Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia by Christopher Bayly, Tim Harper (review)

Among the overworked comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, one similarity deserves attention. In both cases, when the United States and its allies encountered frustration and setbacks, strategists and commentators looked back to the Malayan Emergency and cited it as a case of successful counterinsurgency. There have, accordingly, been a number of historical inquiries into the Emergency, mostly in the context of “the path to Vietnam” or “how Vietnam might have been won.” This book provides a refreshingly different approach to the Emergency, and to the outbreak of the Cold War in Asia.

Forgotten Wars is about Britain’s attempts, in the years 1945 to 1949, either to reestablish its empire in South and Southeast Asia or to depart in as graceful a manner as possible. The book is also about the numerous military conflicts and political struggles created by a miscellany of anticolonial movements—Communist and non-Communist, nationalist and separatist, some emphasizing and others transcending ethnic and religious divisions—all pressing their claims in a post-imperial world.

The area covered is the crescent “from Bengal, through Burma, the southern borderlands of Thailand, down the Malay Peninsula to Singapore island” (p. 8). The authors see this crescent as “the apex of a wider strategic arc that encompassed Suez and Cape Town in the west and Sydney and Auckland to the south” (p. 8). The focus is consistently on territories governed or heavily influenced by Britain. The British role in both Indonesia and Vietnam in the months immediately after Japan’s surrender is touched upon, but only briefly.

Over the subsequent decades, some British policymakers and commentators have contended that this period was, on the whole, a story of orderly decolonization. Others have argued that the real story was of Britain’s clumsy, contradictory, and sometimes cruel reactions to a confusing mélange of rebellions, which forced the exhausted great power largely to withdraw from a part of its empire that was thousands of kilometers away and far from the preoccupations of Western Europe in the opening years of the Cold War. Britain, by this account, was lucky to emerge from the maelstrom of the late 1940s with any credibility, prestige, or economic interest intact.

The coauthors of Forgotten Wars are based at Cambridge University, where Christopher Bayly holds the post of Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History. Despite the jingoistic resonances in that title, the authors do not indulge in any retrospective flag-waving. Their book contains much more about confusion, contradiction and incomprehension than about smooth and orderly decolonization. The considerable detail is linked by a strong narrative thrust, but without an overarching analytical theme.

In a sense, however, the theme is that there is no theme: no central and obvious structure for the confusing events of the time. With hindsight, it is easy to see this period as the turbulent transition from the end of a world war to the beginning of the Cold War, but that was far from obvious at the time. Japan’s surrender had lifted the lid on a huge number of competing aspirations and ambitions, some ephemeral and some of enduring importance. Here lie the seeds of much that characterizes modern-day India, Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia, and Singapore, but one can feel some sympathy for those who, at the time, found it hard to sort the substantial from the shallow.

The book is a sequel to the coauthors’ Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). That title was well chosen: Britain’s war against Japan has often been neglected in accounts of the Second World War. Whether the post-1945 conflicts and rebellions deserve to be called “forgotten wars” is less clear. Much has already been written about these conflicts, as the bibliography to this book attests. (The title is likely to anger some veterans of the Korean War, who have long sought an exclusive claim...