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Rickshaw Coolie: An Exploration of the Underside of a Chinese City outside China, Singapore 1880-1940: Towards an approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Jim Warren
Jim Warren
Affiliation:
School of Social Inquiry, Murdoch University
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Extract

This paper represents the working through of some problems related to the purpose and usefulness of my research in progress on a trilogy on the urban/social history of Singapore with particular reference to the Chinese labouring class. The initial volume is about the life and labour of the rickshawman of Singapore. Rickshaw Coolie examines the origin and development of the rickshaw trade in Singapore; its control and regulation from the standpoint of the Chinese and British; the method of earning a livelihood in rickshaw pulling, and the character of a rickshaw coolie's life. The other two volumes are provisionally titled “The Social Evil: Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Singapore, 1867-1941” and “Chinese Suicide in Singapore, 1883-1939.”

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , July 1984 , pp. 80 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1984

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References

Notes

1. The language of the late Maurice Freedman. Maurice Freedman, The Study of Chinese Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), p. 401.Google Scholar

2. Samuel, Raphael, “Local History and Oral History,” History Workshop, 1 (Spring 1976), p. 202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Ibid.

4. See for example, SingaporeMunicipal Annual Report 1898, p. 102; for 1900, p. 30;Google ScholarIng, Low Ngiong, Chinese Jetsam on a Tropic Shore (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 1974), p. 73Google Scholar.

5. Freedman, The Study of Chinese Society, p. xiii.

6. For a fine discussion of this approach see Chevalier, Louis, Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes inParis During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century(London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 320–350.Google Scholar

7. Castells, Manuel, The Urban Question:A Marxist Approach(Londen: Edward Arnold, 1979), p. x.Google Scholar

8. Samuel, Raphael (editor), People's History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 414.Google Scholar

9. Freedman, The Study of Chinese Society, p. 388; Samuel, People's History, p. 413.

10. Emmerson, Donald K., “Issues in Southeast Asian History: Room for Interpretation - a Review Article,” Journalof Asian Studies, Vol. XL, No. 1 (November, 1980), p. 67.Google Scholar