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The Malayan Emergency of 1948–1960 has been scrutinised for 'lessons' about how to win counterinsurgencies from the Vietnam War to twenty-first century Afghanistan. This book brings our understanding of the conflict up to date by interweaving government and insurgent accounts and looking at how they played out at local level. Drawing on oral history, recent memoirs and declassified archival material from the UK and Asia, Karl Hack offers a comprehensive, multi-perspective account of the Malayan Emergency and its impact on Malaysia. He sheds new light on questions about terror and violence against civilians, how insurgency and decolonisation interacted and how revolution was defeated. He considers how government policies such as pressurising villagers, resettlement and winning 'hearts and minds' can be judged from the perspective of insurgents and civilians. This timely book is the first truly multi-perspective and in-depth study of anti-colonial resistance and counterinsurgency in the Malayan Emergency.

This article locates John Darwin’s work on decolonisation within an Oxbridge tradition which portrays a British world system, of which formal empire was but one part, emerging to increasing global dominance from the early nineteenth century. In this mental universe, decolonisation was the mirror image of that expanding global power. According to this point of view, it was not the sloughing off of individual territories, but rather the shrinking away of the system and of the international norms that supported it, until only its ghost remained by the end of the 1960s. The article then asks, echoing the title of Darwin’s Unfinished Empire, whether the decolonisation project is all but complete, or still ongoing. In addition, what is the responsibility of the imperial historian to engage with, inform, or indeed refrain from, contemporary debates that relate to some of these issues? The answer is twofold. On the one hand, the toolkit that the Oxbridge tradition and Darwin provide remains relevant, and also useful in thinking about contemporary issues such as China’s move towards being a global power, the United States’ declining hegemony, and some states and groups desires to rearticulate their relationship with the global. On the other hand, the decline of world systems of power needs to be recognised as just one of several types of, and approaches to, analysing ‘decolonisation’. One which cannot be allowed to ignore or marginalise the study of others, such as experience, first nations issues, the shaping of the postcolonial state, and empire legacies. The article concludes by placing the Oxbridge tradition into a broader typology of types and methodologies of decolonisation, and by asking what a new historiography of decolonisation might look like. It suggests that it would address the Oxbridge concern with the lifecycles of systems of power and their relationship to global changes, but also place them alongside, and in dialogue with, a much broader set of perspectives and analytical approaches.

To understand how empires control ‘hostile’ populations, we need to penetrate below overarching terms such as ‘counter-terror’ and ‘winning hearts and minds’, in order to understand discrete constituent techniques on their own terms. Yet technique lifecycles tend to be inadequately researched. This article examines three key techniques used to control rural Chinese during the Malayan Emergency of 1948–60. Detention, deportation and, to a lesser extent, the better-documented technique of resettlement are tracked across the campaign, individually and for their changing salience in the overall blend of counterinsurgency approaches. This approach demonstrates that the main move for each technique (and for the campaign as a whole) was not so much from counter-terror to ‘winning hearts and minds’, as from collective and poorly targeted to tightly targeted approaches. It also demonstrates how far highly repressive measures, such as large-scale deportation, continued much later into the campaign than previously r...

After the Second World War, in the shadow of the Holocaust, of Japanese maltreatment of POWs and of collective punishment of civilians for nearby partisan activity across occupied Europe, internati...

Over the last two decades there has been an increasing flow of publications on insurgency and counterinsurgency in European empires. This journal, for instance, issued a special edition in September 1993 on ‘Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires after 1945’. Its preface finished by highlighting recurrent themes for further, comparative study, including differing legal structures, subversive security organisation, ‘the grim but recurrent issue of brutality and torture’, and the ‘technical problems of negotiation (including the tricky matter of amnesty …) in order to bring emergencies to a close’. Despite this call to action, comparative studies of these and other ‘recurrent themes’ have remained thin on the ground. Only a relatively narrow range of technical areas have attracted significant academic attention, notably policing, and the nature and limits of attempts to win ‘hearts and minds’. By contrast, the third area that recent events have brought to the fore is less overtly dramatic, often conducted in secret or at least behind closed doors, and so has remained relatively neglected. This other area is ‘negotiation (including the tricky matter of amnesty …) in order to bring emergencies to a close’. Yet from the 1990s onwards, negotiation took centre-stage in Ireland, Iraq and to a lesser extent in Afghanistan. In Northern Ireland, on-off negotiations and posturings throughout the 1990s would culminate, in May 2007, with that former scourge of the IRA (Democratic Unionist Party leader Ian Paisley), becoming First Minister with an ex-IRA commander (Martin McGuiness) as his Deputy Minister. In Iraq, the decisive moment came in 2006 when local Sunni tribes formed the ‘Anbar Awakening’, and took sides with that country’s government. In Afghanistan, key players increasingly sought to talk to Taliban and tribal leaders, after fighting flared up again from 2003. In all these cases, there was and is a complex colonial past, and past examples of negotiating tactics, which informed events. In each case, Britain as an imperial and colonising power was implicated in that past, which provided a repertoire of negotiating tactics, and a legacy of memories and prejudices for all sides. There is, therefore, a real justification for looking at colonial examples of ‘negotiating with the enemy’.

This article looks at one of the best documented examples of negotiations with insurgents in a British colonial territory: the Baling Talks of 28–29 December 1955. At these, the Malayan Communist Party Secretary-General, Chin Peng, attempted to negotiate an end to the Malayan Emergency. It examines how the communist leadership came to desire negotiations over the period 1954–56, how it viewed them, and on what terms they might have succeeded. It also seeks to understand the British perspective. It shows how, for the British, these one-off negotiations have to be understood in relation to a wider British ‘persuasive’ strategy. Finally, the paper shows why the attitudes and interests of the British and host nation politicians meant that the 1955 talks were doomed to fail.

How and when did the Cold War manifest itself in Southeast Asia? More particularly, how are we to understand the connections between global great power rivalry and the specific regional problems and tensions which marked Southeast Asia in the five years after the end of the Second World War? What were the connections, if any, between the global powers and the nascent political forces of the region during this period? These are some of the issues which the five contributors to this collection address as they explore the origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War. These contributions challenge existing interpretations of the origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War. They employ new evidence gleaned from party archives and memoirs, and from Soviet, British, Australian, Dutch, Indonesian and Vietnamese state archives. They use this evidence to suggest that Southeast Asian communist parties, far from being totally autonomous on the one hand, or pliant tools of larger powers on the other, interacted with changing international communist lines as proactive agents. This interaction is the key to understanding why a regional pattern of increasing violence, and of decreasing cooperation with non-communist parties and democratic politics, emerged in 1948; while also allowing us to understand the uniqueness of the individual parties' paths to revolution. Discussion of the origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War inevitably involves examination of the policies pursued by the colonial powers returning to the region post-World War II, their relations with the great powers, as well as the agendas pursued by the local nationalist forces and communist parties of the region. One of the key issues which has exercised scholars minds in this area has been the switch to armed conflict by communist parties in 1948. The switch was rapid. In 1947 communist parties in this region were generally engaged in broad united fronts, and with the exceptions of China and Indochina, were mostly committed to participation in open political activity and trade union work. Then, in 1948 almost every regional communist party abandoned the broad united front policy and the emphasis on trade union work and legal political activity, and began pursuing a policy of armed revolt. Communist revolts occurred in India, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia and the Philippines in this year, and there were key changes to communist party policy in Indochina. Not surprisingly, people have long asked: Was this a calculated policy of extending the Cold War in Europe to a new front? It is suggested both here and in the papers comprising this collection that existing answers to this question, and explanations of this change, have failed to fully capture the complex interactions between international and local communisms, offering instead 'one hand clapping' explanations which emphasise either international directives, or very local and national factors. Orthodox Cold War historiography held that Moscow issued instructions, which were disseminated at two 1948 conferences held at Calcutta in India: the South East Asia Youth and Student Conference hosted by the World Federation of Democratic Youth, a Moscow-controlled movement (19-24 February 1948); and the Second Congress of the Indian Communist Party (28 February-6 March). According to the orthodox interpretations written in the late 1940s to 1950s, these instructions sparked revolts in the following few months of 1948. (1) Revisionist scholarship soon challenged the orthodox position. By the late 1950s, some academics were already arguing that there had been no clear instructions from Moscow, that the Calcutta Conferences were of debateable significance, and that the revolts were above all locally motivated and uncoordinated. The classic expression of this line was Ruth McVey's The Calcutta Conference and the South-East Asia uprisings. (2) This re-examined the impact of the 'two camp' line being promoted by Moscow and the newly formed Cominform in late 1947 to 1948. …

The Malayan Emergency of 1948–60 has been repeatedly cited as a source of counter-insurgency lessons, with debate over the relative importance of coercion, ‘winning hearts and minds’, and achieving unified and dynamic control. This paper argues that all these techniques and more were important, but that their weight varied dramatically across quite distinct campaign phases. The conclusions include that effective counter-insurgency analysis must integrate cognition of such phases (there must be different ‘lessons’ for different phases); and that in the Malayan case rapid build-up of barely trained local as well as extraneous forces, and the achievement of area and population security, were key to turning around the campaign in the most intense phase. While persuasive techniques were always present, ‘winning hearts’ came to the fore more in the later optimisation phase.

Colonial armies are often studied as microcosms of imperial power and society. This paper makes the case for looking at local defence contributions in wider terms as well: as reflections of a colony's place within a system of world power. It argues that different types of colony played different roles in Britain's system of world power, producing different kinds of security. Hence, while maritime South East Asia at first appears to be a mere appendage to the Indian Raj, and a mere consumer of defence, it shows that the area also played a crucial role in supporting the wider system. The paper then suggests that such a broad conceptualization of colonial defence can be the starting point for integrating colonial army historiography with other, overlapping historiographical traditions. In this case, it means asking questions about the overlap between the themes of colonial armies, the world system of power of each empire, decolonization and regional developments.

This chapter asks how far ‘colonial transitioning’ can provide insights for contemporary conflicts. It demonstrates how ‘transitioning’ in the Malayan Emergency of 1948–60 was deep-rooted, with key activities such as building elections from local level upwards, and the creation of a strong ethos for local forces, took place across and beyond counterinsurgency (COIN) phases. It also shows how smooth transitioning was predicated on COIN control having been intertwined with military–civilian committees throughout. This, and the posting of British as employed or seconded local staff, avoided COIN being an alien accretion, and allowed the gradual localization of those posts initially controlled by British civil, military, and police officials. Rather than suggesting colonial case studies as too alien to modern conditions, the Malayan example offers a distinct paradigm of long-term COIN implementation and transitioning, in which the assisting power embeds into and then eases out of the host nation’s structures.

This chapter reflects on a number of approaches to explain the persistence of crises and their links to the colonial and decolonizing eras. These include historical and political science modes of analysis. A major part of the challenge of decolonization was precisely that colonial societies had many layers of identity - peasant, class, ethnic, religious, regional - that were not in the first place 'national', and often resisted subjection to the leadership of postcolonial as well as colonial elites. Some regional states never really overcame the legacies of fractured identities, of colonization, and of Japanese occupation, continuing to rely on high levels of coercion to enforce state authority, as in New Order Indonesia and in Burma/Myanmar. One central Southeast Asian problem of decolonization and in reaching a 'postcolonial state' remains that of identity management in nation's states.Keywords: Burma; decolonization; identity management; New Order Indonesia; Southeast Asian problem; state authority

Contending with Nationalism and Communism: British Policy Towards Southeast Asia, 1945–65 Peter Lowe London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 xii+312 pp., ISBN: 978-0-230-52123-0 (£55.00 hardback) Peter Lo...