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1931 - 2017
UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND (1957) UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND (1965)
Peter Nicholas Tarling was a historian who specialised in South East Asian history. He was among the growing numbers of historians in western universities who researched and wrote about the eastern Oriental world, a new field in the 1960s.
Professor Tarling was extremely well-loved in Asia and his learned views on Malayan history was always highly valued.
His sudden death in New Zealand was a great loss to the fraternity.
Read the tribute to him printed in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch Royal Asiatic Society.
His contributions to the historical scene in New Zealand are remembered by the University of Auckland.
Tarling wrote some 60 academic studies on the British empire, imperialism in South East Asia and related subjects. He even wrote on opera, a very serious hobby of his. I include a partial but extensive list of his books here.
As of now (2017), I have eight books by Tarling. Let me attempt a blitz historiographical essay on them, in the order that I received and read them.
BLITZ HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
The first book I read was Tarling's Anglo-Dutch Rivalry in the Malay World 1780 - 1824 (1962). It proved a most insightful resource as a basis for my M.A thesis, which was to be on Britain's strategic interests in the Malay world. His book cast the founding of Penang and Singapore as British colonies against the hurried tension with the Dutch during the Napoleonic War years.
The Fall of Imperial Britain in South East Asia (1993) was a broad survey of the British imperial decline in Asia. This was a useful complement to my previous studies on the rise of maritime British power in the early 19th century. From this book, I gained my first lessons on the importance of "collaborators" as the needed social and economic ballast for the empire.
Two other books were acquired in 2001; the first was Imperialism in South East Asia and the second, A Sudden Rampage: The Japanese Occupation of South East Asia 1941 - 45.
The latter book was a sudden jolt to me, as I had long been accustomed to his more Euro-centric writings. None the less, this historiographic move helped shift my observations to appreciating the Asiatic perspective in addition to
the European.
Two books edited by Tarling brought much reading pleasure. His Studying Singapore's Past (2012) was essentially a tribute to the grand dame of Singapore historiography, Constance Mary Turnbull.
The essays examined Turnbull's life and works as her studied evaluations of Singapore history underwent three revisions, reflecting the and evolving and maturing historical understandings of the nation's past.
The second was a compilation of easy-reading autobiographical essays by historians of SEA, titled Historians and their Discipline: The Call of South East Asian History (2001). The main benefit of the collection was a fresh insight into how and why educated young men and women entered the realm of being professional historians.
Imperial Britain in South East Asia (1975) was purchased online. Again a series of previously published papers along the afore-mentioned theme, its scope was wide and focussed on diplomatic history, for which I admittedly now suffered from a waning interest. By this time, my own growing inclination was for narratives of interaction between people, particularly European and Asian.
I was absolutely delighted to find that Volume One of
the Singapore Chronicles, a series of some 50 slim books celebrating Singapore's jubilee was Tarling's Colonial Singapore (2016). I was especially pleased that in a hectic year when "SG50" was everywhere extolled, a noted historian had been approached by an established organisation to chronicle the important century and a half of colonial rule before SG50.
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