Mobility and Modernity in the Urban Transport Systems of Colonial Manila and Singapore

Abstract

Transport motorization is a critical juncture in the history of mobility, yet there is a pressing need to scrutinize and historicize it further, especially in the historiography of Southeast Asia. In this comparative study of the transport histories of early-twentieth-century Manila and Singapore, two colonial urban centers that exhibited the classical metropole-colony dynamics, I argue that the motorization of urban transportation was not simply a process of technological change. The introduction of the electric streetcar and the motor vehicle in the early twentieth century (1900–1941) led not just to the marginalization of other transport modes but also to profound changes in the formation of modern societies and the very idea of modernity. Such changes were accentuated by colonial conditions and the ideological particularities of the late-colonial era, such as the racialist discourse that informed the notion of technological modernism. Adding complexity to society–technology relations was the reality of appropriation, as the colonized began to participate either as conscious consumers or as laborers in providing transport services.