ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the resurrection and expansion of Japanese economic interests in Malaya and Singapore during the 1950s. It considers the nature and formation of the international order of Asia in the 1930s and 1950s in the light of new historiographical developments in the UK as well as in Japan. In the case of British India, the Lancashire textile industry's loss of competitiveness in the colonial market has been interpreted as an economic triumph' for Indian nationalism. Asian industrialization made steady progress by taking full advantage of the imperial world order of the inter-war era. The Japanese were responsible for what was perhaps the most revolutionary innovation within the rural economy of Southeast Asia at this time: the bicycles with which country people could get own goods to market.
