Britons in south-east Asia

The term south-east Asia came into general use during the Second World War and refers to the diverse territories between India and China. The region lies on the crossroads of world civilizations, but its history amounts to far more than the sum of foreign influences. For years, however, many Britons regarded it as further India, since its importance for them was largely determined by activities centred upon India.

The East India Company and south-east Asia, c.1760–1826

Having been worsted by the Dutch in the seventeenth-century competition over the spice trade, the British retreated to Bencoolen in Sumatra. From the mid-eighteenth century, however, the East India Company and private merchants paid the area fresh attention. They did so in order to protect the eastern flank of Bengal, pursue the China trade, exploit opportunities in south-east Asia itself, and advance all these interests at the expense of the Dutch and the French. In 1762 Alexander Dalrymple, an East India Company servant based in Madras who was exploring the Sulu sea for a new route to China, set up a short-lived post at Balambangan. The settlement at Penang, which the private trader Francis Light secured for the company by treaty with the sultan of Kedah in 1786, proved more profitable. In 1811 Stamford Raffles, who had previously served in Penang, so impressed Lord Minto [see Kynynmound, Gilbert Elliot Murray] with ideas on how to extend British influence in the Malay world that he was invited to join the governor-general's expedition to pre-empt a French occupation of the Dutch island of Java. Raffles, who stayed to administer Java, envisaged it as a permanent base for British expansion, but neither the company nor the government wished to retain it. After the defeat of Napoleon, Java was restored to the Netherlands and Raffles was transferred to the moribund residency at Bencoolen. Still determined to check the Dutch, in 1819 Raffles took advantage of a succession dispute in Johore to acquire Singapore for the company. Dutch protests were assuaged in 1824 by a treaty which divided the Malay archipelago into British and Dutch spheres and confirmed Britain in possession of Penang, Singapore, and the former Dutch colony of Malacca.

Merchants were also eager to penetrate the closed kingdoms of mainland south-east Asia. Michael Symes was sent to the Burmese court in 1795 and again in 1802 to improve political and commercial relations as well as to head off French influence. Neither these missions, nor that of Hiram Cox in 1796–8, settled the Anglo-Burmese frontier which in 1824 erupted in a war that forced Burma to part with Arakan and Tenasserim, a massive financial indemnity and commercial concessions. In 1821 John Crawfurd, an army doctor with the East India Company who became a trusted administrator, was sent on a fruitless mission to improve trade relations with the Thais and Vietnamese. A few years later Captain Henry Burney had some success in demarcating British and Thai spheres in the Malay world and winning favourable commercial terms. By 1826 the company's possessions in south-east Asia amounted to no more than two strips of coastal Burma and the presidency of the Straits Settlements (comprising Penang, Malacca, and Singapore). Nevertheless, these enclaves were expanding rapidly and British commerce was already affecting traditional patterns of regional trade, especially in the straits where activity focused upon Singapore.

Commercial expansion was accompanied by scientific endeavour. Alexander Dalrymple was a hydrographer who charted the coasts of the East Indies. William Marsden, who served in Bencoolen in the 1770s, and John Crawfurd, who succeeded Raffles at the Singapore residency, became eminent orientalists. Henry Burney collected material relating to Burma and Siam. Raffles amassed information about the Malay world; he sent specimens to London, though a vast cargo of flora, fauna, manuscripts, and art was lost in a fire at sea. The contributions of soldiers and administrators to knowledge and understanding of Asia would continue with the work of, for example, Arthur Phayre and Henry Yule in Burma and Richard Wilkinson and Richard Winstedt in Malaya.

Imperial expansion, 1826–1914

As the Straits Settlements expanded, they pressed upon neighbouring Malay states and baulked at control from India. In 1867 their jurisdiction was transferred from the government of India to the Colonial Office in Whitehall, which appointed to the post of governor a succession of military engineers rather than ‘India hands’ (Sir Harry Ord, Sir Andrew Clarke, and Sir William Jervois). In 1874 Clarke initiated a ‘forward policy’ in the peninsula when he agreed with Perak chiefs on the introduction of a British resident. During the course of the next forty years this arrangement was adopted in eight other Malay states. In 1841 the sultan of Brunei surrendered Sarawak to James Brooke, a romantic adventurer and admirer of Raffles. Brooke and his successors—his nephew Charles Brooke and Charles's son Vyner Brooke—ruled Sarawak as sovereign rajahs for a century. In the time they extended their kingdom as far as North Borneo which was owned by a British chartered company from 1881 to 1946. While British Malaya cut its links with India, Burma continued to be treated as its adjunct.

In 1852 the governor-general, Lord Dalhousie [see Ramsay, James Andrew Broun], launched a second war and annexed Lower Burma. Arthur Phayre, a soldier–administrator with profound knowledge of Burmese language and history, was appointed first commissioner and planned the development and layout of Rangoon. Mindon Min, whose kingdom was now confined to an area centred on Mandalay, strove to keep the British at bay by striking deals with officials (such as Phayre) and businessmen (like William Wallace [see under Wallace family]), but King Thibaw's dalliance with the French and his hostility to British concession-holders precipitated a third war at the end of 1885. Although Mandalay fell in a fortnight, rural resistance held down thousands of British and Indian troops for another five years. Siam avoided such a fate, partly on account of its different geopolitical position and partly because of the shrewd tactics of King Mongkut. In 1855 he agreed a free-trade treaty with Sir John Bowring (governor of Hong Kong) and invited Westerners to advise on the modernization of his state.

The nature and extent of British control varied in south-east Asia. British financial advisers were central to the government of Siam and in the 1930s the British minister, Sir Josiah Crosby, occupied a pivotal position in Bangkok. After the murder of the first resident in Perak, Hugh Low and Frank Swettenham devised less provocative ways of exercising power in the Malay states. By elevating the authority of the sultans they enhanced their position as residents and thus ensured that the advice which they offered would carry weight throughout the land. In Sarawak the Brookes were too penurious to embark on social and economic change and therefore made a virtue of the necessity to conserve. The Straits Settlements, on the other hand, were a crown colony whose government was shaped by the interests of foreign capital and the problems of immigrant communities. Burma was also directly administered but scant respect was paid to indigenous institutions. The monarchy was abolished, the Buddhist monkhood decayed, and Sir Charles Bernard superimposed on Upper Burma the wholly alien system of village administration developed in British India.

The connections between British rule and British economic interests were close yet complex. Business generated revenue while government created conditions in which business might flourish, but each frequently got in the way of the other. Sir Alfred Dent revived the fortunes of his family [see under Dent family], which at its height rivalled Jardine Matheson & Co. in the China trade, and put up the money for the chartered British North Borneo Company. Wallace Bros., whose connections with Bombay dated from the 1840s, won huge timber concessions in Burma. By the 1880s their subsidiary, the Bombay–Burmah Trading Corporation, was the largest business in Burma and extended into Siam. Founded in 1821, Guthrie & Co. expanded with the Malayan rubber boom in the early twentieth century and its chairmen, Sir John Anderson and Sir John Hay, were dominant figures in the international rubber industry. Despite the administrator's disdain for trade, there was an overlap in individuals' interests. On retirement senior officials benefited handsomely from company directorships and, while he was still in office, Swettenham negotiated with the sultan of Johore potentially lucrative personal deals over the route of a railway.

Colonial society, 1914–1941

Economic growth encouraged the movement of people as well as capital. Migrant farmers from Upper Burma, labourers from India, and cash credits provided by Madras moneylenders transformed rice cultivation and its export from the Irrawaddy delta. In Malaya, Chinese enterprise and labour dominated tin mining until the First World War, while European-owned rubber plantations depended on an imported Tamil workforce. The British tendency to stereotype ethnic groups and compartmentalize them according to social and economic function contributed to communal divisions which the inter-war depression aggravated. Discontent in Burma exploded in anti-Indian riots and Hsaya San's peasant rising (1930–32) which was suppressed only after additional troops had been brought in from India. The British did not entertain self-government for those whom Sir Reginald Craddock (lieutenant-governor of Burma) had called ‘spoilt children of the East’. They reckoned that, without the British presence, indigenous peoples would fall prey to others. Nevertheless, they agreed in 1935–7 to separate Burma from India and introduced ministerial government with Ba Maw at its head. In Malaya, which at this time was less disturbed than Burma by political and economic grievances, the governors Sir Laurence Guillemard and Sir Cecil Clementi concentrated on managerial issues such as striking a balance between alien demands and indigenous interests by way of administrative decentralization.

In spite of occasional unrest and fluctuations in commodity prices European society in British south-east Asia had become comfortable by the 1930s. As well as the availability of medicines and cold storage, improved communications had transformed life since the late nineteenth century. Among a growing number of visitors who followed previous generations of explorers, Robert Bruce Lockhart lamented the passing of the pioneering days of his youth while Noël Coward derided Malaya as ‘a first-rate country for second-rate people’. The absence of poor whites gave an appearance of uniformity which was belied, not only by civil, military, and commercial hierarchies, but also by the wide variety of occupations—the law, education, journalism, medicine, engineering, botanical science, the church and missionary work. Moreover, life in the towns differed markedly from that of the logger in the teak forest, the planter on the rubber estate, or the district officer out of regular contact with the secretariat. This society had features in common with colonial communities elsewhere, such as its significant contingents of Scots (Guthries and Wallaces), family networks (Maxwells and Braddells), European-only clubs, and the presence of colonial wives. The memsahibs were alleged to have called a halt to the integration of Europeans and Asians, although such intermingling had in general been dismally unequal and insensitive. Ethel Proudlock's trial for murder in 1911, which Somerset Maugham later used for The Letter, exposed deep anxieties in Malayan colonial society regarding race and gender.

Until the First World War sexual relations between British men and Asian women were widespread. Prostitution was rife in towns; mistresses were common; inter-racial marriage was rare. Francis Light and Hugh Low had Eurasian wives. The Brooke regime encouraged concubinage among new recruits. The amour of Bruce Lockhart (a young planter and future diplomat and writer) caused deep offence, however, because he selected a daughter of the Negri Sembilan royal family. After the First World War concubinage declined; Charleton Maxwell decided to marry his Malay mistress while George Orwell's [see Blair, Eric Arthur] Flory (Burmese Days) was disgraced by his. Sexual relations between white women and Asian men were generally discouraged on both sides. In the 1930s the Colonial Office regretted the marriage of Sultan Ibrahim of Johore to an English woman on the ground that it might detract from his legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects. Malay rulers for their part objected to their sons returning from overseas study with British ‘shop girls’ in tow. At the same time, those intrepid, lone Victorian women—such as Anna Leonowens (tutor to the wives and sons of the king of Siam), or the indefatigable traveller Isabella Bird [see Bishop, Isabella Lucy], or the botanical artist Marianne North—were being succeeded in colonial society by a generation of female professionals. The missionary teacher and welfare worker Josephine Foss arrived in Kuala Lumpur in 1924; the paediatrician and nutritionist Cicely Williams came to Singapore in 1936; the military nurse Evelyn Turner was posted to Malaya in 1939. All three were dynamic leaders of women internees during the Japanese occupation and in the vanguard of post-war colonial rehabilitation.

Imperial retreat, 1941–1971

The region was scarcely affected by the First World War, but the decision in 1921 to establish a naval base in Singapore made it a likely target in any future international conflict. The Singapore strategy failed in 1942 when General Percival surrendered to Japan. 130,000 British, Indian, and Commonwealth men were lost as casualties or prisoners, and 600,000 people fled from Burma in what was then the largest mass migration in history. Thousands suffered in prisons and labour camps, with Asian deaths far outnumbering European. In the Malayan jungle Frederick Spencer Chapman and members of force 136 linked up with the Malayan resistance. In Burma Orde Wingate's Chindit expeditions operated behind Japanese lines. The reconquest began with victories at Imphal and Kohima and culminated in the occupation of Rangoon by General Slim's Fourteenth Army in May 1945. After Emperor Hirohito's surrender 100,000 men from Lord Mountbatten's south-east Asia command landed unopposed in Malaya.

Notwithstanding this vast military deployment, Britain lacked the means to hold Burma indefinitely. Nor, with plans afoot to accelerate the transfer of power in India, were there strong reasons to linger in the region. Sir Hubert Rance, whom Clement Attlee appointed to negotiate withdrawal from Burma, pinned his hopes on Aung San as a successor but, after the latter's assassination in July 1947, Nu led Burma to independence. Unlike Burma, Malaya remained economically and strategically vital to British governments which reinvested the Singapore base and committed forces to countering communist insurgency on the peninsula. It was, as is portrayed in Anthony Burgess's Malayan Trilogy, a very different country from that visited by Somerset Maugham. Large numbers of British servicemen were sucked into this emergency, but the principal reasons for the failure of the uprising were the communal structure of Malayan society, General Harold Briggs's resettlement scheme, and the ‘hearts and minds’ initiatives associated with General Gerald Templer. Three years after Templer's departure Tunku Abdul Rahman became prime minister of independent Malaya which, again unlike Burma, stayed within the Commonwealth. In 1963 Britain's remaining dependencies (Singapore, North Borneo, and Sarawak) joined Malaya to form Malaysia. This arrangement was intended to perpetuate British interests and influence as cheaply as possible, but Singapore left the federation after two years and mounting defence costs forced the British to leave the Singapore base in 1971. Britain's retreat from south-east Asia lasted thirty years. It engaged more Britons, though often for relatively short spells, and affected a greater number of lives than had Britain's involvement in the region in any other period.

A. J. Stockwell