Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [6]
This book is the story of the first and most intense period of the birth pangs of this new Asian world. It concentrates particularly on the great crescent of territory between eastern India and Singapore which had once been the commercial heart of Britain’s Asian empire and which a revived and self-consciously ‘constructive’ British Empire now wished to reclaim as its own. The book focuses on the years between 1945 and 1949 and is a sequel to our earlier work, Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (Allen Lane, 2004). British troops, including a large contingent of Indian and African soldiers, poured into Burma from northeastern India, reversing the humiliating defeat which they had suffered at Japanese hands three years earlier. The British went on to occupy Thailand, much of the former French Indo-China and Dutch Indonesia, ostensibly in order to disarm the Japanese. But this revivified British Empire attempted to recreate itself in conditions vastly different from those that had prevailed a few years earlier. The British now faced a variety of powerful, armed and embittered nationalist leaderships determined to claim immediate independence.
Forgotten Wars tells the story of how Burmese resistance and the collapse of the British Raj in India brought Burma to independence in 1948, but how that independence was corroded by inter-ethnic conflict and the irresistible rise of the Burmese army which remains dominant in the country today. It shows how Britain was able to maintain its grip in Malaya and Singapore only because it garnered and received the support of conservative Malay and Chinese leaderships which feared the powerful Malayan Communist Party whose cadres Britain itself had helped to arm during the conflict with Japan. It charts the beginning of the long Indo-China war which culminated in the American defeat in southern Vietnam in 1975 and the bloody and little-understood lurch towards Indonesian independence after the fall of Japan. In the process, the book analyses the emergence of the Cold War in Asia. To the north of the region, China became a communist monolith. To the east, North Vietnam seized independence from the French. But to the south, Britain’s rigorous campaign of counter-insurgency against the Malayan communists determined that the future states of Singapore and Malaysia would remain pro-Western and capitalist. These events sowed some of the seeds of East Asia’s great economic miracle which was to blossom in the 1990s. Meanwhile, Burma took a unique road to isolation and stagnation as its leaders battled both communist insurgency and the demands of minority peoples for autonomy.
This book describes the struggles of proconsuls, colonial military commanders and nationalist leaders. But, like Forgotten Armies, it also tells the story of many ordinary people, both Asian and British, who were swept up in the violence of insurgency and counter-insurgency, communal rioting and renewed economic privation. The four years after the fall of Japan were Asia’s time of revolution. Amid the turmoil, people still looked forward to an age of plenty when they would ‘dance among showers of gold and silver’, according to a Burmese verse. This bright future was still long decades away in the year 1949. Many people are still waiting.
In writing this book we have accumulated