Goh Keng Swee: A Legacy Of Public Service

Dr. Goh Keng Swee's extensive career as a public servant was dynamic as well as distinguished, in many ways decisively instrumental in the making of the Republic of Singapore. This distinctive collection of essays attempts an assessment of the long-term influence and significance of Dr. Goh's major contributions.

Envisaged as a companion volume to Goh Keng Swee: A Public Career Remembered, this volume brings together an exceptional team of Singaporean scholars whose interdisciplinary expertise and cross-generational perspectives offer a balanced analysis and nuanced appraisal of Dr. Goh's lifetime of public service. The book's contributors argue that Dr. Goh's past endeavours bequeathed an enduring legacy, meriting fresh examination and careful evaluation in order to appreciate the heroic scale of such achievement.

Particularly instructive are the examples of Dr. Goh's thinking patriotism, fiscal prudence, strategic pragmatism, and creative imagination at work -- technocracy at its finest -- which could be of immediate, practical benefit to a wider nation of technocrats . Further illumination comes from the insights of those contributors who had worked with the former Deputy Prime Minister and knew him personally. For a half-century that witnessed key turning points and phases of development in Singapore's transformation from colonial port city to independent global city, Dr. Goh played a leading role in the crafting and conduct of public policy, as with the creation of public institutions, which made the difference between survival and success.

The organization of this volume reflects both a thematic approach and a chronological arrangement of material, the focus and the order of chapters corresponding to the historical sequence of public offices that Dr. Goh held: social welfare; political and constitutional evolution; development economics and finance; the armed forces and defence industry; the education system, from schools through higher education to the research institutes; Chinese studies, from Confucianism to China watching ; and cultural development, with special emphasis on the creation of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.

Goh Keng Swee: A Legacy of Public Service will be read by present and future generations of public servants, by Singaporeans in general, and by all students and laypersons with an interest in the modern history of Singapore -- social, economic, political, military, and cultural -- to which a characteristically simple and frugal Dr. Goh contributed both decisively and unreservedly.

Emrys Chew, M.A., Ph.D. (Cambridge), is Assistant Professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has taught undergraduate courses on imperialism and nationalism at the University of Cambridge, and now teaches postgraduate courses at RSIS on the international history of Asia and the evolution of strategic thought. He has also served as advisor to the History Curriculum Development Committee at Singapore's Ministry of Education. His current research focuses on the interconnections between Asian and global history, with particular emphasis on the cross-cultural networks and exchanges that would transform warfare andstrategy.

Kwa Chong Guan, B.A. Hons. (University of Singapore), M.A. (Kent), is Head of External Programmes, S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, and Co-Chair of Singapore's National Committee of the Council for Security Co-operation in the Asia-Pacific. He is also Adjunct Associate Professor at the Department of History, National University of Singapore. Formerly Director of the Oral History Centre (1985 to 1994), he has extensive experience in the field of oral history and has published and spoken widely on the subject. His research interests include the heuristics of Asian security practice, the making of Asian military history, Singapore historiography, and Southeast Asian art history.