Category Archives: Britain

by | 5 October 2007 · 5:12 am

Death of a Dutch Adventurer: Erik Hazelhoff

Dutch expatriate Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk notes the death in Hawai‘i of the Java-born Dutch adventurer Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, the author of Soldier of Orange. That prompted me to begin reading an autobiography I have had sitting on my shelf for quite a while. Here are some excerpts from the chapter “To Arms for Ambon!” from In Pursuit of Life, by Erik Hazelhoff (Sutton, 2003), pp. 242-245, 250-251:

On 24 April 1950 the Ambonese and other inhabitants of a group of islands west of New Guinea proclaimed the Republic Maluku Selatan (RMS) – Republic of the South Moluccas – and declared its independence from Indonesia. They had every right to do so. The preliminary Constitution of the United States of Indonesia, Article 189, affirmed: ‘Each federal state shall be given the opportunity to accept the Constitution. In case a federal state does not accept it, they shall have the right to negotiate a special relationship with the United States of Indonesia and the Kingdom of the Netherlands.’ The same article appeared word for word in the Treaty of Independence between Holland and Indonesia, and as Article 2 of the Dutch Transfer of Sovereignty Law. Both countries’ highest representatives had signed these documents.

To remove any doubt about their status, the Ambonese brought the case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which pronounced the RMS legal. The Republic – formerly United States – of Indonesia ignored the verdict and opened hostilities by throwing a sea blockade around Ambon and other major islands, vowing to wipe the new country off the map by military means. Meanwhile the RMS provisional government sent Karel Vigeleyn Nikijuluw, who had resigned from the Dutch Navy, to New York in order to seek support and recognition for the little republic from the United Nations Organization. Before April was over, Nikki – as his friends called him – appeared on our doorstep at Milton Point….

Ideals are like your children, often a pain in the neck, but they are your very own, so you can’t just dump them. You are responsible for them. The cause of the Republic Maluku Selatan, morally right, legally uncontestable, threatened by the overwhelming might of giant Indonesia backed by the limitless power of pragmatic, ill-informed Uncle Sam, was pure as gold and almost hopeless from the beginning. The Ambonese stood for everything that I had fought for in the Second World War, freedom, the right of self-determination and national identity. All they had against them was the size and location of their country, and three centuries of loyalty to the Dutch. How could I not support them? Already in 1572 William of Orange, the George Washington of the Netherlands, remarked during our desperate 80-years’ War of Independence, ‘It is not necessary to hope in order to attempt, nor need one succeed in order to persevere.’ Well. what was good enough for William the Silent was good enough for me. I told Nikijuluw he could count on me, provided it left me time to write. In answer to more specific questions, he assured me that God would show the way….

Through my contact with Vigeleyn Nikijuluw and the cause of the Ambonese I seemed to be sliding back into the past. It felt as if I were partly relinquishing control over my destiny to powers that for the last five years – the era of chaos – had kept their distance from me. It was a familiar, reassuring sensation as good things began to happen for which I myself could not possibly take credit. Judge for yourself.

At the time of the Spanish Civil War (1935–9), the proving grounds and dress rehearsal for the Second World War, a handful of British seamen in small ships regularly risked their lives – and made money – by sneaking through General Francisco Franco’s naval blockade around Spain in order to feed and supply the Loyalists, including thousands of Americans who fought in the International Brigade. The two most renowned of these, Potato Pete and Dod Orsborne, were finally intercepted by the Fascist navy. The former reputedly paid with his life, but Orsborne, cut off from friendly territory and unable to return to England, alone and with no other provisions than some leftover raw potatoes and beans, kept sailing his little craft, the Girl Pat, due west, until one fme day he hit the USA. Instantly famous, he later wrote a book, Master of the Girl Pat, that made the author with his red beard and wicked smile the darling of the radio talk shows. Through this he met, somehow but inevitably, Margaret Sangster. She telephoned us with an invitation ‘to meet this crazy Brit’; Midge took the call because I was out on the Sound discussing ways to sneak through to Ambon. That same night, the most celebrated blockade runner of the times and the world‘s only contemporary naval blockade were fused together at Park Avenue and 77th Street.

The affinity between the Dutch and the Scots is as mysterious as it is documented. In most places on earth, no matter how distant, you’ll find one or two of each, side by side in a local bar, sharing their exile experiences. From my father’s friends in Surabaya to Mauricio Pieper’s buddies in Argentina to my own RAF pals in the war, Scotsmen – and their lassies – abounded. The feisty little redheaded sailor with the Vandyke beard and a Scottish burr that could cut timber proved no exception….

[Many charming misadventures ensue.]

Dirty tricks are pulled in the dark. In the eight months that it took the Republic of Indonesia to wipe the RMS off the map, not one word about it – as far as I know – reached the American newspaper reader. At the height of the conflict 1,800 Ambonese, armed with klewangs and captured rifles, battled against almost 12,000 Indonesians equipped with rifles, light and heavy machine-guns, field artillery, armoured cars and a few light tanks, supported by reconnaissance planes, two B25s and four corvettes with 10cm cannon.

Only the extreme isolation of the war zone made it possible to keep a conflict of such dimensions out of the world press. Day after day Radio Ambon broadcast pleas for assistance, but its primitive signals were received only by the local population, by the Indonesians who did everything in their power to keep the campaign secret, and by the Dutch in nearby New Guinea who, mistrusted and discredited by their police actions, were not believed by any foreign journalist. The Ambonese were not only right, but also strictly on their own.

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by | 27 August 2007 · 9:10 pm

Suppression of Piracy in the Philippines After 1848

From Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity, by James Francis Warren (Singapore U. Press, 2002), pp. 345-346, 363-364:

By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the sea war in the Philippines between Spain and the Iranun and Balangingi had taken on a permanent and normal character of a stalemate in which each party recognized the other as an equal with authority generally limited to the territory each controlled. But in 1848 the combined forces of the Spanish navy and army laid waste to the Samal forts at Balangingi, dispersed the survivors, and forcefully relocated the prisoners of war. This was the decisive moment, the turning point in the history of the century-long conflict between Spain and the slave raiders. The Balangingi were on the brink of climbing out of their Samal identity after nearly half a century of constant upheaval, and, according to Frake, “establishing themselves as a different kind of people.” But, in the aftermath of the Spanish devastation of their island stronghold in 1848, they did not succeed. After that event the Balangingi, as ‘notorious pirates’ and a construed single ethnic group, disappeared from the pages of the historical literature and geographical reports. Balangingi fortunes changed in the 1840s and with them the pattern of maritime raiding in Southeast Asia. The destruction of Tempasuk and Marudu by the English in 1845 also forced Iranun groups to relocate on the east coast at Tunku. The loss of these confederate communities made it more difficult for the Balangingi to conduct slave raids in the western sector of the archipelago. This event, coupled with the founding of Labuan by James Brooke and the appearance of steam gunboats on the northwest coast of Borneo, forced them to gradually withdraw from that area and increasingly concentrate their activities on the Dutch possessions.

At the same time, the Spanish adopted a far more aggressive policy in the south. The new governor of the Philippines, Narciso Claveria, understood the strategic importance of the control of Balangingi which became the focal point of a new Spanish strategy. A daring naval attack aimed at the throat of the Sulu, namely Balangingi, was the key to cutting the sultanate in two and stopping slave raiding in the Philippines….

After the destruction of Balangingi in 1848, the Spanish first used the Samal women and children as hostages to force their husbands and kindred to surrender and make peace. The political ploy did not work. So after a short time, the Spanish assembled their steamers and regularly swept the Visayas and the Sulu archipelago from one end to the other. Repeated punitive campaigns ended with a series of major sea battles off the coasts of Samar and Mindanao and attacks on Taupan’s bases to the south. [Julano Taupan was war leader of the Balangingi at Tawi-Tawi.] Hundreds of Balangingi were killed during the six year long war, many of their ships captured, and others destroyed. Taupan sent his raiders to prey on shipping in less troubled waters in the Moluccas, the Banda Sea, the Java Sea, and along the Bornean coasts. But their activities were short-lived. The British and Dutch dealt with the Balangingi menace by joining forces across the region, stationing steamers in all the key straits of the archipelago at certain times of the year when the slave raiders traditionally appeared in those waters. The Dutch navy concentrated on Taupan’s Balangingi operations around Sulawesi and Bonerate, and the British, with James Brooke’s full support, stationed ships at Labuan to protect the Borneo coasting fleets in the South China Sea.

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Filed under Britain, Netherlands, Philippines, piracy, Southeast Asia, Spain, war

by | 7 August 2007 · 8:40 pm

Industrial Benefits of Downward Social Mobility?

Today’s New York Times carries a story about new research on the causes of the Industrial Revolution.

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.

Because they grew more common in the centuries before 1800, whether by cultural transmission or evolutionary adaptation, the English population at last became productive enough to escape from poverty, followed quickly by other countries with the same long agrarian past….

Dr. Clark’s first thought was that the population might have evolved greater resistance to disease. The idea came from Jared Diamond’s book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” which argues that Europeans were able to conquer other nations in part because of their greater immunity to disease.

In support of the disease-resistance idea, cities like London were so filthy and disease ridden that a third of their populations died off every generation, and the losses were restored by immigrants from the countryside. That suggested to Dr. Clark that the surviving population of England might be the descendants of peasants.

A way to test the idea, he realized, was through analysis of ancient wills, which might reveal a connection between wealth and the number of progeny. The wills did that, , but in quite the opposite direction to what he had expected.

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.

Another significant change in behavior, Dr. Clark argues, was an increase in people’s preference for saving over instant consumption, which he sees reflected in the steady decline in interest rates from 1200 to 1800.

“Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving,” Dr. Clark writes.

Around 1790, a steady upward trend in production efficiency first emerges in the English economy. It was this significant acceleration in the rate of productivity growth that at last made possible England’s escape from the Malthusian trap and the emergence of the Industrial Revolution.

Well, I don’t know. Sounds like the English became more Scottish and less Irish. But it does seem to me that temporary downward social mobility of many, many ambitious immigrants has made a huge contribution to the continuing health of the North American economy.

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by | 25 December 2006 · 8:54 am

Anglosphere Navies vs. Cuban Pirates, 1820s

The United States sent out a second pirate-hunting squadron in 1823, this time under the command of Commodore David Porter, a naval hero who had captured the first British warship taken in the War of 1812. There had been a debate during the winter as to the best method of combating the pirates and it was decided that, to be fully effective, the squadron ‘will require a particular kind of force, capable of pursuing them into the shallow waters to which they retire’, as President Monroe informed the Senate. And so, in addition to the ships which had sailed with Biddle in 1822, Commodore Porter was supplied with a fleet of vessels specifically tailored to the task in hand, the first time that such a sensible policy had been adopted in pirate-hunting history. These included ten fast schooners, with a draught of less than seven feet and fitted with twenty or twenty-four sweeps, and five light double-bank cutters or barges, each to row twenty oars and adapted to carry forty men, well armed with muskets, pistols, boarding pikes and cutlasses. The squadron was also graced by the presence of the US steam brig Sea Gull the first naval steamer of any country to serve in action. She was originally built as a New Jersey ferry and ‘the croakers predicted that she would founder at sea in the first blow’, as Porter told his son who later wrote his biography. But in fact the Sea Gull did good service, mainly as a mother ship to the rowing vessels, though she had a chance to use her powerful guns on occasion and in May 1825 was reported to have sunk a pirate ship after a two-hour gun battle off Matanzas.

Porter chose as his base Key West, American since 1819 and only a hundred miles from the coast of Cuba. The United States was now at last getting cooperation from the Spanish authorities in Cuba and his orders permitted him to pursue pirates ashore, having first given notice of his intentions, orders which shared the ambiguity of those given to the British commanders. American relations with these British counterparts were excellent, the British going so far as to replace the normal admiral commanding the Jamaica station by a commodore so that Porter would not be outranked and ‘we might meet on equal terms’, as the American commodore recorded with gratitude. There was a certain amount of division of labour, the British concentrating their searches on the south coast of Cuba and the Americans on the north, but men of the two navies also hunted together, as in March 1825 when the boats from the British frigate Dartmouth and the schooners Union and Lion joined up with boat crews from the Sea Gull in a successful pursuit of the pirate schooner Socorro. ‘I am happy to say,’ reported the British commodore Sir Lawrence Halsted, ‘the greatest harmony prevailed throughout the service, the men of either nation receiving orders from the officers of the other and obeying each with equal alacrity.’ This harmony was echoed by Lt. Com. McKeever of the Sea Gull who praised ‘the handsome manner in which we were seconded by the officers and crews of the boats of HMS Dartmouth. There had been a certain amount of cooperation between the British and French in previous anti-pirate campaigns, in both the Leeward Islands and West Africa, but nothing on the scale of this Anglo-American camaraderie, this being nicely epitomised by the kind and friendly treatment given to sick British sailors at Key West which included taking convalescent men for a trip round the Florida Keys in the steam brig.

Such cooperation, along with Spanish assistance and the choice of the right sort of vessels for the job, was to prove the doom of the Cuban pirates, but the service was quite incredibly arduous for the British and American sailors and marines involved. Nearly all the close-up work was done by men rowing in open boats who pursued the elusive pirates from cay to cay, through shoals and reefs and into hidden passages through the mangrove swamps, such close pursuit often being done under fire from the retreating pirates. Captain Godfrey of HMS Tyne reported a successful cruise by his men who had chased pirates ‘in open boats without any kind of shelter for thirty days and thirty nights’, a record beaten by Lieutenant Platt of the United States Navy who was employed for sixty-eight successive days in an open boat on the north-west coast of Cuba, ‘in the examination of the inlets, bays, keys, and other places of piratical resort’. A report to the House of Representatives in January 1825 stressed the perilous service being imposed on Americans engaged in anti-pirate duty, who faced disease as well as danger in vessels too small to maintain health on long cruises. But such sacrifice was justified by the result. ‘They enabled the commanders to scour the coast, to penetrate into the shoal waters of the creeks and inlets, to the very margin of the land.’ No pirate hunters in the past had ever shown such zeal, determination and courage as these truly professional British and American sailors and marines.

SOURCE: The Pirate Wars, by Peter Earle (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), pp. 242-244

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by | 9 April 2006 · 4:20 pm

Burma’s Sir Paw Tun in Exile in Simla, 1940s

In the Himalayan foothills near the Solan beer factory [Burma’s ex-prime minister] Sir Paw Tun, the last pre-war prime minister wrote the obituary of the old order in a long, rambling series of letters to [Burma’s ex-governor] Dorman-Smith, part combative, part self-pitying. He wrote as an Arakanese who had imbibed some at least of Britain’s imperial ideas and had tried to reconcile them with Buddhism and his deep sense of Arakanese and Buddhist Burmese identity. He recalled during his school days in a Christian convent he had read Samuel Smiles’s essay on ‘character’. He had prayed daily for his governor, his king and his country. ‘My mother taught me to be absolutely loyal to the British crown’, he wrote. But this was difficult when many British officials acted with arrogance and racial pride. It was natural for well-brought up Burmans to bow before superiors. But more than once he had ‘straightened up from my bending posture to show that he [the British official] no longer deserved respect because he was bullying me’. Mortal man, he said, was liable to be blinded by greed, passion and ignorance. This was particularly true of the old British administration in Burma which knew little of the people or their religion. The British, of course, were not as corrupt as the Burmese ministers such as Ba Maw and U Saw. They were less tempted by money as such, but they still fell victim to ‘other attractions – in some cases women, and in other cases, flattery, platitudes and kow-towing’.

Paw Tun loathed British racism and arrogance, but he believed the Thakins were beneath contempt, merely low-class upstarts. What worried him was the way in which the Thakins and Japanese had rallied the monkhood and the faithful in his ‘priest-ridden country’. He noted how the Japanese were giving liberal donations to the Shwedagon Pagoda and how their commanders had liberally fed the monks and taken part in Burmese religious ceremonies. Despairing of the British, because Dorman-Smith seemed intent on bringing back the new plebeian Buddhism of the Thakins, Paw Tun slowly came to see that he had no future. It was this that lay behind his increasingly erratic behaviour and protacted bouts of illness.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), p. 354

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by | 6 April 2006 · 3:05 pm

Italian POWs in India, 1944

One of the most intriguing organized units involved in road building [in India] was the Italian Auxiliary Pioneer Corps. This was raised from so-called Italian ‘co-operators’. During 8th Army’s campaigns against the Italians in 1941 and 1942, thousands of Italians had been brought to POW camps in India as they could not be taken to Britain. At first, the Italians were something of a nuisance in a jocular sort of way. They were adept at spreading anti-Allied propaganda to the Indian population – for example on the backs of cigarette packs with one or two cigarettes left in them. British military intelligence was particularly struck by one jape. The POWs had fabricated an Italian fascist flag from old clothes. They captured a vulture which flew into their compound and tied the flag to it. The unfortunate bird was seen flapping around the surrounding villages for hours displaying the insignia of Mussolini’s new Roman Empire. After the fall of the dictator and the German invasion of Italy, however, many Italian soldiers who were not committed fascists agreed to work on the Allied side. The valleys of Assam were alive with the sounds of the songs of Sorrento.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), p. 426

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by | 2 April 2006 · 1:38 pm

An Indian Army Refugee, 1942

With the creation of the Indian National Army, the connections that colonial rule had forged along the [British Southeast Asian] crescent were beginning to resurface. Nor was it just the politics of the Japanese Empire that were doing this, but also a flow of refugees that was beginning to make it across the crescent to territory still held by the British. Among the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons wandering through Burma in the later months of 1942 were a few members of the Indian army who had evaded capture in Singapore. These men bought valuable but disquieting news of the Indian National Army to the British. They included Captain Pritam Singh of 2/16 Punjab Regiment. Having seen Indian officers slapped and beaten by the Japanese in a ‘demonstration of love towards the Asiatic races’, as he put it, he decided to escape north by taxi and train in civilian clothes. He bought a false Japanese passport in Penang and got into Thailand. Further north, he stayed for some time with a Kiplingesque character called Khan Zada. The Khan was a Pathan who had spent twelve years in jail in Calcutta for murder, but ended up as a butcher on the Thai-Burmese border. Now aged seventy, he had recently shot his son in the thigh for some mild misdemeanor. Evading Japanese spies and staying in gurdwaras (Sikh temples), Pritam Singh eventually ended up in Kalewa, where the refugees had recently died in thousands. He shaved his head and beard to be less conspicuous and finally escaped into British India via Imphal.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 258-259

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by | 22 March 2006 · 12:43 am

Along the Road out of Burma, 1942

By the middle of May [1942], with the monsoon beginning, the situation was desperate. Thousands had already died and the survivors were almost all diseased, starving and totally demoralized by the constant rain. The route through the Hukawng valley to Assam was the worse of the two remaining escape routes. It was a green hell of mud, human excrement and chaos snaking through the hills. The lower parts of the valley consisted of huge tracts of thirteen-foot-tall elephant grass or stretches of near impenetrable jungle, broken up by small paddies which quickly became lakes of mud. Higher up, the track became more precipitous and the jungle thicker. Near-starving people ate poisonous fruits from roadside shrubs or rotting food from tins. If they collapsed with diarrhoea, they were left behind to perish. Even healthy males could travel no more than eight miles a day in a sea of mud which stretched for mile after mile across the mountains. The only way to make progress was to slither along the roots of trees by the side of the track. Women and children collapsed and drowned in the mud. Cholera became epidemic as exhausted people sheltered in bivouacks to escape the rain and relieved themselves on the floors. Porters refused to touch the dead so they lay decomposing until medical staff arrived with kerosene to burn them. The butterflies in Assam that year were the most beautiful on record. They added to the sense of the macabre as they flitted amongst the corpses….

Some brave people helped others. Frank Sinclair Gomes, an Anglo-Indian telegraphist from Maymyo, three times rescued people from the river at Mogaung, on the southern edge of the valley, saving a Gurkha and a Madrasi woman and her child as their boats overturned. Two Gurkhas died as they tried to rescue starving people on the far side of another river by putting a rope across. All along the route hundreds of Kachins and Naga villagers helped, providing food and transport. They were the mostly unacknowledged heroes of the civilian evacuation, as they were to be the heroes of the later military resistance to the Japanese. Hundreds of thousands of refugees tramped through their lands, polluting their homes and bringing disease and death with them, but their traditions of hospitality were too strong to wither even in this crisis….

Pathetically weak in social services of all sorts, the Indian authorities had to fall back on one of the few efficient organizations in the subcontinent: the Assam Tea Planters Association. Alongside forest officers it was the planters who gave a semblance of order to the chaos….

These people, many of whom were Scots, seemed to come into their own in the crisis. ‘Planters,’ one wrote, ‘are practical, early rising, hard-working people,’ good at dealing with scholarly government officials as well as ‘mobs of ignorant workers’. Many had fought in the First World War and were from factories and business, not from universities. They were particularly adept at handling ‘men, materials, money and motor transport’. Despite their reputation, they had long since given up polo and fishing trips. The planters supplied their greatest resource, labour. As early as February 1942 the government asked the Tea Association for assistance on military projects in the northeast, 25,000 men for the Manipur road and 75,000 for the northerly road from Ledo into Burma. By March every small railway station had its contingent of tea-garden labourers ready to entrain. Each one was equipped with a hoe, two blankets, sufficient food for a fortnight and a hurricane lamp. They were sent off to build roads and carry supplies but many never returned, dying of cholera and exhaustion.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 182-185

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by | 15 March 2006 · 3:01 pm

British Malaise in Malaya, 1941

The lack of civil preparation, the general ‘Malaise’, was to be a persistent charge against the British in Malaya. But, by the outbreak of war, the people of Malaya had experienced more intrusive government than at any time in its history, especially in the form of food controls and price fixing. Mindful of Malaya’s dependence on imported rice, the authorities had by 1940 built up reserves for 180 days. The state also took on new functions such as surveillance and propaganda. By April 1940 there were 312 officers involved in censorship in Singapore and 58 in Penang, plus a number of part-time workers, many of them European wives reading each other’s mail…. However, the Ministry of Information in Singapore soon had a staff of over 100 and issued Chinese newspapers and illustrated propaganda in four languages at a rate of a million pieces a month. Before December 1941 the Japanese could not be mentioned. Instead was broadcast – in the style of Orson Welles’s adaptation of War of the Worlds – a ‘nightmare’ of conquest by the fascists. The dire situation was disguised by over-confident propaganda which encouraged complacency about the scale of the threat. When the war began, the need to maintain this posture immobilized the British regime. The Japanese-owned daily the Singapore Herald fought against the mood by applauding Chinese cabaret girls for dancing with Japanese men and with such headlines as ‘Down with alarmism’ and ‘Prepare for peace’. In October, around 600 Japanese and their families were evacuated, and the consul-general was recalled at the end of the month. But many remained.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), p. 67

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by | 13 March 2006 · 12:21 pm

Malaya’s Role in the British Empire, 1930s

If India was the jewel in the imperial crown, Malaya was the industrial diamond. In 1940, the governor of Singapore estimated, Malaya was ‘worth’ an estimated £227.5 million to the British Empire. Its exports were £131.25 million, of which £93 million were to foreign countries, especially to the United States, to which it sold more than any other territory of the British Empire except Canada. From 1895 until the Japanese war, at no point did British Malaya need financial help from outside. Its status as a model colony was achieved from its own resources, and its accumulated budget surpluses saw it through the Great Depression. The key to the great public works and civic conceits of the Straits Settlements was opium. Duty on opium accounted for between 40 and 60 per cent of its annual revenue. Its production was monopolized by the government ‘Chandu factory’ on Pepys Road in Singapore which turned out 100 million tubes a year. Much of the revenue burden of Malaya therefore fel upon the Asian, particularly Chinese, labourers who were the greatest consumers of opium. The British crescent in Asia was supported by narco-colonialism on a colossal scale.

One of the most dramatic effects of the coming war was the way it forged the crescent into a bloodstained unity. First, the Japanese unified the peninsula from Singapore through Thailand to the borders of Assam by armed invasion. In response the British punched a land route from north India through the nearly impassable ranges of Assam and north Burma into the Irrawaddy valley. Reoccupying the Malay peninsula, they reclaimed their Southeast Asian patrimony. In fact, the designation ‘Southeast Asia’ was itself a brainchild of the military strategists who created Southeast Asia Command in 1943. Yet, as jazz-age imperialism drew to its end in 1939, there seemed little enough as yet, besides their rock solid belief in British superiority, to draw together the white settler societies of the crescent.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 33-34

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