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This article locates John Darwin?s work on decolonisation within an Oxbridge tradition which portrays a British world system, of which formal empire was but one part, emerging to increasing global dominance from the early nineteenth century. In this mental universe, decolonisation was the mirror image of that expanding global power. According to this point of view, it was not the sloughing off of individual territories, but rather the shrinking away of the system and of the international norms that supported it, until only its ghost remained by the end of the 1960s. The article then asks, echoing the title of Darwin?s Unfinished Empire, whether the decolonisation project is all but complete, or still ongoing. In addition, what is the responsibility of the imperial historian to engage with, inform, or indeed refrain from, contemporary debates that relate to some of these issues? The answer is twofold. On the one hand, the toolkit that the Oxbridge tradition and Darwin provide remains relevant, and also useful in thinking about contemporary issues such as China?s move towards being a global power, the United States? declining hegemony, and some states and groups desires to rearticulate their relationship with the global. On the other hand, the decline of world systems of power needs to be recognised as just one of several types of, and approaches to, analysing ?decolonisation?. One which cannot be allowed to ignore or marginalise the study of others, such as experience, first nations issues, the shaping of the postcolonial state, and empire legacies. The article concludes by placing the Oxbridge tradition into a broader typology of types and methodologies of decolonisation, and by asking what a new historiography of decolonisation might look like. It suggests that it would address the Oxbridge concern with the lifecycles of systems of power and their relationship to global changes, but also place them alongside, and in dialogue with, a much broader set of perspectives and analytical approaches.
This article addresses the ‘revisionist’ case that post-war Western counter-insurgency deployed widespread, exemplary violence in order to discipline and intimidate populations. It does this by using the Malayan Emergency of 1948–60 as a case study in extreme counter-insurgency ‘violence’, defined as high to lethal levels of physical force against non-combatants’ (civilians, detainees, prisoners, and corpses). It confirms high levels of such violence, from sporadic shooting of civilians to the killing of 24 unarmed workers at Batang Kali. Yet it also demonstrates that there were more varieties of and nuances in extreme force than is sometimes realized, for instance with multiple and very different forms of mass population displacement. It also concentrates more effort on explaining how such violence came about, and shows a marked trend over time towards greatly improved targeting, and towards methods that did not cause direct bodily harm. This case study therefore suggests the need for a ‘post-revisionist’ form of counter-insurgency analysis: one that can take into account the lifecycles of multiple types of violence, and of violence-limitation, and emphasize explanation for extreme violence over its mere description. Such a post-revisionist analysis need not necessarily imply that there was more, or less, violence than suggested by previous accounts. Instead, it requires a more nuanced and contextualized account, clearly differentiated by technique, place, and period.
One of the first conflicts of the Cold War, the Malayan Emergency was a guerrilla war fought between Commonwealth armed forces and communist insurgents in Malaya from 1948 to 1960. Souchou Yao tell ...
This chapter provides an authoritative overview of the British campaign against communist insurgency in Malaya from its start in 1948 to its official ending in 1960, aimed in particular at practitioners. In so doing it argues for the vital importance of recognising several phases as having very distinct conditions.
