Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

by Caroline Elkins

There was no top-down Chinese Communist plot to overthrow British rule in mid-June 1948, though Britain’s immediate state-of-...

was into this uncertainty that Gray, Catling, and other Palestine Police Force veterans arrived ...

In short order, Palestinian replaced Black and Tan as the empire’s new watchword for legalized lawlessness.

When several of Gray’s Palestinians, like Catling, assumed leadership positions within the force, animosities ran even higher. It was a move the Old Malayans described as the “promotion of Palestinian henchmen.” When Gray packed the upper ranks of police with his Palestinian men, the locals called them the “Praetorian Guard.”[109]

only they understood the “ordinary illiterate or semi literate classes which make up the great body of the Malayan public.” As far as the Old Malayans were concerned, locally honed paternalism rendered them omniscient on when “to be tough’’ with their “natives” and “just how ‘tough’ to be” without engendering “bitterness.”

In the summer of 1948, the Old Malayan police force was still recovering from the years of Japanese occupation.

Some of the men had barely survived Japan’s prisoner of war camps. Eleven thousand were left to patrol a population of 5 million people. Only twelve British officers spoke Chinese, and there were only 228 Chinese police force members.

The government’s immediate dispatching of the so-called Palestinians was not just about much-needed manpower, however. Their arrival witnessed the reinvention of Palestine’s ill-fated covert squads as “Ferret Forces,” which included several of Orde Wingate’s protégés.[112]

It wasn’t long before government reports noted local complaints: “the Force is ceasing to be a Police Force and is becoming a paramilitary organisation.”[113]

Even before the “Palestinians” arrived on the scene, planters and mine owners called for more draconian methods. The local Straits Times had summed up demands that harkened back to Britain’s humiliations in the Mandate: “Govern or get out.”[116] Many planters were also wartime veterans, and some had served in Force 136. They quickly hunkered down behind self-fashioned fortresses of barbed wire, spotlights, trenches, and booby traps filled with broken glass and other shrapnel. They amassed their own private armies, complete with American-funded ammunition to protect rubber destined for U.S. markets, and bullet-proof vehicles jerry-rigged from rusted-out Japanese tanks.[117]

the start of the emergency, looking to arrest and detain the Federation’s Communist leadership and any local leader who defied Britain’s attempts to control the political and economic future of the region, security forces launched Operation Frustration, a clamp-down on all forms of democratic activity.

It also gave Chin Peng, who managed to evade the operation, a recruiting bonanza. Former members of the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army fled to the jungles in fear of arrest. The Malayan Communist Party reconstituted between two and three thousand of them, eventually calling the new insurgent

group the Malayan National Liberation Army.[118]

Known as the Min Yuen, or “People’s Movement,” the civilian supporters—some enthusiastic and others coerced into supplying Chin Peng’s forces—were drawn largely from the five hundred thousand squatters who lived on the jungle’s edges.[119]

The British government at home reckoned there were between 2,200 and 6,100 armed insurgents in the jungles.

Britain’s mission was to “destroy the Communist Party organisation in Malaya” and to guarantee that “the economic...

Such a move, according to British internal reports, “entails the protection of the rubber and tin industries, of the personnel employed by them, and the maintenance of the confidence of the peopl...

Less than two weeks after Gent declared a special emergency, Creech Jones recalled him.

one dissenting administrator noted that they were headed down a familiar path “allowing our regime to become purely one of repression.

Just as Gray and his men had been hand-selected for their liberal imperial methods, so too did the Colonial Office make a deliberate choice in appointing Sir Henry “Jimmy” Gurney, Palestine’s last chief secretary, to take charge as Malaya’s high commissioner, despite the failures riddling the Mandate during Gurney’s time.[122]

This was a battle not only to control crucial imperial resources but also to contain Communism in the early years of the Cold War.

Gurney knew there were rules to the game that had evolved over decades in the empire, and he transplanted Palestine’s legalized lawlessness into Malaya through 149 pages of emergency regulations, empowering him, in his words, “to take any action he wished.”[123]

Locally, the Straits Times editors questioned the appointment of yet “another Palestinian,” with the “Colonial Office…falling into the fallacy of supposing that Malaya is a second Palestine”—which, of course, was precisely the mindset that drove Gurney’s appointment and the personnel, tactics, and regulations that came with it.[125]

Malaya and Palestine were similar in other ways, not least in the complete breakdown in intelligence:

Britain’s imperial overstretch consistently required cutting fiscal corners, and its effects were thrown into relief with one end-of-empire crisis after another in the postwar era.

most British police officers and members of the special branch, dedicated to political security and intelligence, did not understand the local languages.

Literally unable to speak to subject populations or to tr...

Many British officials still cast ordinary peasants and townspeople across the imperial globe in childlike images, albeit ones that were increasingly petulant if not criminal.

any popular demands for freedom and human dignity, no matter how fractured, were the result of Machiavellian leaders like Gandhi, Jinnah, al-Husayni, Begin, and Chin Peng, who exploited their followers.

British colonial officials like those in Malaya were routinely and astonishingly caught off guard when populist demands gave rise to violent insurrections was a reflection of the liberal imperial ethos that shaped and defined Britain’s empire and those who served it.

Cathay Theatre and Cathay Building, Singapore, 1941

the case of Malaya, MI5 director-general Percy Sillitoe looked to augment and systematize the colony’s intelligence operations. In August 1948 he made a personal visit to Kuala Lumpur, where he declared the Malayan Security Service an unmitigated disaster. It was soon disbanded. He then transferred his Middle East go-to operative, Alex Kellar, who was by then head of the Security Intelligence Middle East station in Cairo, to take charge of its sister operation in Southeast Asia.

Based in Singapore, Security Intelligence Far East was a clearinghouse for the collation and assessment of all intelligence that security liaison officers, or local MI5 operatives, accumulated together with the region’s special branch officers.

Headquartered alongside Malcolm MacDonald’s offices in Singapore’s Cathay Building, the combined operations were known locally as the “tr...

The Cathay Building was a cultural landmark, the first skyscraper in all Southeast Asia. It had a famed restaurant, a dance hall, a rooftop garden, and a thirteen-hundred-person, air-conditioned cinema, where moviegoers could relax in armchairs whil...

Kellar’s arrival did not go unnoticed. He strode through the Cathay Building’s corridors wearing Palm Beach and Saigon linen suits, white Egyptian-cotton...

He

billed headquarters for his tropical getups, which hardly endeared him to MacDonald; neither di...

MacDonald and Kellar were a disastrous combination from day one, which led to Kellar’s eventual ouster and replacement with Jack Morton, a longtime veteran of the Indian Special Branch. Gurney, Gray, Catling, and William Jenkins—the initial director of intelligence in Malaya—were constantly at ...

Even the police rank and file couldn’t get along, generally cleaving along Palestini...

police force from 11,000 to 73,000 members further exacerbated local clashes as new recruits were often young or subpar or both. Included in the expanding police rank were 41,000 men, mostly Malay, who enlisted into the special constabulary, and 1,000 planters, who were “seconded” to the force, a typical move in Britain’s empire where loc...

addition, three battalions of British Army personnel, many of whom were National Servicemen barely out of their teens, would arrive to track down terrorists in the j...

In the early years, British officials danced around what to call the Communist insurgents, partly because of economic considerations. Insurance companies covered Malayan estates and mines for “riot and civil commotion” but not for “rebellion” or “insurrection.” The Rubber Growers’ Association, powerful London lobbyists, implored the Colonial Office to stop using terms like rebellion and insurrection lest the Malayan planters be uninsured, forcing them to turn to Attlee’s financially strapped government to cover losses.[129]

The colonial secretary made clear that Britain was launching a “vigorous counter-attack on Communist propaganda both at home and abroad” to counter any notion that the “present troubles in Malaya arise from a genuine nationalist movement of the people of the country.”[131]

Such representations shaped broader understandings of Communist aims, providing whatever legitimation Britain needed to unleash legalized lawlessness in the extreme.

The new high commissioner took this one step further, making snap judgments about Malaya’s Chinese community and the Communism that s...

As for Communism, in the words of the new high commissioner, it was “not a political doctrine; it is banditry and lawlessness.”[133]

Not only were Chinese civilians criminals and their ethnically based movement unrepresentative of a Malayan nationalism, they were also illegal residents of the Federation. Simply put, the Chinese minority were held to be “aliens” in Malaya, despite their climbing demographics and socioeconomic participation in the territory since the turn of the century.

At the eve of the Second World War, “Malaya had been transformed from a collection of Malay states into a politica...