialist Club, and the left generally, helped facilitate this mission, which was eventually accomplished with the rise and dominance of the PAP.

The Second Malayan Spring permitted the emergence of different groups of politicians and activists with different ideas of modernity and development: liberal-democrats, communalists, Fabian socialists and Marxist socialists. These various groups constituted what some scholars have called “multiple modernities”, a term usually ascribed to non-Western forms of modernity which departed significantly from the Western liberal-democratic type, but which remained distinctively modernist in their optimism towards a better future.