Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

by Caroline Elkins

Yet as army members like Ho took in the RAF aircraft “flying demonstration sorties” and listened to “God Save the King,” they were reminded of their subjecthood. Ho and his compatriots wondered what their three years of grueling jungle life and resistance to Japan’s occupation had done for them.

Returning to the barracks, he recalled that the former guerrillas “surrendered their weapons by throwing them into a heap as if they were old brooms,” after which they burned their copies of Messervy...

“Of what use were the showy flashes, ribbons and campaign medals to us now ...

the Japanese put to death his countrymen or marched them off to prison camps, he and six friends heard the Communists’ resistance message, spreading in cover-of-darkness meetings, and decided to join the movement. In the face of looming Japanese oppression, the Communists’ message transcended ideology and spoke to Ho.

He and his friends soon entered the underground, having gathered tommy guns and cartridges from Australian soldiers killed in action, and bicycled their way by night toward the jungle’s edge. With the support of other civilians who fed and protected them, Ho and his companions reached the guerrilla camp of the incipient Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army.[90]

Behind enemy lines in Malaya’s dense jungles, a disparate group converged. Among the four thousand men and women were Chinese Communists, townsfolk, and triage nurse Anthony Daniels, who had survived the last-stand effort against Yamashita’s army in Singapore. Together with men and women like Ho, they comprised eight regionally divided regiments, spearheaded and controlled by the Malayan Communist Party.

the party’s general secretary, Lai Teck, also known as “Mr. Wright,” who was Britain’s most valuable double agent in Malaya.

Chin Peng, the party’s second-in-command, was not in Britain’s hip pocket, but the war created allies overnight, and Chin proved himself “Britain’s most trusted guerrilla fighter,” accordin...

There another British officer declared these men “probably the best material we had ever had at the School” and lauded “the rank and file” with whom he fought alongside in the jungles as “absolutely magnificent.”

Force 136 also offered the guerrillas logistical support in their hit-and-run efforts against the Japanese. But it was the Chinese civilian resistance that proffered some of the most crucial aid.

The Sook Ching (purification by elimination) Operation that took place after Singapore’s fall offered a preview of what was to come for those whom the British had left behind in the region. It claimed the lives of 25,000 to 50,000 Chinese whom the Japanese first indiscriminately screened for antifascist sentiments before killing them, often in the most brutal of ways.[93]

The Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army worked assiduously to cultivate ideological and material support from the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese who had fled the urban areas and lived as s...

With Japanese occupation, the mass exodus to the jungle’s periphery saw squatter numbers reach four hundred thousand.[94]

Many of them constituted a front organization known as the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Union.

provided Chin Peng’s men with an extensive underground network of supporters who offered food, clothing, funds, weapons, intellig...

Chin Peng’s followers were anti-imperialist, whether the foreign rule be Asian or European. After the Second World War, the British military high command initially brushed aside the Malayan army’s vital contributions to Allied victory in the East. The guerrillas, for their part, emerged

from their encampments and unleashed a new form of terror on suspected Japanese collaborators—or “running dogs,” as the Communists termed them. Kangaroo courts tried them, and angry mobs took over the region with vigilante justice. Distinctions between criminality and ideology blurred. The civil conflict was precisely the pretext that the British Military Administration needed to reassert colonial control in Malaya with its own form of liberal imperial harshness.[96]

January 6, 1946, two months after Ho’s passing-out ritual in Alor Star, Supreme Allied Commander Louis Mountbatten—who, as we’ve seen, would oversee India during the Raj’s...

It marked an end, as well as an ill-fated beginning. Shifting from their earlier dismissive course, British officials put Chin Peng and seven other Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army leaders up in Singapore’s Raffles Hotel. They wined and dined the wartime guerrillas before the supremo himself awarded each of them with the Burma Star and the 1939/45 Star. With crowds and photographers there to bear witness, the event was a resplendent a...

military dress, represented the king and the empire. But rather than symbolically kissing the imperial ring with a formal salute, all eight men stood before Mountbatten with their clenched fists straight in the air. Whatever goodwill mig...

Malaya in 1945

Two and a half years later, when the Chinese Communists took out the three European planters in cold blood, it took many by surprise, including Chin Peng and High Commissioner Edward Gent.

The territory was 465 miles long, about the size of England, and geographically, politically, and ethnically divided. Separating the South China Sea from the Bay of Bengal, the Malay Peninsula was home to mountains covered in a sweltering jungle that cut through the territory’s middle from north to south, blanketing nearly 75 percent of it.

Along the coastline, plains were home to vast estates, mines, and semihabitable jungle fringes. British rule was a hodgepodge of political units. Malay sultans governed nine protectorates and Britain directly ruled Singapore as well as Penang and Malacca, which were crown colonies and collectively known as the Straits Settlements.

In April 1946, Britain combined the nine Malayan protectorates and the Straits Settlements into a single political entity, the Malayan Union, while leaving Singapore as a separate crown colony. It was a British attempt ...

It also sought to circumscribe the sultans’ influence by centralizing the power of the Malay states and Malacca and Penang into a single, directly ruled British entity. Britain also sought to confer “Malayan Union Citizenship,” a distinct common citizenship status, on all locally born Chinese and Indians, who would join the Malay population already holding citizenship claims bestowed by the sultans. The newly formed United Malays National Organisation, comprised almost entirely of Malays, rebuffed British plans. For the organization’s members, Britain was violating the inviolable: the nominal sovereignty of Malay rulers and the privileges

of their constituents that extended back to the eighteenth century.[98]

Of the 5 million people who inhabited Malaya and Singapore after the Second World War, Malays comprised 50 percent of the population, Chinese made up 38 percent, and a religiously diverse mix of Indians 11 percent; several smaller groups comprised the remaining 1 percent.[99] In the postwar years, all three communities felt the full weight of Britain’s imperial resurgence as fleets of technocrats, welfare officers, and social science researchers bore down on the peninsula as never before.

Communism found further traction, and by 1947 the Malayan Communist Party boasted twelve thousand members, nearly all of whom were Chinese, though by no means were all Chinese Communists. Chinese of many political persuasions joined Indian and other laborers in the broad-based Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions, boasting over a quarter-million members. Countless strikes—some three hundred in 1947 alone that led to a loss of well over a million man-days of work—rocked the Malay Peninsula, in an escalating cycle of violence and government crackdowns that witnessed British troops opening fire on civilian hunger marches.[100]

Sparked by layers of local conflicts, communal violence wracked the rural areas, compounding Britain’s problems. One

British Military Administration officer described a postmassacre scene along the Perak River, recalling that “we poled down the river in sampans….There were dead men, women and children, all Malay, lying everywhere for about a mile and a half along the riverside…the total was 56.”[101]

Britain wanted political and civil order to facilitate economic control.

Into this world, Britain introduced its second colonial occupation, resulting in high unemployment, inflation, and increased taxes. To satisfy domestic economic needs, colonial officials sacrificed those of their subjects, while rescuing Malaya’s planters and miners to bring crucial dollars from the lucrative rubber and tin industries into the sterling area. After the war, 30 percent of Malaya’s exports went to the United States. British exchange controls, which reduced American imports thus conserving dollars, meant that Malaya had a trade surplus with the United States that surpassed the empire’s top four dollar-earning colonies combined.

In 1948, while Britain suffered from an overall $1.8 billion deficit, Malaya

brought in $170 ...

Malaya was the empire’s cash cow, and worker protest and local communal violence threatened it.

The death knell to the supposed era of multiracial liberalization was rung when the Federation of Malaya replaced the contentious Union in February 1948. This new political entity turned the imperial clock back to the pre-1941 era.

Britain ensured that their Malay constituents would have certain citizenship rights while denying them to much of the Chinese and Indian populations.

Some Chinese families had resided in Malacca since Portuguese rule centuries earlier, but under the new Federation, the citizenship bar was set incredibly high for them.

the vast majority of those born in any one of the nine Malay states were considered “aliens.” In contemporary terms, they were stateless.[103]

Long-cultivated cultural norms guaranteed the European population its position atop Malayan society. Indeed, nothing proclaimed exclusive British “civility” like Kuala Lumpur’s Lake Club, where the colony’s privileged whites found their enclave.

Overseeing it all was the governor-general of Malaya and Singapore, Malcolm MacDonald, an Attlee appointee and the son of Labour’s first prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald.

Malcolm MacDonald had been colonial secretary during Palestine’s Arab Revolt and had prepared the White Paper that limited Jewish immigration to the Mandate both during and after the Second World War.

While the Lake Club remained a sort of British Eden, the governor-general did undertake to integrate local elites in the hotels, dance halls, and golf courses before the whole multiracial enterprise plummeted.

Even then, many Chinese and Indian businessmen, some of whom had vast holdings throughout the peninsula, had far more in common with the European company directors and plantation and mine owners than they did with ordinary laborers.

Despite the peninsula’s enduring conflicts, the local Malayan Security Service gave MacDonald and Malaya’s High Commissioner Gent a measure of assurance. On June 14, 1948, it issued a report insisting there was “no immediate threat to internal security in Malaya,”

Meanwhile in 1947 Chin Peng ascended to general secretary of the Malayan Communist Party, after its members had finally uncovered his predecessor’s double dealings and, according to reports, assassinated him across the border in Thailand.

Chinese grassroots demands for change, a better life without discrimination, were behind the planters’ murders. These assassinations took place just two days after the Malayan Security Service issued its “no immediate threat report.”

Chinese vigilantes were also responsible for the elimination of Chinese labor contractors, who were as much their targets as the European planters because of their association with exploitative wage and labor regulations.[107]