ABSTRACT

In 1939, Western colonial powers seemed securely, tranquilly and permanently entrenched in South-East Asia. They dominated five of the region’s six states: British Burma, with its headquarters in Rangoon; French Indo-China, a collection of states ruled by the French from Hanoi; the Philippines, an American colony; the Netherlands East Indies, a vast archipelagic state managed from Batavia; and British Malaya, a collection of political units controlled, with varying degrees of directness, from Kuala Lumpur and including, for our purposes, the regions of northern Borneo. Only in the Philippines was there any assured prospect of independence in the near future. The Americans—keen almost from the beginning to ensure their rule of the islands was only temporary and facilitative—had begun a period of tutelage in independence with the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935. The single large state which had escaped colonization by the West was Siam (renamed Thailand in 1939). It had, since the late nineteenth century, preserved its oft-threatened sovereignty through a programme of careful diplomacy abroad and, much more important, administrative modernization and infrastructural enhancement at home, ironically paralleling Western colonial efforts at state-building.