Letters From Malaya 1951 1956

My father was a captain in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (R.E.M.E.) and was sent to Malaya with his young family as part of the British government's response to the armed revolt of the Malayan Communist party. An emergency was declared which lasted from 1952 until 1960. The British encouraged Merdeka (Independence) through political means whilst instigating military counter-insurgency measures against the MCP. This remains the only successful jungle campaign against Communism ever to be fought by a Western power.

The Malayan Emergency lasted from 1948 to 1960. During these tumultuous years, following so soon after the Japanese surrender at the end of the Second World War, the whole country was once more turned upside down and the lives of the people changed. The war against the Communist Party of Malaya's determined efforts to overthrow the Malayan government involved the whole population in one form or another. Dr Comber analyses the pivotal role of the Malayan Police's Special Branch, the government's supreme intelligence agency, in defeating the communist uprising and safeguarding the security of the country. He shows for the first time how the Special Branch was organised and how it worked in providing the security forces with political and operational intelligence. His book represents a major contribution to our understanding of the Emergency and will be of great interest to all students of Malay(si)a's recent history as well as counter-guerrilla operations. It can profitably be mined, too, to see what lessons can be learned for counterinsurgency operations in other parts of the world.

'No nation can escape its geography', warned Percy Spender, Australia's Minister for External Affairs, in 1950. With the immediate turmoil of World War II over, communism and decolonisation had ended any possibility that Asia could continue to be ignored by Australia. In the early 1950s, Australia embarked on its most ambitious attempt to engage with Asia: the Colombo Plan. This book examines the public and private agendas behind Australia's foreign aid diplomacy and reveals the strategic, political and cultural aims that drove the Colombo Plan. It examines the legacy of WWII, how foreign aid was seen as crucial to achieving regional security, how the plan was sold to Australian and Asian audiences, and the changing nature of Australia's relationship with Britain and the United States. Above all this is the question of how Australia sought to project itself into the region, and how Asia was introduced into the Australian consciousness. In answering these questions, this book tells the story of how an insular society, deeply scarred by the turbulence of war, chose to face its regional future.

Decolonizing the History Curriculum in Malaysia and Singapore is a unique study in the history of education because it examines decolonization in terms of how it changed the subject of history in the school curriculum of two colonized countries – Malaysia and Singapore. Blackburn and Wu’s book analyzes the transition of the subject of history from colonial education to postcolonial education, from the history syllabus upholding the colonial order to the period after independence when the history syllabus became a tool for nation-building. Malaysia and Singapore are excellent case studies of this process because they once shared a common imperial curriculum in the English language schools that was gradually ‘decolonized’ to form the basis of the early history syllabuses of the new nation-states (they were briefly one nation-state in the early to mid-1960s). The colonial English language history syllabus was ‘decolonized’ into a national curriculum that was translated for the Chinese, Malay, and Tamil schools of Malaysia and Singapore. By analyzing the causes and consequences of the dramatic changes made to the teaching of history in the schools of Malaya and Singapore as Britain ended her empire in Southeast Asia, Blackburn and Wu offer fascinating insights into educational reform, the effects of decolonization on curricula, and the history of Malaysian and Singaporean education.