ABSTRACT
Before we address the impact of the defeat, it is vital to convey something of the experience itself. Various aspects of it - its disorienting speed, the manner in which much of the civilian population was drawn into unwelcome participation in it, the initial assumptions about its causes and implications - shaped the politicisation that ensued. The history of these weeks is enormously complex and more thoroughly investigated Ьу military and political historians than Ьу social historians. What follows here is not an attempt to write the social history of Мау and June, which would require us to draw systematic distinctions among the different regional or class or gender experiences of defeat, but rather to offer certain somewhat impressionistic observations about the experience writ large, the main source for these impressions being the memoirs and diaries of participants.
