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in a bind. On the one hand, many Malayans felt that old-style colonial retribution could have no further place in a territory where so many – above all the British themselves – had played morally and politically ambivalent roles during the war. Yet equally, the sight of known collaborators and profiteers on the streets alienated popular opinion. Above all, it was the unevenness and inconsistency of British justice that was the source of lasting anger. A sharp distinction emerged between colonial justice and popular justice. As soon as the newspapers began to publish again, denunciations crowded their pages: of the schoolmaster for removing the word ‘Britain’ from textbooks, ‘thereby treating Britain as an enemy’; the arrogant mistresses who had escaped arrest; charges of ‘fawning on the Japanese without shame’; even of pushing a Japanese officers’ car when the engine broke down.102 Reputations were blackened by dark innuendo, and this fed undercurrents of corruption, blackmail and extortion. Men with guilty consciences turned to the triads for protection. As the vengeful fury of the British began to subside, a long, slow internal reckoning was only just beginning, and for many it would never be complete.

3

1945: A Second Colonial Conquest

In 1945 imperialism was down but not out. Japan’s dream of a great East and Southeast Asian empire had been crushed flat in the ruins of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But the British seemed determined to retain a dominant influence in the region. As British armies fanned out across Burma, Malaya, French Indo-China and Indonesia, a more intrusive and authoritarian form of administration seemed to be taking shape in place of the distant paternalism of the old Raj. Yet not all the signs seemed to favour renewed imperialism. A new British Labour government had been voted into office by a landslide as the European war ended in mid 1945. Prime minister Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps, its dominant personalities, had always displayed an interest in India’s independence, or at least dominion status under the British crown. But both men were paternalists rather than liberators, and in the dangerous new world which followed the bomb many of their colleagues believed that a powerful military position in Asia was essential to guarantee Britain’s worldwide security. Clement Attlee personified his party’s awkwardness about imperial authority. In 1945 he made a speech to Americans insisting that British ‘socialists’ were not ‘against freedom’: ‘We in the Labour Party’, he said, ‘declare that we are in line with those who fought for Magna Carta and habeas corpus, with the Pilgrim Fathers and the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.’1 But this freedom was not to be of an untrammelled nature; elsewhere he lamented the fact that ‘man’s material discoveries have outpaced his moral progress’. By implication, most people would benefit from a strong and morally assured guiding hand. Such beliefs flowed from his sense of the injustice of poverty, which far more than any belief in the principles of scientific socialism had drawn him into the Labour Party.

Attlee and his generation were really nineteenth-century Whigs and their colonial policy was conceived in this vein. By no means convinced of the inherent value of territorial empire, they were none the less sure of the doctrine of the white man’s burden. Pondering the possibility that Britain might be forced to take over some of Italy’s colonies after the war, Attlee wrote: ‘Why should it be assumed that only a few Great Powers can be entrusted with backward peoples? Why should not one or other of the Scandinavian countries have a try? They are quite as fitted to bear rule as ourselves. Why not the United States?’2 The even-handedness of this thinking towards Europeans is as striking as its insistence on the category ‘backward peoples’. In a similar exercise of doublethink, Herbert Morrison, the rumbustious foreign secretary, had declared: ‘we have ceased to be an imperialist race’, whilst adding in the same breath that Labour was a great friend