• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Chinese peasants being arrested by Malay policemen, April 1949

Dyak trackers in Malaya, c. 1949

The Sultan expects: the ruler of Selangor inspects Malay special constables on a rubber estate, 1949

Hearts and minds: a propaganda leaflet drop, 1948

Imperial twilight: drinks party at Malcolm MacDonald’s residence, Bukit Serene, 1949

Fighting during the Karen insurgency, 1949

The quiet man: Ne Win (left) in London for military training, 1949

The man with the plan: Templer with the Home Guard, Kinta, 1952

Bandung spirits: Nasser, Nu and Nehru celebrating the Burmese Water Festival, 1955

Chin Peng at Baling, December 1955, with his old Force 136 ally, John Davis.

Epilogue: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire

In 2007, as the ‘Asian century’ begins and the economies of the crescent from India to Singapore are booming, it is difficult to imagine the scale of suffering and conflict that occurred during and after the Second World War in Asia. For much of the region, August 1945 was at best a hiatus in the fighting, and for many people the worst was yet to come. The continuing toll remained heaviest on civilians; the number of deaths from war-related famine in India, Indo-China and south China alone was close to 6 million. Millions more were driven from their homes and countries during the war and the numerous petty but lethal conflicts that surged on for decades in its aftermath. With the fall of Japan, the Great Asian War entered a new phase: it became a struggle against Western imperialism and its allies; a war for national freedom and for a new ordering of society. What gave the years from 1945 to 1949 their peculiar epochal quality was a sense of being part of a great acceleration in time, of living at a moment of unprecedented change. The days of Japanese occupation had a millennial edge to them; but any promise of peace and righteousness was soon destroyed by repression, exploitation and hunger. The fall of Japan came when many societies were at their lowest ebb: battle scarred, battle hardened, at war with one another. But as the Malay radical Mustapha Hussain had earlier reflected, ‘although the Japanese Occupation was described as one of severe hardship and brutality, it left something positive, a sweet fruit to be plucked and enjoyed only after the surrender’.1 Now history seemed open, at a juncture when the peoples of colonial Asia could shape their own future as they had not been able to do within living memory.

As the British sought to regain their Asian empire, they were confronted by myriad mutinies against old patterns of authority. This was Asia’s revolutionary moment when many previously disempowered groups in society – women, the young, workers and peasants – took the political initiative, for a time, as they tried to rebuild their communities, salvage their livelihoods and regain their dignity. They joined movements that were fired by radical ideologies – social democracy, religious revival, Marxism and Maoism – and these doctrines reacted with each other in a dangerous alchemy. It was, to use the phraseology of the Indonesian pergerakan, or movement, an age in motion, a world upside-down. New leaders addressed an often bewildered people in exhilarating new language. In the words of the Malay radicals:

The People’s Constitution of PUTERA is based on elections, kedaulatan rakyat [sovereignty of the people], and moves towards social justice, and egalitarianism, without upper and lower classes in the bangsa [nation] except according to the capability, intelligence and industry of the individual. We hope in this matter the rakyat no longer have any doubts, but instead have more faith in the struggle and loyalty to their respective movements. Because of this we appeal once more, struggle onwards with a fiery spirit, but with a cool head until the sacred aims that we aspire to are achieved. Remember, comrades, that the world is changing fast and we cannot live with the understandings and feelings that we had in the year 1941. We are now in the year 1947 in the