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Singapore: Unlikely Power, by John Curtis Perry. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 329.
There is a trend now in British politics where a succession of their politicians seem to proffer the Singapore model - however vaguely it is described and whatever it may be to each one of them - as the all-encompassing alternative to whatever the status quo is. Be it during the referendums determining Scotland's place in the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom's place in the European Union or the recent general elections, the city-state's status as an economic powerhouse in Asia has earned admirers across all political stripes in its former colonial master. In fact, a recent article in Bloomberg News sought to demystify the United Kingdom's "strange Singapore envy".
It is in that spirit perhaps that John Curtis Perry's book Singapore: Unlikely Power should be savoured. Professor Perry, an eminent maritime historian of East Asia, who in 2015 retired following a long and distinguished career as professor of East Asian and Maritime Studies at the renowned Fletcher School of Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, has shifted his attention away from his usual intellectual stomping grounds in Northeast Asia to delve deeper into this quintessential definition of a maritime citystate at the heart of Southeast Asia. With the...