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Around such observances, the elites of Malaya began to close ranks. The previous October the wealthy towkays in the Chinese Chambers of Commerce had opposed the new constitution and supported a mass hartal. Gent was afraid that, with Malay feelings running so high, any further protests when the Federation came into effect on 1 February might result in racial war. He armed himself with a bill to outlaw hartals: it was, in effect, a ‘shoot to kill’ ordinance. There were plans afoot to arrest the leaders of the protest movement, including the head of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Malaya’s ‘rubber and pineapple king’, Lee Kong Chian. But the Governor General, Malcolm MacDonald, thought this a ‘serious political mistake’.3 He drew on all his diplomatic skills to talk the towkays round. In private, both Lee Kong Chian and Tan Cheng Lock, the hartal’s figurehead, now baulked at the many-headed hydra of popular protest. They feared that any breakdown in Sino-Malay relations might prove irretrievable. They had gone as far as they would go. As a compromise, they agreed to supply placemen to serve on the new Federal Legislative Council; one of them was Tan Cheng Lock’s son, Tan Siew Sin.4 The broadest-based political movement in Malaya’s history had dissolved. The left was deeply disillusioned. On 1 February, as Gent was sworn in as the first High Commissioner of the Federation of Malaya at Kuala Lumpur, within earshot of the artillery salute, the Malayan Communist Party met in secret to discuss the possibility of armed revolt.

The Federation left the Malay rulers sovereign and the States’ elite entrenched in federal bureaucracies. Their powers over land and appointments were considerable: British advisers to the Malay courts complained that government files were withheld from them.5 This was less a step to self-government than a return to the time-honoured tug-of-war of indirect rule. But Britain at least controlled a strengthened central government. As the voice of middle-class Asian opinion, the Malaya Tribune, put it, the Federation was a ‘gentlemen’s agreement under which the Malays are granted certain privileges on the understanding that they will leave all real authority in the hands of British bureaucracy’.6 British Southeast Asia seemed extraordinarily resilient, and it was more valuable to Britain than ever before. In 1938 Malaya had accounted for 2.57 per cent of Britain’s world trade; by 1951, this would rise to 9.9 per cent and the figure for Southeast Asia as a whole would be 11.36 per cent. Malaya remained the world’s top producer of rubber, which brought $120m into the sterling area in 1948; the nearest commodity in value was cocoa at $50m. In 1948 the sterling area suffered an overall dollar deficit of $1,800m, but Malaya’s surplus was $170m. Its nearest competitors were the Gold Coast, with a surplus of $47.5 m, Gambia ($24.5 m) and Ceylon ($23m). But, at the end of the year, Ceylon’s contribution was lost. By 1952 – 3 Malaya was providing 35.26 per cent of Britain’s net balance of payments with the dollar area.7 The first British settlements in the region were founded in the wake of the fall of the first British empire of the Atlantic. Now a third British empire seemed to be emerging out of the loss of India and Burma. Soothsaying for his masters in Whitehall, W. Linehan, a senior scholar-administrator in the Malayan Civil Service, concluded that the prospect of the rise of a strong independence movement in Malaya ‘within the next generation or so, appears exceedingly remote’.8

At the epicentre of British Southeast Asia was the new Commissioner General, Malcolm MacDonald, with his bustling court of political, economic, military and financial advisers at Phoenix Park in Singapore. He was, in the words of one Singapore civil servant, ‘an influence that was pervasive yet without power’.9 MacDonald acted as the political impresario of British imperialism in the region. He remained convinced that