Modern enterprises, multiple entanglements : an exploration of Lim Peng Siang’s business career and social activities in colonial Singapore and Fujian (1904 – 1941)

• Main Author: Goh, Jeremy
• Other Authors: Koh Keng We
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Business::General::History; DRNTU::Business::Operations management::Family owned business enterprises; DRNTU::Humanities::History::Asia::China::Chinese overseas; DRNTU::Humanities::History::Asia::Southeastern Asia; DRNTU::Humanities::History::Asia::Singapore
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/73546
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This thesis illustrates the development of Lim Peng Siang’s businesses and philanthropic engagements in colonial Singapore and Fujian. It argues that his enterprises and philanthropy shaped a new form of industrial modernity—characterized by the implementation of modern technology in production, diverse forms of family-based business structures and strategies, as well as the raising of educational standards—in Singapore and Fujian during the early twentieth century. By exploring how Lim’s enterprises supported pre-war industrialization through a myriad of structures and strategies based on the family, this thesis addresses Singapore’s economic and business history, as well as global business history. At the same time. it builds upon the historiography of Overseas Chinese business by incorporating elements from the “culturalist”, “contextual” and cultural entrepreneurship approaches. This thesis is also relevant to the field of world history as Lim’s modernization and industrialization project showed how the colonial spaces of Singapore and Southeast Asia, if not South China, were sites of innovation and change. In doing so, it challenges the idea that these areas were part of a passive periphery in a Wallersteinian world system centered on the industrial economies of northwestern Europe and the United States of America.