When Dolores Ho was a young girl in the military station of Taiping, she worried that celebrating Chinese holidays by hanging red cloth might flag her family as communists. This could have been a deadly declaration during Britain’s prolonged anti-communist campaign, known as the “Malayan Emergency” (1948–1960). Tamil rubber tappers frequently told her about Chinese civilians who “disappeared.” Her brother considered joining the military to protect their family from violence. Living through the “Emergency,” they found, extended the trauma of the Second World War into the “postwar” period. During that prior conflict, Ho’s family felt “abandoned” when British leaders surrendered Singapore to the Japanese military in February 1942.1 Over the next three years, they lived in chicken coops and searched for food along storm drains to avoid Japanese soldiers, who targeted Chinese civilians for violence. British forces’ similar tendency to single out Chinese civilians after reoccupying Malaya and Singapore felt like another betrayal. For soldiers and civilians living under colonialism, war often provided continuity, rather than change, for the racialized traumas of military occupation.
Losing Hearts and Minds analyzes soldier and civilian experiences of war and anti-colonialism in Singapore and Malaya from the First World War to the Malayan Emergency. In so doing, it examines the colonial roots of military claims to win civilian “hearts and minds” in war. Many associate this phrase with U.S. military strategies during the Cold War, after Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson used it in this context. It gained renewed relevance when President George W. Bush said it to justify the military invasion of Iraq. It then appeared in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps’ revised “Counterinsurgency Field Manual” in 2006, citing the Malayan Emergency as a successful counterinsurgency campaign.2 However, the phrase gained its martial popularity due to British, rather than American, militarism. Director of Operations and High Commissioner of Malaya Sir Gerald Templer (1951–1954) famously claimed that the key to success in the Malayan Emergency “lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle but in the hearts and minds of the people.”3 Still, the Malayan Emergency demanded an extensive military presence in the jungle, including soldiers from Nepal, Australia, New Zealand, East Africa, and Fiji. Losing Hearts and Minds, therefore, asks how colonial subjects’ experiences of imperialism and war shaped Britain’s stated emphasis on fostering positive soldier-civilian relations. It shows that the “hearts and minds” approach remade and replicated colonial racial and gender hierarchies, increasing rather than reducing violence against civilians.
Across multiple conflicts, British leaders tried to claim soldier and civilian loyalties despite the challenges of anti-colonial rebellion, military occupation, and the rise of communism. As a result, Singapore and Malaya became sites of some of the most impactful military and anti-colonial conflicts of the twentieth century. A 1915 mutiny of Indian troops in Singapore revealed Indian soldiers’ immersion in global anti-colonial networks and their ease in finding supporters among European, Malay, and Chinese civilians.4 The 1942 “fall” of Singapore represented a lasting blow to British imperial and military power as some colonial subjects aided the Japanese invasion and occupation.5 The Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) laid the groundwork for global wars of decolonization and anti-communism, bringing soldiers around the globe into contact with civilians weary from endless war.6 These recurring conflicts forced European, Indigenous, Chinese, Malay, and Indian civilians to resist or collaborate with British and Commonwealth soldiers, rebellious Indian troops (1915 and 1942), invading Japanese combatants (1941–1945), and communists (1948–1960). British military leaders tried—but largely failed—to win the “hearts and minds” of colonial subjects many times before Templer popularized this famous phrase. As a result, Losing Hearts and Minds examines the fraught history of war and empire that made British leaders like Templer believe that “winning hearts and minds” was innovative, necessary, and possible.
One major impediment to earning and maintaining civilian confidence was that British rule in Asia hinged on racial hierarchy. Farish Noor and Peter Carey have argued that “theories of racial difference and white supremacy were at the very heart of the empire-building process in the nineteenth century.” As a result, nineteenth-century conflicts in Southeast Asia were “race wars” that “were conceived, rationalized, fought or justified at times on the basis of racial ideas and understandings.”7 Yet “race” is a complex term that deserves further analysis. As many scholars have argued, race is not a fixed biological reality but rather a shifting and relational category of power, similar to and intersecting with gender, class, and sexuality.8 This was especially true in colonial Asia, where diverse colonial populations vied for opportunity despite limits on their upward mobility. According to Kristy Walker, “race became the primary category of social analysis in Southeast Asia, governing employment opportunities and public space.”9 Yet racial stratification was also gendered. For Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, in “societies where racial demarcation is endemic to their sociocultural fabric and heritage, gender identity is inextricably linked to and even determined by racial identity.”10 British leaders in Singapore and Malaya heavily relied on gender-segregated military and labor recruitment, as well as racial stratification, to define people’s value and limit their access to power.
For Ann Laura Stoler, racial categorization is also complicated by the fact that terms like “colonizer” and “colonized” were not fixed and self-evident, but rather “an historically shifting pair of social categories.”11 Many white settlers brought their own ideas of Britishness or Europeanness but also adopted norms and styles that would amplify their difference from the colonized. In turn, definitions of “British” or “European” identity proved complex. Some understood “British” to be an inclusive term that forged unity across the empire. This included colonial subjects and soldiers from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean with no direct family ties to, or experiences in, Britain but who still understood themselves as “British” because of their inclusion within the empire.12 This was especially common in the military, where the idea of the imperial, and later Commonwealth, family helped secure personnel and material support from colonies in wartime.13 At the same time, white settlers and their descendants in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa increasingly embraced the term “British” to distinguish themselves from racialized Indigenous and migrant populations, as well as those living in predominantly Black or Asian colonies.14 Whiteness, in these contexts, became a precondition of “British” belonging, making anyone not white implicitly not British. “European,” similarly, was a malleable rather than fixed term.15 Entering elite clubs, cinemas, and cafés often meant an ability to pass as white. As a result, many British and Asian soldiers and civilians used “British” and “European” to mark the white colonial population as separate and distinct from Asian colonial subjects. They often extended these terms to white Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders, further emphasizing Britishness and Europeanness as whiteness. Given that not all Britons or Europeans were white, this work often contextualizes the terms European or British by adding “white” before them, to signify people benefiting from the status of whiteness. “European,” “white,” and “British” were all contested terms that had multiple meanings. Yet whiteness, in this period, carried currency for those who claimed it.
Another difficulty of early-twentieth-century racial categorization is that it often existed as a binary between Black and white. “Native” became shorthand for colonial leaders to cast all racialized subjects as possessing similar traits, flattening their identities and making them easier to rule. As a result, the complex meanings of “Asian” often get left out of the conversation. Anne Anlin Cheng has argued for reclaiming the term “yellow” to discuss racialization of Asian people in the present.16 In the period discussed, however, “yellow” was a common slur used against Asian migrants.17 Many in Southeast Asia understood it as a pejorative term that denied them connections to a specific homeland or claims to Britishness.18 It signified them as “colonial others,” betraying promises of inclusive Britishness that transcended racial differences. It also flagged the “otherness” of people with both European and Asian (“Eurasian”) heritage, underlining their tenuous connections to Britishness, Europeanness, and whiteness. As a result, when discussing racial bars or racial exclusion along a color line, I use the term “Asian” while recognizing that the term has limitations. Writing during the Emergency, Eurasian doctor and author Han Suyin explained that:
Asians now spoke of themselves as we-Asians, as if Asia were an entity, when really it was a huge agglomeration of continents and cultures and races and religions and governments further apart from each other than any European country could be from any other European country. And yet we-Asians gripped the imagination . . . It meant something. There was a feeling of akinness, from Egypt to Japan . . . and all these countries were changing, changing, running the centuries into days, hurrying and scrambling forward, at a breathless speed which left European prejudices and platitudes about them as far behind as the buggy horse was left panting after a jet plane. Somehow Europe appeared so staid, stay-behind and unimaginative beside this surging exaltation of Asia.19
As Han Suyin suggests, “Asian” was an important concept for how people self-identified to create transnational solidarities that transcended imperial identity. The complexity and imprecision of racial categorization, alongside its very real consequences, is exactly why race and militarism are essential to understanding British colonial rule in Asia. Racial identities enabled the implementation of, and resistance to, colonial violence in times both of formal war and colonial “peace.”
While this study focuses on the twentieth century, ideas about race in Southeast Asia were central to Britain’s earliest colonial and trade settlements in the nineteenth century. One of Singapore’s most influential governors, Stamford Raffles, was also a member of the English East India Company and hoped to divide Singapore into racially segregated districts. As a result, Lt. Philip Jackson mapped a (never executed) plan of the city in this light in 1828.20 As British demands for trade increased, Company leaders emphasized racialized labor recruitment to encourage and coerce Chinese and Indian migrants to come to the region for work. On arrival, they often faced plantation-style discipline and severe racial hierarchy.21 As Lynn Lees has explained, “If sugar planted a harsh, hierarchical empire in rural Malaya, plantation rubber cultivated its growth by identifying colonial rule with unfree labour, endemic violence, and racial separation.”22 At the same time, British leaders relied on the heavy recruitment of men from India to maintain and defend the region’s profitable trade. After a major rebellion against the East India Company started with a mutiny of troops in India in 1857, British suspicions toward colonial subjects intensified.23 Military investment increased across Asia, including building Fort Canning in Singapore. While this ostensibly protected the colony from external attack, defenses towered over Chinese residential districts. Military power was as much, if not more, about protecting colonial investments from colonial subjects as it was about defending against external threats.
When the British Colonial Office took control of the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Malacca, Penang) in 1867, they integrated the region more formally into networks of British military power.24 This included a recurring reliance on colonial troops and police to curb Indigenous resistance, such as the heavy use of Sikh police during the Pahang Civil War (1891–1895).25 A series of treaties in the early twentieth century expanded British rule even further, bringing previously independent regions under the umbrella of British kingship as “Unfederated” Malay states with protectorate status. These states retained previous rulers as figureheads to legitimize unpopular imperial policies.26 As war and anti-colonial activity intensified in the twentieth century, British leaders hoped that policing the population with Indian men would retain colonial control.27 Instead, Singapore and Malaya became fertile sites of revolt that undermined British assumptions about governance and rebellion because soldiers and civilians constantly found commonalities. Long before Singapore gained its reputation as an “impregnable fortress,” and Malaya became a test case for winning “hearts and minds,” soldiers and civilians alike dreamed of freedom from military occupation.
British leaders’ reliance on Indian soldiers also influenced racial assumptions about martial prowess in Singapore and Malaya. In particular, the Indian Army prioritized the recruitment of men who belonged to the so-called “martial races.” This proved to be a malleable set of ideals that defined men’s martial potential through their faith, region of origin, ethnicity, and physical stature.28 Gajendra Singh has applied Ann Laura Stoler’s phrase about “colonial negatives” to Indian Army martial race concepts. Just as photograph negatives are colorless shadows that can be cropped, redeveloped, or discarded, martial race ideas are adjustable, “half formed images” that do as much to distort as portray the living breathing men they represent.29 Gender, as much as race, was central to these formulations, as “martial race” status granted some men claims to robust, powerful masculinity, while relegating others to the marginal status of “effeminacy.”30 This was also dehumanizing. Michelle Moyd has argued that the idealized image of East African askari, which echoed Indian “martial race” thinking, allowed real men to become “a beautiful object—a myth—floating above history.”31 For Moyd, martial race theories shaped how young men understood themselves in relation to colonial regimes. Tim Parsons also notes that “martial race” categorization was rooted in the political economies of different colonial contexts and involved inventing or hardening existing identities. Officers encouraged “martial race” soldiers to think of the army as their tribe, family, or community, isolating them from civilian experiences of colonialism and collective identity.32 Simeon Man suggests that diverse recruitment enabled empires to claim “antiracism and anticolonialism” without actually ending “imperial violence.”33 In Singapore and Malaya, the reliance on international imperial soldiers, and selective racialized recruiting in local police and volunteer forces, ensured pervasive tensions around race and militarism. These echoed and duplicated the problems of British rule in India rather than laying the groundwork for a “successful” model of imperial war.
British militarism in India cast such a large shadow over Malaya and Singapore that it also shaped the “hearts and minds” approach to war. In 1891, Sir Robert Groves Sandeman, working for the governor-general in Baluchistan on the Indian borderlands, wrote to a friend that “to be successful on this frontier a man has to deal with the hearts and minds of the people and not only with their fears.”34 This made Sandeman, rather than Templer, the originator of perhaps the most famous phrase in military history. The “Sandeman system” emphasized the recruitment of local personnel into militias to become a “civilizing” influence that could maintain colonial order. As Nivi Manchanda has argued, the perceived unpredictability of the region created an “emergency episteme” in which experts were born overnight to create “practical” knowledge recycled through an “academic-military complex” that served “overwhelmingly . . . military purposes.”35 Of course, this approach did not bring stability to the Indo-Afghan border region, which remained a space of colonial militarization and brutality up to and through the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Still, the Sandeman system influenced colonial leaders beyond India. Harold Briggs, who preceded Templer as high commissioner in Malaya, had served in Baluchistan with the son of one of Sandeman’s assistants. Briggs would introduce the mass internment and resettlement of predominantly Chinese civilians, renamed “New Villages” by Templer, in Malaya during the Emergency. The phrase that made Templer famous in military circles, and profoundly influenced U.S. militarism, had clear roots in the “high tide” of British colonialism in India. Yet Templer did not understand himself as part of this imperial history. Years later, he referred to “winning hearts and minds” as “that nauseating phrase I think I invented.”36 Ignoring or forgetting the imperial past enabled leaders to suggest that winning “hearts and minds” offered something other than a repackaged rationale for continued violence.
Rather than tracking if Templer introduced a “successful” model of counterinsurgency, Losing Hearts and Minds interrogates how wartime experiences made, remade, destroyed, or fortified imperial identities. While the title speaks to a famous military phrase, it does not center the voices of leaders and policy makers who inspired, defined, or took inspiration from it.37 Instead, it prioritizes the people whose hearts and minds British leaders claimed to win. It does so by using a wide range of diaries, letters, oral histories, and memoirs of people who identified with or served British power. This includes Indian soldiers who longed for respect back home, Eurasian nurses who identified as British without ever setting foot in Britain, and Chinese businessmen who rushed to defend white Britons from rebelling Indian soldiers. It also examines white soldiers and civilians who saw themselves as challenging, rather than reinforcing, colonial racial hierarchies. Some white women doctors claimed to “understand” Malays. Many Australian internees lived beside Asian and Eurasian civilians in internment camps. A few British soldiers felt that their service was about cross-cultural collaboration. Many colonial subjects believed or hoped that serving the empire could facilitate egalitarian, interracial unity. Yet these testimonies—whether by white, Asian, or Eurasian authors—more often reveal the limitations of forging inclusivity in wartime. Most felt betrayed, in one way or another, by the racial biases embedded in colonial law, policing, and militarism, which limited their ability to secure the power promised to them. As a result, this work seeks to understand how people emotionally processed such betrayals. As Tiffany Florvil has argued, emotions could help a “community cohere” by serving as tools for “refashioning of new transnational, diasporic, identities and kinships.”38 Similarly, Losing Hearts and Minds respects people’s emotions as legitimate ways of processing war and rejecting the dehumanization of colonial violence that treated them like disposable pawns.
The source base for this project includes archival resources originally produced in English, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, and Malay from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, India, Nepal, Malaysia, and Singapore. Yet the focus on those serving or proximate to British power means that many sources were translated into English either by colonial officials or archivists and scholars. Many of the Indian, Malay, and Chinese actors documented in this story left testimonies in English through either oral histories or memoirs. As Gauri Viswanathan has explored, English education in colonial spaces often inculcated Christian values that shaped how colonial subjects understood the world.39 Ashis Nandy, Homi Bhaba, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak similarly warn scholars that such cultural “mimicry” reinforces colonial power, limiting self-formation and colonized people’s ability to “speak” or even know their own voices.40 However, throughout this study, I follow Gajendra Singh in seeing these sources as contested rather than compromised. For Singh, even court testimonies were a “process” rather than a fixed text.41 In this, Singh goes beyond James C. Scott’s notion that sources contain “hidden transcripts” of resistance because colonial subjects’ intentions often went beyond simple colonial binaries of either compliance or resistance.42 Instead, this analysis takes all forms of collaboration, resistance, self-preservation, uncertainty, and fear as contingent responses rooted in immediate needs to survive warfare and colonial rule. Where my own language skills are inadequate, I rely on scholars such as Francis Loh Kok Wah, Mahani Musa, Agnes Khoo, and Tan Teng Phee, who provide invaluable insight into how Chinese and Malay language actors understood these events.43
This study also relies on oral history interviews to understand the perspectives of those who lacked the power to write detailed reports or memoirs about their experiences. The National Archives of Singapore provides useful translations of interviews with Malay, Indian, and Chinese eyewitnesses. Translations, of course, hold many limitations, particularly when discussing emotional histories of war steeped in nationalist or anti-colonial narratives. As Sandra Taylor recalled of her research on Vietnamese communist women, she was American and her translator was a communist. As a result, she never got “their true feelings” but rather “a dramatized account of their heroism.” Since memories, like translations, are “reconstructions” rather than factual records of the past, they often justify certain actions or inactions that may not conform to present social, cultural, or political norms, particularly in a context of collaboration or resistance. Yet for Taylor, like Singh, these stories are not “falsifications” but rather “paeans to the glories of a particular ideology, testaments to the righteousness of their cause, testimonies to the need to persist against what these women saw as the cruelties of a foreign imperialist and its local supporters.”44 Similarly, Losing Hearts and Minds closely tracks the stories people tell about war and colonialism to understand the long-term limitations of Britain’s perceived “success” at winning hearts and minds. If people’s memories of war involved discrimination, hatred, isolation, and racial persecution, then their hearts were never won.
In colonial Singapore and Malaya, people used their personal histories of war to process their experiences and forge a place for themselves within or beyond colonial society. Interpreting these diverse sources benefits from Joan Scott’s understanding of “the evidence of experience,” which she calls the “evidence for the fact of difference.” In her analysis, people use specific memories to understand and define their identities—such as framing early erotic encounters as integral to “coming out” stories. Instead of naturalizing identity categories, she encourages “exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world.”45 Similarly, Losing Hearts and Minds recognizes that no individual account stands in as a “typical” British, Malay, Chinese, Australian, or Indian perspective. Instead, these sources show how people in wartime experienced similar emotional responses to the conflicts in which they were immersed but had unequal methods of coping with and acting upon these traumas. As Tan Teng Phee has argued, this makes it possible for “elites and ‘small people’ alike” to “become the keepers and makers of the past.”46 By examining deeply emotional personal stories of militarization and military service from the high tide of imperial power to decolonization, Losing Hearts and Minds shows that military leaders rarely understood the varied human consequences of war and empire. This was especially true when they claimed to “win” civilian favor.
This work builds on rich “war and society” and post-colonial scholarship that explores the violent consequences of imperialism, war, and racism. Many scholars have examined the role of colonial soldiers in Asia during the world wars.47 Others have considered the cosmopolitan and multilingual nature of cultural, economic, and political life in colonial Singapore and Malaya.48 Some have shown how colonial subjects used vast interconnected anti-colonial networks across Asia-Pacific to challenge imperial rule.49 Many more have demonstrated that British colonialism depended on everyday and exceptional violence to maintain colonial control.50 As Caroline Elkins has recently argued, “violence was not just the British Empire’s midwife, it was endemic to the structures and systems of British rule.”51 Losing Hearts and Minds builds on this impressive work by comparing soldier and civilian experiences to tell a global story of various colonial and anti-colonial actors living, working, and fighting across multiple conflicts in a single colonial space. Singapore and Malaya’s populations—soldier or civilian, revolutionary or cautiously “loyal”—were highly mobile, with connections across the colonial world. Yet war came, again and again, to this place. As a result, Losing Hearts and Minds understands these mobile experiences of war as essential to the fabric of colonial society. It seeks to reconstruct the social and racial worlds of British Malaya and how this shaped the perceived success, and overlooked failures, of the hearts-and-minds strategy. As people lived, migrated, or served in Malaya and Singapore, they brought assumptions about difference that trembled or solidified in the face of conflict. By emphasizing the many faces of war from the perspective of those who experienced it, this book tells the story of living in a place constantly made and remade by war and empire.
1. Dolores Ho, interview by Kate Imy, July 2019, National Army Museum, Waiouru, New Zealand.
2. Sarah Sewall (Introduction), John A. Nagl (Foreword), David H. Petraeus (Foreword), and James F. Amos (Foreword), The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). For a United States–focused examination of the phrase, see Elizabeth Dickinson, “A Bright Shining Slogan: How ‘Hearts and Minds’ Came to Be,” Foreign Policy, August 22, 2009, https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/08/22/a-bright-shining-slogan/.
3. Quoted in Richard Clutterbuck, The Long Long War: The Emergency in Malaya, 1948–1960 (London: Cassell, 1967), 3. For more on Templer, see Leon Comber, Templer and the Road to Malayan Independence: The Man and His Time (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015).
4. Key works discussing the event include Sho Kuwajima, First World War and Asia: Indian Mutiny in Singapore (1915) (Osaka: Sho Kuwajima, 1988); Heather Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Umej Bhatia, Our Name Is Mutiny: The Global Revolt against the Raj and the Hidden History of the Singapore Mutiny 1907–1915 (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2020); Tim Harper, “Singapore, 1915, and the Birth of the Asian Underground,” Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 6 (November 2013): 1782–811.
5. Key works include C. A. Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (London: Penguin, 2005); Brian P. Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore, 1940–1942 (Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing Group, 2005); Patricia Pui Huen Lim and Diana Wong, War and Memory in Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000); Lachlan Grant, Australian Soldiers in Asia-Pacific in World War II (Sydney: NewSouth, 2014); Ban Kah Choon and Yap Hong Kuan, Rehearsal for War: The Underground War Against the Japanese (Singapore: Horizon Books, 2002); Cheah Boon Kheng, Red Star over Malaya: Resistance and Social Conflict during and after the Japanese Occupation of Malaya, 1941–46 (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2003); Karl Hack, Defence and Decolonisation in Southeast Asia: Britain, Malaya and Singapore, 1941–1968 (Richmond, UK: Routledge Curzon, 2001).
6. Karl Hack, The Malayan Emergency: Revolution and Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Karl Hack, “The Malayan Emergency as Counter-Insurgency Paradigm,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (2009); C. A. Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Teng Phee Tan, Behind Barbed Wire: Chinese New Villages during the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960 (Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 2020); Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied, Radicals: Resistance and Protest in Colonial Malaya (Delkab: Northern Illinois University Press, 2015); Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame: Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey, Emergency and Confrontation: Australian Military Operations in Malaya and Borneo 1950–1966 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin and the Australian War Memorial, 1996); Raffi Gregorian, The British Army, the Gurkhas, and Cold War Strategy in the Far East, 1947–1954 (New York: Palgrave, 2002); T. N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Christopher Pugsley, From Emergency to Confrontation: The New Zealand Armed Forces in Malaya and Borneo 1949–1966 (South Melbourne, Victoria: Oxford University Press, 2003); Kumar Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda: The Winning of Malayan Hearts and Minds, 1948–1958 (Richmond, UK: Routledge Curzon, 2002); Anthony Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948–1960 (London: Muller, 1975); Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerilla Warfare—the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Leon Comber, Malaya’s Secret Police, 1945–60: The Role of the Special Branch in the Malayan Emergency (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, and Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 2008); Rory Cormac, Confronting the Colonies: British Intelligence and Counterinsurgency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); David French, The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Christopher E. Goscha and Christian F. Ostermann, Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1945–1962 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
7. Farish A. Noor and Peter Carey, eds., Racial Difference and the Colonial Wars of 19th Century Southeast Asia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 9, 15.
8. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 251–74; Ann Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 3 (July 1992): 514–51.
9. Kristy Walker, “Intimate Interactions: Eurasian Family Histories in Colonial Penang,” Modern Asian Studies 26, no. 2 (2012): 324.
10. Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race.”
11. Ann Laura Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 1 (January 1989): 134–61, at 136–7.
12. Anne Spry Rush, Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
13. Kate Imy, Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).
14. John Mitcham, Race and Imperial Defence in the British World, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 2.
15. Olivette Otele, African Europeans: An Untold Story (New York: Basic Books, 2021); Tiffany Florvil, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020).
16. Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
17. David Atkinson, The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Madeline Y. Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
18. For more on Eurasian identities, see Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories”; Liesbeth Rosen Jacobson, “The Eurasian Question: The Colonial Position and Postcolonial Options of Colonial Mixed Ancestry Groups from British India, Dutch East Indies and French Indochina Compared,” Historische Migratiestudies 6 (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 2018), 14, https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/62456.
19. Han Suyin, . . . And the Rain My Drink (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), 252.
20. “Plan of the Town of Singapore by Lieut Jackson,” Survey Department, Singapore (1828), National Archives of Singapore, accessed July 2, 2023, https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/maps_building_plans/record-details/f9926418-115c-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad; Bonny Tan, “Raffles Town Plan (Jackson Plan),” National Library Board, last modified 2016, https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_658_2005-01-07.html.
21. Lynn Hollen Lees, Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1786–1941 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 182; Lim Teck Ghee, “British Colonial Administration and the ‘Ethnic Division of Labour’ in Malaya,” Kajian Malaysia 2, no. 2 (1984): 28–66; Colin E. R. Abraham, “Racial and Ethnic Manipulation in Colonial Malaya,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 6, no. 1 (1983): 18–32; Sandra Khor Manickam, “Race and the Colonial Universe in British Malaya,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (October 2009): 593–612.
22. Lees, Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects, 217.
23. For more on 1857, see Vera Nünning, “‘Daß Jeder Seine Pflicht Thue.’ Die Bedeutung der Indian Mutiny für das Nationale Britische Selbstverständnis,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 78 (1996), 373; Marina Carter and Crispin Bates, Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2013); Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race, and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 28–9; Kim A. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 27–8; Avril Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
24. Malcolm H. Murfett et al., Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore from 1275 to 1971 (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2011).
25. Netusha Naidu, “‘Sly Civility’ and the Myth of the ‘Lazy Malay’: The Discursive Economy of British Colonial Power during the Pahang Civil War, 1891–1895,” in Racial Difference and the Colonial Wars of 19th Century Southeast Asia, ed. Noor and Carey, 193.
26. Lees, Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects, 168–9.
27. Nadzan Haron, “Colonial Defence and British Approach to the Problems in Malaya,” Modern Asian Studies 24, no. 2 (1990): 275–95.
28. There is a rich and robust scholarly dialogue about the “Martial Races.” See for example, Streets, Martial Races; Kaushik Roy, Brown Warriors of the Raj: Recruitment & the Mechanics of Command in the Sepoy Army, 1859–1913 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2008); Gavin Rand and Kim Wagner, “Recruiting the ‘Martial Races’: Identities and Military Service in Colonial India,” Patterns of Prejudice 46, nos. 3–4, (2012); Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (London: Macmillan, 1994).
29. Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers, 12–13.
30. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Streets, Martial Races.
31. Michelle Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014), 210, 10–11.
32. Timothy Parsons, The African Rank-and-File: Social Implications of Colonial Military Service in the King’s African Rifles, 1902–1964 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999), 5–6, 55.
33. Simeon Man, Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Decolonizing Pacific (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2018), 12.
34. Quoted in B. D. Hopkins, “The Problem with ‘Hearts and Minds’ in Afghanistan,” Middle East Report 255 (Summer 2010), https://merip.org/2010/05/the-problem-with-hearts-and-minds-in-afghanistan/. See also T. H. Thornton, Colonel Sir Robert Sandeman: His Life and Work on Our Indian Frontier (London: John Murray, 1895), letter dated April 19, 1891, title page.
35. Nivi Manchanda, Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 8.
36. Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerilla Warfare, 1.
37. Simon Smith, “General Templer and Counter-Insurgency in Malaya: Hearts and Minds, Intelligence, and Propaganda,” Intelligence and National Security 16, no. 3 (2001): 60–78. Thompson and Clutterbuck focus on the impact the Emergency had on American militarism in Southeast Asia: Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966); Clutterbuck, The Long Long War.
38. Florvil, Mobilizing Black Germany, chap. 1, Kindle.
39. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
40. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 65; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia Univesity Press, 1994), 66–111.
41. Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers, 19.
42. Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers, 82; James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985).
43. Francis Loh Kok Wah, Beyond the Tin Mines: Coolies, Squatters and New Villagers in the Kinta Valley, Malaysia, c. 1880–1980 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988); Agnes Khoo, Life as the River Flows: Women in the Malayan Anti-Colonial Struggle (Monmouth, Wales: Merlin Press, 2004); Tan, Behind Barbed Wire; Mahani Musa, “Women in the Malayan Communist Party, 1942–89,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 44, no. 2 (June 2013): 226–49.
44. Sandra C. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Ho Chi Minh and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 7, 17, 18.
45. Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer, 1991): 773–97, at 777. See also Keat Gin Ooi, “The ‘Slapping Monster’ and Other Stories: Recollections of the Japanese Occupation (1941–1945) of Borneo through Autobiographies, Biographies, Memoirs, and Other Ego-Documents,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 7, no. 3 (Winter 2006).
46. Teng Phee Tan, “Oral History and People’s Memory of the Malayan Emergency (1948–60): The Case of Pulai,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 27, no. 1 (2012): 84–119, at 86. See also Kah Sengh Loh, Ernest Koh, and Stephen Dobbs, Oral History in Southeast Asia: Memories and Fragments (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
47. Yasmin Khan, India at War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers; Tarak Barkawi characterizes Indian soldiers as cosmopolitan in Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
48. Lees, Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects; Rachel Leow, Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Loh Kok Wah, Beyond the Tin Mines; Timothy P. Barnard, Contesting Malayness: Malay Identity across Boundaries (Singapore: NUS Press, 2018); Anthony Milner, The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya: Contesting Nationalism and the Expansion of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
49. Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021); Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia; Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011); Moon-Ho Jung, The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State, Violence, and Radical Movements Across the Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).
50. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45–86; Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021); Taylor Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (New York: Routledge, 2010); Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (New York: Penguin, 2022).
51. Elkins, Legacy of Violence, 13.
52. Bayly and Harper cite the larger number, though 30,000 is the more common reference. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 25.
53. Elkins, Legacy of Violence, 14.
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