Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia (review)

As with most collections of essays, this is a difficult book to review. The essays emerge from a panel on colonial armies that was held in 2001. They cover a wide range in terms of chronology and of geographical and cultural settings within Southeast Asia. Although most articles cover the years from the nineteenth century to the present, the inclusion of Geoff Wade's informative piece, "Ming Chinese colonial armies in Southeast Asia," extends the timeframe to the early fifteenth century. The geographic range includes not only Ming China but the American Philippines in the 1920s; French "pacification" in Indochina during the 1880s and 1890s; the Dutch in Indonesia in the early twentieth century; the Portuguese in East Timor; the impact of Japanese colonialism during World War II; and the role of the British in Burma, Malaysia, and Singapore from the colonial to the postcolonial eras.

The editors offer three chapters that place these discrete studies within a larger framework. An introductory chapter revisits the vexed question of definitions for colonialism and imperialism, seeking greater precision in the use of these terms. Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig's interesting and innovative chapter on "Demography and Domination in Southeast Asia" usefully reminds us that a demographic explosion in Southeast Asia made the colonial armies' task of maintaining order increasingly difficult during the colonial years. Karl Hack's essay on "Imperialism and Decolonisation in Southeast Asia: Colonial Forces and British World Power" places the role of colonial armies in a broad context of British declining power. While the broad picture is helpful, this reviewer sees these essays as more the work of the fox than the hedgehog, to borrow from Isaiah Berlin's essay on Tolstoy. In all of these essays, however, the scholarship is impeccable.

Certain themes recur. One is the duality of dependency and collaboration. The dominant power, whether French, British, American, Portuguese, Dutch, or Japanese (we have less evidence for Ming China) relied upon recruitment of local manpower to maintain control. At times this led to a policy of "divide and conquer" by playing off internal ethnic conflicts. Justification for such practice came in the discourses on martial races, which could be found in French Indochina as well as in Dutch Indonesia or the domain of the British. Emphasis upon honor and duty appealed to these sometimes newly constructed identities and often secured their loyalty. Such praise existed alongside suspicion, leading to the use of "martial races" outside their areas of recruitment, as the two essays on Indochina make clear.

The ambivalent and often contradictory legacy of the era of the colonial armies could be seen in the aftermath of Japan's wartime domination in Southeast Asia, which becomes apparent in Abu Tahib Amhad's essay on the impact of the occupation upon colonial and anticolonial forces alike. Collaboration with the Japanese against the Europeans could lead to subsequent formation of national armies, delay the process as in Burma/Myanmar, or could lead to reversals of loyalties as the Japanese imperial sun began to sink. And the postwar and postcolonial legacies would also differ, seen in the experience of Malaysia where resistance to the Japanese in 1941–42 became a proud, postcolonial memory.