52.2 HISTORIOGRAPHY which he found in the storeroom of a subordinate court. A passion for a forgotten past of people who have stood outside history and recovery of a whole set of social relations have been a central preoccupation running through my work, Warren wrote. The book, part of a trilogy on the road to completion, he hoped would 'con tribute to a revision of South-East Asian Modern History, and to the notion of, what is "historical",40 But he did not integrate his history with the 'national' history of "' 40 Singapore he placed his people's history, as it were, alongside Nor, in Hong Lysa's view, did he succe ed in giving a history back to the coolies; he ironically ends up stereotyping them as helpless victims of circumstances... In fact, they did fashion their own forms of submission, resistance or adaptation. Warren's tendency, she suggests, was to romanticize the rickshaw coolies, thence to stress his empathy with them and his role in giving them a history."Though rather cruelly put, the remark 41 points to a danger in history from below.