ABSTRACT
This chapter has stressed the enduring value of Malaya for the sterling area throughout the 1950s. The desire to maintain Malaya's dollar earnings and manage its sterling balances was clearly a central, though not exclusive, tenet of Britain's controlled decolonisation strategy for maritime Southeast Asia. The chapter points out, a number of modifications were made to the operation of the sterling regime in Southeast Asia during the 1950s, allowing the imperial economic bloc to metamorphose into a less ferocious beast by the end of that decade. The central importance of Malaya for the post-war sterling area has become an article of faith in the historiography of British decolonisation with economic ties between China and Malaya. The relatively open' nature of the sterling-area system in Asia can be further illustrated through an examination of the economic relations between Malaya and Hong Kong during the 1950s.
