Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

by Caroline Elkins

At Ipoh Camp, among the worst, thirteen hundred detainees resorted to hunger strikes and rioting, demanding the release of all female...

In some instances, guards “lost their heads” and opened fire with live ammunition; in other cases, the situation, according to the deputy commissioner of Malaya’s criminal investigation department, “was now worse than...

“Rehabilitation” was liberal imperialism’s counterpart to its innocuous-sounding “repatriation,” another in a long line of ever-evolving...

According to one top secret report, “successes against bandit gangs, though essential to security, is only in effect a ‘rap on the Knuckles.’ It is at the ‘heart’ that we must aim—to dominate the Chinese populated and squatter areas.”[111] To do so, Briggs launched the British Empire’s largest forced migration since the era of trade in enslaved people.

Five-hundred seventy-three thousand people, nearly 90 percent of whom were Chinese, were relocated into 480 resettlements. It was not only the scale of the forced migration but also its speed that created massive bureaucratic challenges and hardships.

Alongside the resettlement of rural squatters, Briggs also took aim at the rubber plantation and the tin mine laborers. He created “labour lines,” which were effectively resettlement areas and labor pools for the Federation’s dollar-producing industries, much as the resettlement camps were sources of “casual labour” for the Federation’s estate owners.

In total, officials displaced and relocated approximately 650,000 workers into the “labour lines,” which brought the overall forced migration and resettlement of British subjects and alleged aliens to nearly 1.2 million.[112]

A few months later Malaya’s attorney general wrote to Colonial Secretary Griffiths informing him “there is no room for any ‘sitting on the fence.’ All those who believe in the democratic way of life must join in the fight, and we must fight with our gloves off—all of us—Malays, Chinese, Indians, Europeans and Eurasians….Let everyone declare himself now, and give wholehearted support to the men of our Security Forces who are giving such valiant service to our cause.”[117]

For those Chinese living in Malaya’s rural areas, Britain’s “gloves off” policy meant, in many cases, that the government did not warn villagers of their impending removals. This was particularly true in areas branded as “bad” or “black.” One colonial official later described that “when resettlement happened, the first thing was that it was like an ambush almost; suddenly the dawn morning, all of the police, all of the soldiers came in and surrounded the village. It was pretty terrifying.”[118]

As truckloads of “alien Chinese squatters” were brought to new resettlement sites that dotted the Malayan countryside and urban fringes, security forces torched everything left behind. One Communist insurgent witnessed his village burn to the ground: “I would never forget the scene. The British soldiers set fire and burned down my homeland.

For nearly a week, I could not do anything except watch the smoke go up to the sky.

The fury only fuelled my hatred and strengthened my will to fight against the British ...

According to government reports, “safe and protected” living sites awaited the dislocated masses. Government financial assistance would help with the resettlement process, as would medical services, schools, water supplies, electrification, and cultivatable plots for villagers’ crops. In reality, the sites welcoming the internally displaced hordes were inhospitable when not uninhabitable. They included “sandy wasteland[s],” inte...

Local officials expected refugees to build their own permanent dwellings with whatever materials they had brought with them, or with items they purchased using the government “upheaval allowance.” In a kind of colonial debt peonage, the “allowance” was, in fact, a loan, for those able to get one.

The government fragmented preexisting social networks of support and belonging. Many villagers could not understand their new neighbors. Local officials purposefully settled Hokkien and Cantonese speakers alongside those who spoke Hakkas, Teochius, and Foochow, to prevent solidarity and stymie the flow of information.[121]

Some resettlement camps had as many as thirteen thousand people, though on average populations were small, as one hundred to a thousand refugees from disparate parts of the Federation were thrown toget...

“None of the squatter resettlement areas in Johore, Kedah, Kelantan, Trengganu and Malacca has piped water or electricity.”[123] Villagers navigated putrid conditions just to reach fresh water.

In August 1949 officials in London were still looking on in despair at the continued lack of trained interrogators and interpreters, a problem so evident throughout the empire that one wonders, with the benefit of hindsight, how such glaring mistakes kept recurring.

The culture of British imperial governance, however, rested on the “trust the man on the spot” ethos, and while the Colonial Office worked to centralize intelligence matters and disseminate knowledge accumulated in one colony to other parts of the empire, its officials could only cajole local governors and high commissioners on matters of day-to-day operations.

They continued with their invectives “urging the Government of the Federation of Malaya to agree to set up a translation and interrogation center [CSDIC]….The project is, we consider, essential for the high-grade interrogation of bandit prisoners.”[132]

“the Centre will be directly under Commissioner of Police, Federation [i.e., Gray].”[133] The center was modeled on the “CSDIC experience”

Turning to Malaya, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 universally forbade torture, and regardless of whether British officials agreed that an “armed conflict not of an international character,” as outlined under Common Article 3, existed in the Federation, the British military would, in 1955, suggest that the thrust of the conventions applied.

may seem disingenuous that the military would issue such commands demanding compliance with the Geneva Conventions while knowing full well that it had encouraged, as did the British colonial administration and security services, the creation of interrogation systems and the spread of interrogation methods that had been so effective during wartime but that now violated international law, at least in the spirit, if not original intent, of the convention’s drafters, as we’ve seen.

The scale and scope of the Briggs Plan, and the tactics used to implement it, were seemingly successful vis-à-vis the Communists. As the historians Bayly and Harper tell us: Chin Peng, for one, had assumed that the forced movement of people by the British would fail, just as similar schemes by the Japanese had failed. The central strategic assumption of the revolution was that the villages would rise in resistance to the British.

But the MNLA [Malayan National Liberation Army] could offer them little protection from an equally tenacious and better-equipped regime. Peasant resistance was futile, the Malayan revolution foundered on a false premise.[156]

The Communists pinned future hopes on peasants like this but were slow to recognize how self-defeating their actions had been. For many villagers, just surviving the insurgency was their priority.

Early that month, Gurney climbed into the back of his Rolls-Royce together with his wife and private secretary and settled in for the ride to Fraser’s Hill, a resort town nestled in the highlands north of Kuala Lumpur, for a weekend of colonial leisure. His Rolls was fitted out for a man in his position, complete with a crown insignia and a Federation flag, which flapped in the breeze as the vehicle climbed the narrow road that wound through mile after mile of dense thickets. Unbeknownst to Gurney or his single escort vehicle, hidden within the jungle brush was a Communist platoon of thirty insurgents who had been waiting, on and off, for nearly two days for a suitable target. In their most opportunistic strike of the insurgency, Chin Peng’s men opened fire with Bren guns as Gurney’s vehicle rounded a sharp bend.

Within moments, dozens of bullet holes riddled the Rolls-Royce. The high commissioner, hit in the head and body, staggered out of its back seat toward a bank, where he collapsed, dead in one of the empire’s re...

While Gurney had no doubt been careless, the ambush was nonetheless another measure of Britain’s perceived failure not only to get hold of the Malayan s...

In 1951 the Central Office of Information undertook a survey for the Colonial Office on “public knowledge of colonial affairs.” While respondents remained woefully short on details—only four out of ten surveyed could name a single colony—nearly 75 percent of them believed Britain would be worse off without her empire.

Insofar as partnership was concerned, only 20 percent believed Britain had a welfare role to play in the colonies.

For Labour, the 1951 election was an unmitigated disaster. Despite winning the popular vote, it lost twenty seats, which gave the Conservatives the majority and catapulted Churchill back into Downing Street.

In a twist of fate, one premise for Attlee calling the election, George VI’s trip, never took place. The king was too ill to travel, so Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh had undertaken the royal tour on his behalf.

Three months after their departure the royal couple was at Treetops, a game lodge at the edge of Kenya’s Aberdares forests, when they learned the news: the king was dead. Britain now had a ...

Colonial troops in Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation ceremony, processing from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace, June 2, 1953

Britain needed boots on the ground, and the Malayan military effort would prove an empire-wide one. Soldiers, pilots, sailors, and auxiliaries from around the world descended on the Federation in the form of ten RAF squadrons, seven British and eight Gurkha battalions, two Royal Armoured Corps regiments, one Royal Marine Commando brigade, a small flotilla from the navy, and three colonial battalions that drew forces from Southern Rhodesia and colonies in East Africa and the South Pacific.

At the end of 1952, there were thirty thousand military personnel in Malaya.

Another military force present was the Malayan Scouts, led for a time by Colonel “Mad Mike” Calvert with rough-and-ready methods reminiscent of Palestine.

Joining these covert forces were white recruits from New Zealand, Australia, Southern Rhodesia, and South Africa, where frontier spirits combined with legally enabled systems of racial domination.

Around the time Templer arrived, such a noxious combination had led to Calvert’s scuttling, as the Malayan Scouts’ methods and behavior, from bucking the chain of command to holding wild parties, were noteworthy, even in the context of the times.[14]

The Colonial Office had endorsed the recruitment of ex–Force 136 officers—many of whom were found on the barstools of the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge—to spearhead Gurney’s “frontier force” or “jungle force” initiative, otherwise known as the Ferret Force. Joining them were former Special Operations Executive (SOE) pioneers like the Chinese expert and colonial administrator Robert Thompson, and together, they directed the police, who constituted much of the force’s rank and file.

According to the Colonial Office, these ferretized men were to “locate and destroy insurgent elements who are taking cover in jungle country [and] to drive such elements into open country where they can be dealt with by regular Army and police units.”[15]

Templer sat on the SOE’s executive council. Such a leadership role no doubt fueled his ideas on how to eliminate Communists in Malaya, whom he renamed “communist terrorists,” or CTs for short. In fact, it was under his government’s order that “the designation ‘bandit’ will not be used in future official reports and Press releases.”[17]

The shift in nomenclature was as much for the outside world, particularly the Americans, as for anyone else.

Along with jettisoning the term bandit, the British government did not share with the Americans all the unsavory details of its counterinsurgency efforts and other aspects of its colonial rule. According to a secret memorandum “disclosed only to expatriate officers and only then on a very strict ‘need-to-know’ basis”: