The Pearl of the Indies
Curtailed as her ambitions in Europe may have been, Britain had not exited the Napoleonic Wars entirely empty handed, demanding the retention of the East Indies from the Netherlands as their price at Aix (and returning what was thought of as a worthless waystation in South Africa to the Dutch as compensation), and from that arrangement Britain's economy recovery in the late 1810s was aided by the lucrative trade of the Malayas which the Dutch had enjoyed; this filled the East India Company's coffers and helped stabilize the realm's increasingly shaky and unsustainable finances in the short term, but also meant that a new understanding of their Oriental domains was necessary.
The founding of Singapore thus represented one of the most crucial episodes of the "Third" British Empire, so denoted as it followed the First (which ended in 1776) and Second (1815) iterations of British power both in North America and in European affairs. The island lay at the very southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, owned by the nearby Sultanate of Johor, and had for years been seen by the local Malays as something of an afterthought and backwater; indeed, it was marshy and disease-ridden. For EIC official Sir Stamford Raffles, however, there was a tremendous amount of potential for a Royal Navy port sited "betwixt Bengal and Batavia" and after the conclusion of the EIC's intervention in a Johori dynastic struggle, the island in its entirety was transferred to British control and Singapore became the third British possession on the Peninsula, after the small outposts at Penang and Malacca.
Singapore's strategic placement was considerable. It lay at what today we know as one of the world's most important strategic chokepoints along the Strait of Malacca, and thus it controlled essentially all trade between India, China and Java - and, thus, all trade between Europe and East Asia. With Britain having seen setbacks in India in the years prior to Singapore, it proved an absolutely crucial ground for launching pacification missions in Sumatra and Java, where Dutch authority's evaporation had left many local fiefdoms and sultanates restive, and Indian mercenaries were imported to Singapore to keep the peace throughout the rest of the 1820s as the city grew rapidly.
Indeed, Singapore in the 1820s and 1830s - with only a brief interruption during the Great Unrest - was probably one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Within less than a generation, Raffles' waystation had become the "Pearl of the Indies," Britain's most critical overseas port and one of the most thriving trade entrepots on earth. Merchants from every European state, from the Americas, and all across Asia, India and the Near East consolidated there in a buzzing polyglot city, all lying under the watchful eye of Royal Navy cutters which maintained it as the base of the Far East Station, before long the most prestigious command after the Mediterranean. In a sense, the revenues of Singapore had helped rescue the revenues of the British overseas empire, and made the East Indies among the most lucrative colonial possessions on earth with full advantage taken of their proximity to China, India, and other British possessions...
