ABSTRACT
The literature on the Malayan Emergency has focused upon the aims and methods of the Malayan Communist Party and aspects of counter-insurgency such as psychological warfare, new villages and food denial operations. Although the significance of political concessions for winning ‘hearts and minds’ has been regularly stressed, their exact contribution to the defeat of insurgency and the latter’s impact upon the timing and manner of decolonisation have been obscured by the absence of the official record. The contiguity of Great Power ambitions in the region distinguished South-east Asia from much of Africa until the later 1950s. Malayan policy became enmeshed with the big issues of imperial defence and the Cold War with the result that the Colonial Office had less of a free hand in this area than in tropical Africa. The success was not solely due to British military might nor even to British skill in manipulating Malayan politicians.
