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In this book, Andrea Benvenuti discusses the development of Australia’s foreign and defense policies toward Malaya and Singapore in light of the redefinition of Britain’s imperial role in Southeast Asia and the formation of new postcolonial states. Benvenuti sheds light on the impact of Britain on Australia’s political and strategic interests in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. It will be of interest to historians of Australia’s foreign relations, Southeast Asia, and the British Empire and decolonization.
 

Guns of February shows the Fall of Singapore and Japan's 1941 military campaign in Malaya through the eyes of Japanese soldiers who took part, based on interviews, memoirs, war diaries, and other Japanese-language sources. Although an enormous number of books have been published on Japan's wartime advance into Southeast Asia, few books in English make much use of Japanese sources, and they reveal little of what happened on the Japanese side. In the words of the author, the Japanese"'advance by brigade groups', 'outflank the defence', 'sustain many casualties', and remain altogether a largely faceless mass bicycling their way down to Singapore." In Guns of February some of the voices of these soldiers are finally heard, and they tell a fascinating story. A few of them were professional soldiers who served their country with commitment and dedication, but many were conscripts hoping to stay alive, curious and apprehensive about the countries they entered, and moved by the plight of the people whose cities and towns they sometimes destroyed. Many were young men, interested in girls and in the sights and sounds of Southeast Asia, but also missing their families and the familiar world of Japan. It is a picture far removed from the staple view of the remorseless and fanatic Japanese soldier totally devoted to his Emperor and determined to die for his country. In writing this account of the Japanese advance on Singapore, the author attempted to show the universal humanity of the actors concerned.

In 1500 Malay Malacca was the queen city of the Malay Archipelago, one of the great trade centers of the world. Its rulers, said to be descendents of the ancient line of Srivijaya, dominated the lands east and west of the straits. The Portuguese, unable to compete in the marketplace, captured the town. They were followed a hundred years later by the Dutch who, lured in their turn by Malacca as symbol of the wealth and luxury of the east, were to rule this port city for more than a hundred and fifty years.

It proved to be, in many ways, an empty conquest. Portuguese and Dutch governments imposed restrictions on Malacca’s trade, driving it to the newer ports in the north and south. Moreover, by the time the Dutch finally secured the town, they had established their own port at Batavia, in Java. Dutch Malacca was, by 1701, “a place of little trade.” Why then did the Dutch maintain their occupation of the port? Lewis draws on the extensive correspondence of the Dutch East India Company to examine the role the Dutch played as Malacca’s rulers in the eighteenth-century Malay world, arguing that their presence, though generally too weak to secure their own interests, disrupted the traditional political and economic organization of the Malay polities, contributing significantly to the disarray that beset the Malay world at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Invariably, armies are accused of preparing to fight the previous war. In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl—a veteran of both Operation Desert Storm and the current conflict in Iraq—considers the now-crucial question of how armies adapt to changing circumstances during the course of conflicts for which they are initially unprepared. Through the use of archival sources and interviews with participants in both engagements, Nagl compares the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice in the Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960 with what developed in the Vietnam War from 1950 to 1975. 

In examining these two events, Nagl argues that organizational culture is key to the ability to learn from unanticipated conditions, a variable which explains why the British army successfully conducted counterinsurgency in Malaya but why the American army failed to do so in Vietnam, treating the war instead as a conventional conflict. Nagl concludes that the British army, because of its role as a colonial police force and the organizational characteristics created by its history and national culture, was better able to quickly learn and apply the lessons of counterinsurgency during the course of the Malayan Emergency. 

With a new preface reflecting on the author's combat experience in Iraq, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife is a timely examination of the lessons of previous counterinsurgency campaigns that will be hailed by both military leaders and interested civilians. 
 

Reggie, according to his niece Wendy, 'only told you what Reggie wanted you to know.' Reggie was my father. He had honed the technique of talking with apparent openness and using that talk as a decoy duck: while you were listening to it quack around the pond, you weren't noticing all the others hiding in the reeds. What follows includes tales that Reggie told repeatedly but, on the whole, it's about what Reggie didn't tell me.




 


So begins a stunning personal account of a Eurasian family living in Malaya. One of the many gaps in Reggie's account of his family was that his mother was Eurasian. When Rebecca Kenneison discovered this omission after his death, she set out to learn more about her extended family on the other side of the world. Her voyage of discovery is compelling in itself, but Playing for Malaya has a much larger purpose. Set in the 1930s and 1940s, it recounts the experiences of an extended Eurasian family during the invasion and occupation of Malaya by the Japanese. Colonial society considered Eurasians insufficiently European to be treated as British, but they seemed all too European to the Japanese, who subjected the Eurasian community to discrimination and considerable violence. Because many Eurasians, including members of the Kenneison family, supported the Allied cause, their wartime experiences are an extraordinary account of tragedy, heroism and endurance, presented here with great consequence and clarity.

Red Star Over Malaya is an account of the inter-racial relations between Malays and Chinese during the final stages of the Japanese occupation. In 1947, none of the three major race of Malaya - Malays, Chinese, and Indians - regarded themselves as pan-ethnic "Malayans" with common duties and problems. With the occupation forcibly cut them off from China, Chinese residents began to look inwards towards Malaya and stake political claims, leading inevitably to a political contest with the Malays. As the country advanced towards nationhood and self-government, there was tension between traditional loyalties to the Malay rulers and the states, or to ancestral homelands elsewhere, and the need to cultivate an enduring loyalty to Malaya on the part of those who would make their home there in future. 
 
 As Japanese forces withdrew from the countryside, the Chinese guerrillas of the communist-led resistance movement, the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), emerged from the jungle and took control of some 70 per cent of the country's smaller towns and villages, seriously alarming the Malay population. When the British Military Administration sought to regain control of these liberated areas, the ensuing conflict set the tone for future political conflicts and marked a crucial stage in the history of Malaya. Based on extensive archival research, Red Star Over Malaya provides a riveting account of the way the Japanese occupation reshaped colonial Malaya, and of the tension-filled months that followed Japan's surrender. This book is fundamental to an understanding of social and political developments in Malaysia during the second half of the 20th century.

Amok, one of the few Malay words commonly appearing in English, names a syndrome of unpredictable and indiscriminate homicidal behavior with suicidal intent. In tracing the development of this behavioral pattern, Spores examines historical data, including frequently colorful colonialist accounts of such episodes, from British Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies during the period 1800–1925.

Spores presents a basic etiological distinction between reactive-motivated and a spontaneous, unmotivated amok; the one an intentional act capable of establishing or restoring dignity and self-respect; the other a result of organic disturbance. He also explores the social-psychological dynamics of engagement in the two types of solitary amok and suggests possible behavioral chains. Further, his study demonstrates the impact of social forces and processes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which significantly altered factors in traditional Malay society important in generating expressions of solitary amok.

Running amok demonstrates the utility of bringing historical data to bear on the examination of specific social phenomena, particularly suggesting that the understanding of some present-day forms of mental disorder or other aberrant or deviant behavior can be facilitated and enriched through such analysis.

For three-and-a-half bleak years during World War II, Japan occupied Malaya and Singapore, transforming a once prosperous and vibrant region into a desolate place rife with unemployment, corruption, inflation and shortages of essential supplies.  As Japan’s promised Greater East Asia crumbled, malnourished residents increasingly faced a struggle to survive, with little prospect of better times ahead.
Originally published in 1998, The Japanese Occupation of Malaya and Singapore is fully updated with material from newly discovered and recently translated documents and as well as new archival evidence. Kratoska’s work offers a clear depiction of wartime life under foreign occupation, and explains how the legacies of war and occupation shaped the post-war recovery in Malaya and Singapore.

The book, by a cultural anthropologist, tells the story of the Malayan Emergency through the cultural interpretations of modern conflict, and examines the counterinsurgency through the lens of the postwar British Empire. Souchou Yao’s penetrating and illuminating essays on the Malayan Emergency set standards of wide-ranging, evocative analysis. The book ranges across a vast canvas, from the protection of rubber and tin for a bankrupt post-war Britain, to the British military violence as a heritage of the Victorian Imperial Policing; from collective punishment to population resettlement of more than half a million Malayans. Throughout the book runs a passionate concern for the lives and struggles of ordinary men and women in colonial Malaya. The Malayan Emergency is packed full of the myth of British liberalism and good sense. In truth, the counterinsurgency measures point to what Camus has described as ‘Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy …’ . Counter-insurgencies call for mobile security forces and humane, liberal measures – population relocation, civil reconstruction, good governance – in which Western governments specialize. These measures, affected as they did Malayan civilian life, are captured by the anthropologist’s art of ethnography and cultural analysis. Among the vignettes are ethnographic encounter with a woman ex-guerrilla, and the author’s remembrance of his insurgent-cousin killed in a police ambush. The book examines the Emergency afresh, and in the process brings into focus issues not normally covered by the disciplines: nostalgia and failed revolution, socialist fantasy and ethnic relations, the moral costs of modern counter-insurgency.

In 1931 a book full of thrilling adventures set mostly in Malaya appeared in London under the title A Yellow Sleuth: Being the Autobiography of “Nor Nalla” (Detective-Sergeant Federated Malay States Police). Reviewers concluded that the stories were just barely plausible, but agreed that the author knew Malaya intimately.
Nor Nalla is an anagram for Ron Allan, who spent four years working on a rubber plantation in Malaya shortly before World War I. Like Kipling’s famous colonial spy, Kim, the “yellow sleuth” is a master of undercover operations, and this reissued work explores vast locales, from the forests of Malaya to the ports of Java, from London’s underbelly to the camps of Chinese laborers in WWI Flanders.  Throughout, readers are left to differentiate between fiction and fact, and ponder questions of authorship, in this “impossible fantasy of hybridity,” as Phillip Holden calls it in his perceptive introduction.
Contemporary readers will not only savor the book’s tales of adventure and detection, they will also appreciate the ways that the author brings to life— and reveals the contradictions of—late colonial society.

Violence and the Dream People is an account of a little-known struggle by the Malayan government and the communist guerrillas, during the 1948-1960 Malayan Emergency, to win the allegiance of the Orang Asli, the indigenous people of the peninsular Malaya. The author argues that the use of force by both sides in their attempts to woo or coerce the jungle dwellers to support one side or the other in the conflict, caused tensions among the Orang Asli that resulted in counter violence against the interlopers and internecine killings in the tribal groups.

This study challenges the depiction of the Orang Asli as naïve innocents, unwittingly manipulated by outsiders for their own purposes. Heavily outnumbered, they looked to their own resources to survive, in the face of relocation, conscription, random bombings, and haphazard killing. Leary argues that they were shrewd enough to recognize the winning side and backed their judgment with force where necessary.

Violence and the Dream People is an important study of a much neglected facet of the Malayan Emergency and of the history of the indigenous peoples of the Malay Peninsula.