Singapore became an independent city-state in 1965; since then, Singapore has presented itself as an island that has made the world its hinterland through its position as a container port, logistics hub, and financial centre. Singaporean nationalist narratives, collectively known as the Singapore Story, have claimed that it was Singapore’s openness to trade dating from the establishment of the British East India Company trading depot in 1819 through to its aspirations as a ‘global city’ under the post-colonial People’s Action Party government that made the city exceptional and allowed it to survive in a hostile region. These narratives simultaneously bind Singapore to the region of Southeast Asia as its foil and obscure Singapore’s history as a port in the Malay World. Other geographical imaginings and transnational histories are either forgotten, flattened, or co-opted by these nationalist narratives in an attempt to make hegemonic the geography of the global city. In response to the Singapore Story, this paper traces and untangles these other imaginings and histories by showing the amnesia required to make Singapore a so-called free port in 1819 and how a focus on Indian Ocean geographies reveals how Singapore was not exceptional but one in a chain of ports that were made to become hubs of intensified networks of labour and capital.