Customer Reviews

Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia

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An excellent read, well written and apparently unbiased. The authors cover the return of British forces primarily in Burma and Malaya. Also covering the British military operations in Indochina and Indonesia and the events leading to the Partition of India.
The book covers a huge scope of much neglected history and should be read by anyone interested in this region. Especially the sections on Burma and Malaysia.
My only complaint is that the sections on each country ends with the departure of the British. I would have enjoyed reading a postscript of the politics of those countries after the end of military actions.

In this brilliant book the entire story of Post-War Asia is finally revealed. For sixty years the horrors of Post-War Asia have been largely ignored. Instead history of Asia after the war has focused on Vietnam, which only began in the 1950s with French involvement. This book wants to re-focus our attention on the other half billion people in India, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma(Myanmar) and Indonesia. This massive area came under British occupation following the war and immediately began to fall apart as old religious and ethnic rivalries came to the fore, communist insurgencies broke out and nationalism was on the rise.

The first part of the book examines the 'new Asia' that came into being following the surrender of Japanese forces in the region. Burma was the first country to experience problems as nationalists and others bucked for independence. In India Muslim-Hindu tensions began to flare. There was a 'second colonial conquest' underway in Indonesia and Malaysia and underneath it all the Communist party, so long underground, was re-emerging among many ethnic Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia.

But what is most important in this book is the new understanding of ethnic-religious violence in the region. In India it was Hindu against Muslim that led to Partition in 1947 and the killing 1 million people in communal violence and the making of 17 million into refugees when Pakistan was cleansed of Hindus and Muslims fled the Punjab.

In Malaysia it became the rallying cry of "Malaya for the Malays" which meant Malaysia would be ethnically Malay and religiously Muslim, the Chinese, who were seen as Communists, would be ethnically-cleansed.

In Indonesia Islamic parties were also on the rise, alongside the nationalism of Sukarno. In Burma there was violence between ethnic-minorities such as the Karens in 1948. It also follows the emergence of Lee Kuan Hew and Singaporean moves towards independence from Malaysia, following anti-Chinese riots against the Chinese in Singapore. The British war in Malaysia would drag on until 1960.

This is a brilliant study of South and Southeast Asia and it means much for today. Too often this part of the world has been completely ignored and yet these countries form a fulcrum today between China and the West. Moreover modern Muslim insurgencies in Thailand and elsewhere are important to understand. The tragedy of this book is that it could not include enough information on Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia or Thailand.

Seth J. Frantzman

Once South East Asia did not consist of countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia. Rather it was part of the British, Dutch or French Empire. These empires were rather repellent political systems. The mass of the population was poor and the local elite were co-opted by the imperial power. The nature of the system was autocratic. Education was limited to a narrow elite as no one wanted anyone to start challenging the system. Development was limited to a narrow range of export industries to boost the trade balance of he imperial power. Central to the whole exercise was racism that justified the system and in turn made it repellent. Possibly the system might have lasted longer but for the Japanese. The Japanese occupied much of South East Asia and tried to mobilize the local elites to strengthen their war effort. Suddenly all of these countries developed self-awareness, which in turn led to the evolution of nationalist movements. They also became a fertile ground for the spread of communism.

With the defeat of the Japanese the old imperial powers came back and tried to impose their old regimes. The forgotten wars of the title are the wars that started after 1945 as the old imperial order broke down.

Britain was willing to allow India independence, however it wanted to hang on to Malaya. At the end of the war Britain was desperate for foreign exchange as it was deeply in debt. Malaya was a wealthy colony that had high exports of tin and rubber. This led to a full-scale communist rebellion that was described at the time as "the emergency". The British were able to win but granted independence in the 60s.

The French of course lost their colonial war in Vietnam. The problem they faced was that China and Russia were able to supply the Vietnamese rebels with modern weapons.

The Dutch also fought to regain what was to become Indonesia. America however eventually pressured them into pulling out of the fight and allowing independence. The reason being that a continued war might have led firstly to the communists becoming the dominant arm of the independence movement. Secondly a communist led movement might have won and this would have been a disaster for the west. Far better to have independence when the communists were a minor ally.

The book is good as it explains in some detail how the Second World War created the seeds of change. It then describes the forces that led to de-colonization. Also the nature of the struggle is something which has been important in how the various new countries developed. Burma for instance was thrown almost immediately into a long civil war. This led to the dominance of the military which has plagued the country ever since. The role of the Chinese minority in the communist movement in Malaya led to a state in which racial identity is a key determinant in the working of the political system. All in all a very good book about and the old imperial system and its demise.

While one might be fooled by the cover and the title into thinking that this is a re hash nothing could be further from the truth. This book follows up where "Forgotten Armies" left off and doesn't miss a beat. Having lived in the region and met quite a few people who lived through the events I was impressed by the depth and detail of the research by the author. A definite must read for anyone interested in postwar SE Asia.

It's not often that you wonder what on earth possessed you to buy a particular book - and I wasn't 100 dense pages into "Forgotten Wars" before I was thinking to myself, Why?

As other reviewers have commented, this book clearly does cover ground in desperate need of insight and review - the attempts of Britain to recover her leading role in Southeast Asia after World War II as each of these regions in Southeast Asia pursued independence. The French experience of this we know as the beginning of the Vietnam War.

Unfortunately, Bayly and Harper leave no stone unturned in their effort, rendering the book a mind-numbing exercise.

No real differentiation is made between minor and major historical characters, so as a result, try as you might to focus on who did what, when, and why, you soon get bogged down in the details of how Person X wrote a letter that claimed something although Person Y thought this was not the case and in any event, Person X later that month changed his mind to be more in line with what Person Z had said two months prior... (in hindsight, any book with a 9-page glossary of "leading characters" at its beginning should be circumspect - even Shakespeare's plays have only a page or two).

This "no stone unturned" also means there is no real summary of the "action" during the four years covered by the book because, no doubt, how can you summarize a situation wherein everything that occurred was important (remember our 9 pages of dramatic persona?). Even a single page chronological summary might have helped.

In addition, because so many of the characters (at least on the British side) are the same because the whole region was one "protectorate" and thus received one set of British leaders, Blayly and Harper cite one a particular British action and decision at one point - then 15 or so pages later - pick it up again, giving it more context now that we've covered India in addition to Burma over this particular time window - and now they go into 3 or 4 pages of details around the particular decision. Its almost the reverse of how one might have imagined it - first the 3-4 pages of details surrounding and leading up to a decision, followed 15 pages later by a few sentence reminders.

You find the same thing when it comes to the photographs accompanying the book. Normally, one might expect characters like Aung San - a leading Burmese nationalist - mentioned not only in the 9-page glossary but also, when first cited in the text, to have a reference to Photograph 12 or Plate 6, etc. Not so with "Forgotten Wars." Instead, you'll need to flip through all the photographs before you suddenly see someone you read about at the beginning of the book on the last page of the photographs. That, by the way, is just another example of how poorly organized the book is: the characters who appear first in this chronological history are in the second set of photographs ... and vice versa.

Compared to other works that cover similarly complicated histories and geographies (David Fromkin's "A Peace to End All Peace", Peter Hopkirk's "The Great Game", Nathaniel Philbrick's "Mayflower", and Daniel Walker Howe's "What Hath God Wrought" just to name a few), Bayly and Harper's "Forgotten Wars" is incredibly dissatisfying and far too easily forgotten.

And in my view, that's what makes this book all the more frustrating - the late 1940s in Southeast Asia so desperately cry out for someone to tell their story well.

Good intentions aside, Bayly and Harper are not those storytellers.