Britain's Colonial Emergencies and the Invisible Nationalists.

The article discusses Great Britain's colonial emergencies of the forties and fifties. The main objective of Britain's colonial emergencies was to neutralize popular national revolts. Military tactics were a means to realize the political objective of destroying popular nationalism and substituting for it parties of conservative collaborators. For the Colonial Office one of the most disturbing aspects of the emergencies was its lack of advance information or warning about the impending conflict. This was particularly the case in Malaya. The root cause of the Colonial Office's failure to understand the issues raised by the emergencies was its underestimation and lack of understanding of the nationalist challenge. In a general sense the Colonial Office understood that the aspiration for national independence might become a major threat to the Empire, the Colonial Office realized they had to control rising nationalist tensions in the colonies. The Colonial Office took an elitist view of nationalism, which it regarded as a movement of the intelligential or the middle classes: it was moderate, respectable and ready to collaborate with the colonial masters.