Globalising the History of Singapore

World studies, which are more commonly referred to now as global studies, have become an increasingly important field of study, both in the social sciences and humanities since the early 1970s. Beginning with discussions among economists and political scientists who sought to reconceptualise distributive and interactive dynamics between states and societies located in different parts of the world at the height of the Cold War, the boundaries of global studies have since widened as they gained the attention of geographers and sociologists in the final decades of the twentieth century. Their contribution to the institutionalisation of global studies in academia has mainly involved fresh approaches that enhance our understanding of the often unequal relationships between developed and developing countries. Keywords such as “interactive zones”, “world systems” and “free markets” have become indispensable in any discussion about the world as a whole. The justification for the need to develop new vocabularies, promulgate new generalisations and invent new methodologies lay primarily in the assumption that humankind was facing “globality” and “globalisation”, a condition and a process whereby traditional boundaries of space, knowledge and power are broken down, compressed, and intensified, by the advancement of information and transportation technology.