Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

by Caroline Elkins

Together, the Chinese and Indian “immigrant races” outnumbered the indigenous Malays, prompting colonial officials in London to imagine various ways in which non-Malays, as we’ve se...

During the war, tens of thousands of people in the Malay Peninsula who had managed to survive Japanese purges and labo...

Part of the struggle for survival was laying claim to the colonial state. Ethnic Malays, demanding that the British put a stop to their expanded citizenship schemes, which they did by abandoning the Malayan Union for the Federation, pointed to their historically embedded rights as located within a Malayan ancien régime that British colonial rule had historically leveraged and protected.

by 1947 over 60 percent of the so-called immigrant population had, in fact, been born in Malaya,

“disease and disorder shaped the world-view of [this]...

It was the Communist insurgents in this generation populating Malaya, along with others born outside the territory, whom British officials now labe...

British orthodoxy held firm: the Malayan Communist Party was inspired by the Zhdanov Doctrine, a cultural doctrine developed by Soviet Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov dividing the world into Western “imperialistic” regimes and Soviet “democratic” ...

London looked to cast Malayan Communism as “part of the Kremlin’s worldwide campaign...

Some officials in London and Malaya were more convinced of China’s influence, though the best anyone could show were government messages of support for the Malayan “liberation movement” that came from the soon-to-be People’s Republic of China.[136]

In reality, Chin Peng and his followers were waging a war for national liberation that received little outside material support.[137]

the Malayan Communist Party had the early upper hand. The party was a propaganda machine, and its distribution network of leaflets spread the message of British “white terrorism.”

but the Communists’ direct messaging to the Federation’s beleaguered population wa...

This message was anti-imperialism as much as it was doctrinaire Communism. Such rhetoric had a broad appeal to the largely illiterate rural population who had been the casualties of war

since the Japanese invasion over six years earlier.[138]

That colonial officials dismissed the Chinese population as misguided criminals at best and alien subjects at worst did n...

Major-General Charles Boucher, a former officer in India, arrived in late June 1948 to direct the military campaign. His troops were headed toward a straight-on battle against some of Britain’s best Special Operations Executive–trained guerrillas who had operated behind enemy...

As local papers chronicled more ambushes, gruesome murders of Europeans as well as locals, and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of rubber trees, it became clear that the stiffening emergency regulations and the combined tactics of Gray and Boucher were not working.[141]

Malaya was no “Empire skirmish.”[145]

Yet the impact of Palestine continued to loom large not only in Malaya but also back home. There The Times correspondent Louis Heren drew on his wartime coverage during the final years of the Mandate, capturing prevailing sentiment in a two-part series titled “Malayan Emergency.” “There is no evidence to show that Malaya’s Communists are incapable of intensifying

and extending their campaign of terrorism,” Heren wrote. Fifty ex-members of the Irgun Zvei Leumi, whom your Correspondent knew in Palestine, could, if it were possible to disguise them as Asians, bring the country to a standstill and drive the administration to the safety and impotence of barbed-wire enclosures as they did in Jerusalem. Efficiency in terrorism is not a Jewish monopoly….The Malayan terrorists are learning; they have their own efficiency campaign. Their ambuscades, for instance, are now almost text-book demonstrations, whereas previously they were ragged, ill-planned

affrays. Their gun positions are sited to bring fire to bear simultaneously on all vehicles of the usual military three-vehicle convoy….They have learned to construct ...

“It is very doubtful that [the Communists’] expansion can be checked with the present tactics and methods,” Heren wrote. He concluded “the end is still not in sight and war weariness is increasing dangerously.”[149]

Heren wrote this piece in August 1952, when for four years Britain had been waging a costly and brutal battle largely for economic resources in a territory where Palestine continued to cast a shadow over emotions and events,

however much liberal imperial strategies in Malaya began to expand beyond those ...

On December 10, 1948, in the grande salle of Paris’s Palais de Chaillot, forty-eight of the United Nations’ fifty-eight members, Britain among them, voted in favor of Resolution 217A.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)

December 10 is still celebrated as Human Rights Day, as it ushered in a new article of faith in basic humanity and the need, above all else, to protect inalienable rights that are intrinsically possessed, not conferred.

At the time, the mood in Whitehall was somber, though not defeatist.

In the months leading up to the December 10

vote, British officials had maneuvered between the UDHR, which like the UN Charter’s preamble was not legally enforceable against its signatories because of its purely declarative status, and its covenants, which would be enforceable as binding agreements in states that signed and ratified them. Fortunately for Britain, the covenants were taking significant negotiation time and were ultimately decoupled from the declaration.

The [UN] charter contemplated that following the last war, some international machinery would be set up to define and protect human rights—the four freedoms, in the classic phrase of President Roosevelt….It

It was felt, in the light of the experience of Fascism and Nazism, that there was an intimate link between the recognition of human rights and the preservation of the peace of the world.

mere mockery and a sham to proceed with a pious declaration which would not be binding and enforceable.”[4]

the end, however, that was precisely what happened, at least in the near term. The Colonial Office was therefore sanguine

about the turn of...

It would take another three decades for the covenants to be drafted, signed, ratified, and entered into force, though the aspirational UDHR still caused British officials concern.

In the words of the Colonial Office, Articles 13, 21, and 25 of the declaration—freedom of movement, right to participation in government, and right to basic standards of living—“may be extremely difficult to reconcile” in the empire.[6]

the UDHR was potentially “a source of embarrassment” as far as the em...

Many governors and high commissioners refused to publish its contents, or even refer to its existence, in their Official Gazettes, and they certainly had no intention of dissemi...

the Colonial Office told its governors and high commissioners around the empire. “There is also a danger that politically inclined school teachers would be placed in a position to use the Declaration to confuse pupils on current political issues.”[8]

Regardless, for some, the lack of legally enforceable mechanisms for the declaration gutted it of much moral purpose.

The important point is that human rights thinking—whether about humanitarian or human rights law, which clearly were intersecting before and after the Second World War—was

But it remained on the periphery until Germany brought colonial counterinsurgency methods to Europe, upending, as we’ve seen, the Western natural order of things by gobbling up sovereign states into the Nazi empire and

unleashing genocidal practices whose impact rippled through the international community.

In the summer of 1948, fifty governments and fifty-two national Red Cross societies gathered in Stockholm to revise and update earlier treaties regulating conduct in war. Together, four new conventions, later known as the Geneva Conventions of 1949, comprising 429 articles of law were being drafted.

Each convention addressed the protection of a particular category of persons during armed

conflicts: the First and Second Geneva Conventions covered the wounded, sick, and shipwrecked; the Third Geneva Convention prisoners of war; and the Fourth Geneva Convention civilians. There were also articles common to all four conventions, with Common Article 3 arguably the most contentious of them all. Often referred to as a “mini-convention,” ...

What’s clear is that British and French officials, with ongoing conflicts in Malaya

and Indochina, wanted to protect their sovereign free hand in their empires, while Cold War concerns consumed the Americans, who undermined protections for victims of air bombing along with the British.

The “crucial test,” according to British negotiators, was to craft “a definition [of partisan] wide enough to include such people [as the French sought domestically, but] avoid admitting the existing ‘terrorist’ elements in Palestine, when captured, to the rights of prisoners of war.”[24]