Singapore is a small island measuring about 710 square kilometres at the southern tip of the Malaysian Peninsula. Yet its small size belies a complex historiography. Indeed, history itself became a subject of contention in the 1960s and ‘70s, when

It was only in 1984 that a two-volume textbook titled The Social and Economic History of Singapore was issued to schools. The volumes, like C. M. Turnbull's seminal A History of Modern Singapore, trace the history of modern Singapore back to its founding by Sir Stamford Raffles, who established it as a trading post for the British Empire. Turnbull's work became the basis of the state-sanctioned official historical narrative, the Singapore Story. This narrative was publicly presented in an audio-visual show in 1997, called “The Singapore Story’, and later made into a video screened at the then Singapore History Museum from 1997 to 2003. This Singapore Story was also included in the National Education Programme launched by the Ministry of Education in 1997. The purpose of National Education is

According to Karl Hack and Jean-Louis Margoulin, the Story ‘reached its apotheosis’ in Lee Kuan Yew's books published thereafter: The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew and From Third World to First: The Singapore Story.