ABSTRACT
To recognise the outstanding importance of the economic stability and the political security conferred by the West is to call attention to the few occasions when there was a disastrous failure to discharge the essential duties of government. Such occasions were the most serious blemishes in the long period of Western rule. The World Depression of the thirties, with its catastrophic effects on the incomes of the South East Asian peasants, and the Second World War, when Western arms proved incapable of shielding the colonial peoples against the tribulations of foreign invasion, did much to undermine both the colonial regime and the Western enterprise which that regime had fostered.
