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By Root 4487 0

India until 1936, and although the predominant Burmese population of the lowlands was governed on a Raj model, the ethnic minorities of its hill regions enjoyed a good deal of autonomy. British Malaya was a cluster of Islamic sultanates; there was no central government as such: British rule rested on the treaties of ‘protection’ that had been signed with Malay rulers from 1874 to 1914. The British governed, but they did not, strictly speaking, rule. The Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang and Malacca were older outposts of the islands: models of Anglo-Saxon municipal management with oriental trappings. To all this the war gave a flaking veneer of coherence. If there was an ‘imperial system’ it really functioned only in wartime: men and materiel were mobilized across the crescent: Indian soldiers for the garrisons of Malaya, Chinese labourers for the Burma Road that supplied Chiang Kai Shek’s war effort. But in Malaya, the mobilization and the defeats of 1941 and 1942 exposed all the inadequacies of an administration that was ‘more suited to the days of Clive’.20 The final, squalid exodus from Singapore laid bare the complacency and racial arrogance of its colonial masters. When the city fell on 15 February 1942, General Yamashita Tomoyuki’s armies shattered the myth of white invulnerability, and broke the mandate of ‘protection’.

This loss was catastrophic to Britain’s global prestige and material strength. As India became a drain on the domestic balance of payments, Southeast Asia had emerged as one of the Empire’s prize assets. The region exported two-thirds of the world’s tin, and British Malaya alone provided half the world’s production of rubber. Most of it passed through the port of Singapore. These industrial colonies were a major buttress of the sterling area: before the war, rubber exports to the USA were running at $118 million a year; tin, another $55 million.21 Even Burma, although something of backwater, had oil and rich reserves of timber, and its export economy was intimately tied to the rest of the crescent. The frontier economies of Southeast Asia were dependent on the food production of the basins of the great river systems of the mainland, particularly the 3.7 million tons of padi exported annually from the Irrawaddy delta: Burma was the rice bowl of Malaya.22 Japan’s blitzkrieg to the south in 1941 had as its principal target the oilfields of British Borneo and Sumatra, and the iron and bauxite mines of Malaya. The assault on Burma and India was dictated by the need to throttle the supply route over the ‘hump’ of northern Burma to Yunan in China. The economic resources of Southeast Asia were seen by Britain as so vital to its domestic recovery that it was willing to expend an unprecedented amount of blood and treasure in its reconquest.

The Japanese had sought to impose their vision upon the crescent by incorporating it, with their other conquered territories, in a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was a dream of a new Asian cosmological order, with Japan at its political and economic core. This vision left a powerful legacy in the minds of all who were exposed to it. However, the Japanese conquest states were hamstrung by conflicts between officials, chiefly men of a civilian background who wanted to give substance to Japan’s dream of ‘Asia for the Asians’, and military commanders who saw only the imperatives of the war effort. Japan did not manage to make its colonies serve its economic needs. A brief phase of constructive imperialism in 1942 soon gave way to the politics of scarcity and plunder. Japan’s military ascendancy was short lived, and the resurgence of Allied naval power after the Battle of Midway in mid 1942 meant that strategic goods from Southeast Asia could not be shipped back to Japan in any meaningful quantity. The great rubber estates of Malaya became virtual wastelands in which the remaining labourers scraped a subsistence by growing food on roughly cleared ground. The campaigns in Burma left behind large regions of scorched earth. When rice exports from Burma and