R3.7 The emergence of independent states in Southeast Asia (1900–1990)

Southeast Asia is the region between India, China and Australia: the mainland states of Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Malaya, and the islands of the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei and the north of Borneo. Between 1946 and 1984 every colony in the region became an independent state, and the ways in which they won independence shaped their politics for decades afterwards.

The overview timeline shows three phases. Nationalist movements grew under colonial rule from about 1900 to 1941; the Japanese conquest and occupation of 1941–1945 broke colonial power across the region; and between 1945 and 1957 the main states of the region won independence, by negotiation or by war. China and Korea are East Asian, not Southeast Asian, states; India and Sri Lanka belong to South Asia.

Colonial Southeast Asia, c. 1900–1914

By 1900 the European conquest of Southeast Asia was almost complete. The Dutch controlled most of the islands that became Indonesia, although wars of conquest in Aceh (northern Sumatra) and Bali continued into the 1900s. France had joined Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos into the Union of Indochina (1887; Laos added 1893). Britain held Burma and the Malay states, and the United States had just taken the Philippines from Spain.

The colonial map

Every colonial state in the table drew its borders around peoples who had never been one nation. The Dutch East Indies contained hundreds of ethnic groups across thousands of islands, and Burma combined the Buddhist Burman plains with hill peoples such as the Shan, Kachin and Chin. Nationalists later had to persuade these peoples that they belonged to one nation, usually defined by the colonial border itself.

Political impact: indirect rule and "divide and rule"

No colonial power had enough European officials to govern millions of people directly, so all of them ruled through local elites. The Dutch governed Java through the priyayi aristocrats who served as regents, and the British governed the Malay states through their sultans. France kept the Nguyen emperors in Hue and the kings of Cambodia and Laos as figureheads. In Burma, by contrast, Britain abolished the monarchy in 1886, which left the Buddhist monkhood without its royal patron and the Burmese without a traditional focus of loyalty.

Colonial governments used divisions between peoples to keep control. The French ruled Vietnam as three separate ky (regions), Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina, with different laws, so that the Vietnamese could not act as one people. The British recruited the Burmese army mainly from the Karen, Kachin and Chin minorities, and in Malaya they kept Malays in farming and the civil service and left tin and trade to the Chinese. The Dutch divided the population of the Indies into legal categories of Europeans, "Foreign Orientals" (Chinese and Arabs) and Natives, each with its own law.

Economic impact: exports and exploitation

Colonial economies were reorganised to export raw materials to world markets. The most notorious system was the Dutch Cultivation System (cultuurstelsel, 1830–1870) in Java, which required villages to give part of their land or labour to growing export crops such as coffee, sugar and indigo for the government. Its profits paid a large share of the Dutch state budget, while famines struck parts of Java in the 1840s. After 1870 the Liberal Policy opened the Indies to private plantations on leased land, and by 1900 Western companies grew sugar in Java and tobacco and rubber in Sumatra, and Royal Dutch drilled for oil.

Elsewhere the pattern was similar. French Indochina earned revenue from state monopolies on salt, alcohol and opium, which Governor-General Paul Doumer (1897–1902) used to pay for railways and administration, and French companies such as Michelin opened rubber plantations where labour conditions were very harsh. The Mekong delta in Cochinchina and the Irrawaddy delta in Burma became great rice exporters, with land concentrated in the hands of landlords and moneylenders. British Malaya produced much of the world's tin and, by the 1920s, about half of its rubber.

The table shows that colonial economies did create wealth, including for some local elites, but distributed it very unequally. Railways, ports and irrigation were built mainly to move exports. Because colonies depended on a few exports sold on world markets, their people were exposed to sudden falls in prices, as the Great Depression of 1929–1933 showed.

Social impact: plural societies and displacement

Colonial economies needed labour that the local population would not or could not supply, so they encouraged immigration. Chinese migrants worked in Malayan tin mines and became traders and shopkeepers across the region; Tamil workers from southern India were brought to Malayan rubber estates; Indian labourers, officials and moneylenders moved to Burma, where Rangoon became a city with an Indian majority. The British administrator J. S. Furnivall later called the result a plural society: communities that lived side by side and met in the marketplace but did not mix.

Social stratification followed racial lines. Europeans sat at the top, Chinese, Indian and other immigrant groups often occupied the middle as traders and moneylenders, and the majority of the local population were peasants. In Lower Burma, Indian Chettiar moneylenders came to own a large share of the rice land after farmers defaulted on their loans in the Depression. Indigenous peoples were also displaced: plantations in Sumatra and Malaya took forest and hill land used by local communities, and in the Philippines the American administration declared unregistered land public property.

Cultural impact: religion, schools and language

Colonial rule challenged traditional religious practices in different ways. In the Philippines, where Spanish rule had made most of the population Catholic, the power of the Spanish friars over land and local government became a central grievance. In Burma the end of the monarchy removed the king's role as protector of Buddhism, and Europeans who wore shoes in pagodas offended Burmese Buddhists. The Dutch distrusted Islamic teachers and controlled the pilgrimage to Mecca, while French Catholic missions converted about a tenth of the Vietnamese, whom the colonial state then often favoured.

Western schools reached only a small minority but had a large effect. The French abolished the Confucian examinations in Vietnam (1915–1919) and promoted quoc ngu, the romanised script of Vietnamese, which made literacy far easier to spread. The Dutch Ethical Policy, announced by Queen Wilhelmina in 1901, promised irrigation, emigration from overcrowded Java and education as a "debt of honour" to the Indies. Its schools trained a small Indonesian elite of doctors, teachers and clerks, many of whom became nationalists.

The origins and growth of nationalism, 1900–1941

Nationalism is the belief that a people forms a nation with the right to govern itself in its own state. In Southeast Asia it began among small educated groups in the first decade of the twentieth century, and by the 1930s it had become a mass force in Indonesia, Vietnam, Burma and the Philippines. Malaya was the main exception: there nationalism stayed weak and divided by community until after 1945.

The diagram of causes groups the reasons why nationalism grew. Grievances were necessary, since peasants did not join movements without reasons to oppose colonial rule, but grievances alone produced local revolts, not national movements. Ideas, shared identities and examples from abroad allowed educated leaders to connect local anger to the goal of a nation-state.

The role of ideas

Most early nationalists had been educated in Western schools, where they learned about the French Revolution, liberalism and the nation-state, and saw that Europeans did not apply these ideals to their colonies. Religion supplied another set of ideas. Islamic modernism, carried by pilgrims and students returning from Mecca and Cairo, encouraged Muslims in the Indies and Malaya to purify their faith and to organise; Buddhist revival movements in Burma did the same for Burmese Buddhists. Japan's defeat of Russia in 1905 showed that an Asian nation could beat a European power, and the Chinese revolution of 1911 that an ancient monarchy could become a republic.

The historian Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities (1983), argues that the nation is an "imagined community", since its members will never meet most of their fellow members. He stresses print, newspapers and novels in a common language, and the colonial state itself: schools and careers moved young people around the whole colony, so that a student from Sumatra who studied in Batavia began to see the Indies, not his own island, as his country.

The First World War, Versailles and the League of Nations

The First World War drew Southeast Asia into European conflicts. About 90,000 to 100,000 Vietnamese served in France as soldiers and workers (estimates vary), and saw that the French were neither invincible nor united. War demand first raised and then cut prices for rubber, tin and sugar, and in 1918 rice shortages hit parts of the region. The colonial powers made small political gestures: the Dutch opened the Volksraad, an advisory People's Council, in 1918, and in the Philippines the Jones Act (1916) gave Filipinos an elected Senate and the promise of independence.

At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, a young Vietnamese living in Paris who called himself Nguyen Ai Quoc ("Nguyen the Patriot"), later known as Ho Chi Minh, sent the delegates a petition, "Demands of the Annamite People". It asked not for independence but for equal rights, an amnesty for political prisoners and representation in the French parliament. It was ignored. The Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations applied self-determination to Europe, and colonies taken from Germany and the Ottoman Empire became mandates under Britain and France. The lesson many Asian nationalists drew was that the Western democracies would not free their colonies voluntarily.

Communism and socialism

The Russian Revolution of 1917 offered an alternative. In 1920 Lenin's Theses on the National and Colonial Questions called on communists to support national liberation movements in the colonies, and the Comintern (Communist International, founded in 1919) trained Asian revolutionaries in Moscow and sent them home as organisers. The Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), founded in 1920, was the first communist party in Asia outside the Soviet Union, and the Indochinese Communist Party followed in 1930. The Malayan Communist Party (1930) drew almost all its members from the Chinese community.

Communism appealed because it explained colonialism as part of world capitalism and offered a disciplined organisation, outside support and a programme for peasants and workers. It also brought repression: the PKI's failed risings in Java (November 1926) and Sumatra (January 1927) led to mass arrests, and the Indochinese Communist Party was nearly destroyed after the Nghe-Tinh revolt of 1930–1931. Non-communist nationalists took socialist ideas too: Sukarno's Marhaenism (a socialism of the small farmer), the Burmese Thakins' reading of Marx and Lenin, and the later social programmes of every independent state.

The Great Depression

Between 1929 and 1933 world prices for rice, rubber, sugar and tin collapsed. Colonial governments kept collecting taxes at the old rates, so peasants who sold their crops for half the previous price had to pay the same tax, and many lost their land to moneylenders. The Depression produced the two largest peasant revolts of the period: the Nghe-Tinh soviets in central Vietnam (1930–1931) and the Saya San rebellion in Burma (1930–1932). Both were crushed, but they showed how economic hardship could join peasants to nationalist and communist movements.

The role and importance of leaders

In the 1920s and 1930s a new generation of leaders turned elite associations into mass movements. Sukarno in Indonesia, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Aung San and the Thakins in Burma, and Manuel Quezon in the Philippines each combined a clear goal with the ability to speak to ordinary people. Their importance differed with the colonial setting. Where the colonial power allowed elections, as in the Philippines, leaders won power through politics; where it did not, as in the Indies and Indochina, leaders spent years in prison or exile, and their movements survived underground.

The Second World War and the Japanese occupation, 1941–1945

Japan wanted the oil of the Dutch East Indies, the rubber and tin of Malaya and the rice of Burma and Indochina to continue its war in China. After the United States, Britain and the Netherlands cut off Japan's oil in July 1941, its leaders decided to take the resources of Southeast Asia by force. The attack came on 8 December 1941 (7 December in Hawaii, where Japan struck the US fleet at Pearl Harbor the same day).

Why the colonial powers collapsed so quickly

The vertical timeline shows the speed of the conquest: Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, the Indies and most of Burma fell in about five months. Japan had control of the air and sea after Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse; its troops were experienced from the war in China and moved quickly through jungle and plantations. The colonial powers had few modern aircraft and their attention was on Europe, where the Netherlands and France were already occupied by Germany. Colonial armies were small and many of their local soldiers had little reason to fight for their rulers.

The fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942 was the greatest single defeat in British military history: about 80,000 British, Australian and Indian troops surrendered, on top of those already captured in Malaya. Many Southeast Asians watched European soldiers marched as prisoners through their streets. Whatever people thought of the Japanese, the belief that Europeans were born to rule did not survive.

Establishing and maintaining Japanese rule

Japan governed most of the region through its army and navy. In Indochina it left the Vichy French administration in place until March 1945, because France was neutral and kept order at no cost to Japan. In Thailand it worked through the government of Field Marshal Phibun, which allied with Japan in December 1941. Elsewhere Japanese military administrations replaced the colonial governments and interned European civilians: about 100,000 Dutch and Eurasian civilians were held in camps in Java alone.

Rule rested on violence. The Kempeitai, the military police, used arrest, torture and execution against suspected opponents. In Singapore and Malaya, where the Chinese community had raised money for China's war against Japan, the army carried out the sook ching ("purge through cleansing") in February and March 1942, screening Chinese men and killing many of them. Japanese authorities reported about 5,000 to 6,000 deaths and Singaporean estimates run up to 100,000; most historians accept a figure of roughly 25,000 to 50,000. The range is wide because no full records were kept and the numbers became part of post-war politics.

Japan also used "divide and rule". In Malaya it favoured Malays in the police and administration, while the Chinese were treated as enemies and Indians were recruited into the Indian National Army to fight British India. In Java it promoted Islamic organisations as well as secular nationalists. In Burma the Japanese-backed army clashed with Karen villagers in 1942, deepening a hostility that lasted after the war.

The United States of America and the British Empire have in seeking their own prosperity oppressed other nations and peoples. Especially in East Asia, they indulged in insatiable aggression and exploitation, and sought to satisfy their inordinate ambition of enslaving the entire region …

Joint Declaration of the Greater East Asia Conference, Tokyo, 6 November 1943. The conference brought together Japan and the governments it sponsored, including Ba Maw's Burma, Laurel's Philippines and Phibun's Thailand (represented by Prince Wan Waithayakon). As a source, it shows the anti-Western language in which Japan presented its war, issued at a moment when Japan was losing ground in the Pacific and needed Asian manpower and goodwill; its purpose was propaganda, and it says nothing about Japan's own control of the region.

Propaganda

Japanese propaganda told Southeast Asians that Japan had come as an "elder brother" to free Asia from the West. Slogans such as "Asia for the Asians" and Java's "Three A" campaign (Japan the light, protector and leader of Asia) filled newspapers, radio, films and posters. The occupiers banned Dutch and English in schools and offices and promoted local languages alongside Japanese, which in Indonesia gave the Indonesian language a new role in government and education.

The page from Djawa Baroe addresses Indonesian youth in Indonesian, under a slogan of Greater East Asian unity. The Japanese organised young people in Java into uniformed youth corps, auxiliary police and volunteer armies, and gave them drill, discipline and a sense of their own importance. When Japan surrendered, these same young people, the pemuda, became the most radical force in the Indonesian revolution.

Political and economic impact

Politically, the occupation helped nationalists in several ways. Japan released imprisoned or exiled leaders such as Sukarno and Hatta and gave them posts, radio broadcasts and mass organisations. It trained local armies, the Burma Independence Army (1941–1942) and the Indonesian PETA (Defenders of the Homeland, 1943), which became the core of the national armies. It granted nominal independence to Burma (August 1943) and the Philippines (October 1943), and promised it to Indonesia in September 1944. When Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, the Allies had not yet reached most of the region, and nationalists had weeks in which to seize power.

Economically, the occupation was a disaster, as the diagram of consequences shows. The region lost its export markets, so plantations closed and workers lost their jobs, while imports of cloth and manufactured goods stopped. The Japanese army requisitioned rice and printed occupation money, which caused severe inflation. Hundreds of thousands of men were taken for forced labour: between 200,000 and 500,000 romusha from Java alone were sent to other islands and as far as Burma and Thailand, and the historian M. C. Ricklefs estimates that no more than 70,000 of them survived the war. On the Burma–Thailand Railway (the "Death Railway", 1942–1943) about 12,000 Allied prisoners and an estimated 90,000 Asian labourers died.

Social impact: women and ethnic groups

Famine killed more people than fighting. In northern Vietnam a famine in 1944–1945 killed between about one and two million people (the Vietnamese government's figure is two million), and in Java requisitioning and forced labour led to famine in 1944–1945. A figure of about 4 million deaths in the Dutch East Indies from famine and forced labour, often attributed to a United Nations report after the war, is widely repeated; historians treat it with caution, but agree that the death toll was very high.

Women suffered in particular ways. The Japanese military forced women and girls from the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya and other territories, as well as Dutch women interned in Java, into military brothels; these comfort women were held in conditions of sexual slavery. At the same time, the occupation drew women into public life through women's associations, nursing and propaganda work, which some later carried into nationalist organisations. Ethnic relations worsened: Chinese communities suffered most from Japanese violence, and Malay–Chinese clashes broke out in Malaya in 1945 when the communist-led resistance came out of the jungle and punished people it accused of collaboration.

The emergence of independence leaders

The occupation made the reputations of a new set of leaders. Sukarno and Hatta became national figures through Japanese-sponsored organisations; Aung San led the Burma Independence Army and then turned it against the Japanese in March 1945; Ho Chi Minh returned to Vietnam in 1941 and built the Viet Minh as an anti-Japanese and anti-French front. In Malaya and the Philippines the most effective resistance came from communist-led armies, the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army and the Hukbalahap, which made the communists serious contenders for power after the war.

The comparison table shows why the occupation had such different effects. Where Japan built up nationalist leaders and armies and left a vacuum (Indonesia, Vietnam, Burma), it greatly strengthened the independence movements. Where the colonial power had already promised independence and returned quickly (the Philippines), its effect was to divide the elite between collaborators and resisters more than to speed up independence.

Routes to independence after 1945

Japan's surrender left the colonial powers determined to return. The Netherlands and France saw their empires as essential to their recovery and status after the humiliation of German occupation; Britain wanted Malaya's dollar-earning rubber and tin; only the United States had already fixed a date for leaving the Philippines. Within ten years, however, every large colony except Malaya was independent, and Malaya followed in 1957.

The table of routes points to four factors that every case combined in different proportions. Mass mobilisation gave nationalists the ability to make colonial rule unworkable. Conflict and resistance raised the cost of staying. External support, from the United Nations, the United States, the Soviet Union and China, shaped what the colonial power could do. The weakness of colonial authority after the war, in money, manpower and legitimacy, decided how long it could hold on.

Indonesia: from the Dutch East Indies to Guided Democracy, 1900–1959

The Dutch East Indies stretched about 5,000 kilometres from Sumatra to New Guinea and held around 60 million people by 1930, most of them Muslim and about two-thirds of them on the island of Java. Indonesia proclaimed its independence on 17 August 1945, fought the Netherlands for four years, and received sovereignty on 27 December 1949. Its first decade ended with President Sukarno replacing parliamentary democracy with "Guided Democracy" in 1959.

Colonial rule in the Indies

After the profits of the Cultivation System, the Agrarian Law of 1870 opened the Indies to private companies, which leased land for plantations. Sugar dominated Java, while the east coast of Sumatra became a centre of tobacco and rubber plantations worked by Chinese and Javanese contract labourers ("coolies"). Under the Coolie Ordinance, workers who broke their contracts faced the penal sanction, fines or imprisonment. The Dutch completed their conquest of the outer islands only after long wars, above all the Aceh War (1873–c. 1904), and Royal Dutch began producing oil in Sumatra in the 1890s.

The Dutch ruled Java through the priyayi, the Javanese aristocratic class, who served as regents under Dutch residents, and the outer islands through sultans and chiefs. The law placed Europeans, "Foreign Orientals" and Natives in separate categories, and Chinese traders often worked as middlemen between Dutch firms and Indonesian producers, which made them a target of resentment. The Ethical Policy after 1901 expanded schools and irrigation, but by 1930 only a few per cent of Indonesians could read and write.

Why do many Hollanders find it unpleasant to converse with us in their own language? Oh yes, now I understand; Dutch is too beautiful to be spoken by a brown mouth. … Oh, now I understand why they are opposed to the education of the Javanese. When the Javanese becomes educated then he will no longer say amen to everything that is suggested to him by his superiors.

Raden Adjeng Kartini, letter to Stella Zeehandelaar, 1900, published in Letters of a Javanese Princess (English translation by Agnes Louise Symmers, 1920). Kartini, the daughter of a Javanese regent, wrote in Dutch to a Dutch friend, so she could write more freely than in public; her letters were published after her death in 1904 by a Dutch official who supported the Ethical Policy. The letter shows the racial barrier that educated Javanese met, and Kartini's argument that the colonial order depended on keeping Javanese uneducated.

The origins of Indonesian nationalism, 1908–1927

The first modern organisation, Budi Utomo ("Noble Endeavour"), was founded on 20 May 1908 by Javanese medical students in Batavia to promote education and Javanese culture; 20 May is still celebrated as National Awakening Day. It remained a small elite body. The first mass movement was Sarekat Islam (1912), which began as an association of Javanese batik traders against Chinese competition and grew under the leadership of H. O. S. Tjokroaminoto into a movement that claimed about two million members by 1919. Islam gave it a shared identity that cut across Java's social divisions.

Other organisations followed. Muhammadiyah (1912) promoted a modernist Islam through schools and clinics, and Nahdlatul Ulama (1926) defended traditionalist Islam. The Indische Partij (1912) was the first to demand independence for the Indies as a whole, and was banned. The Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), founded in May 1920, gained support among workers and peasants; its badly planned risings in West Java (November 1926) and West Sumatra (January 1927) were crushed. About 13,000 people were arrested, and hundreds were sent to an internment camp at Boven Digul, in the malarial interior of New Guinea.

Growth of nationalism: Sukarno and the Youth Pledge

After the communists were broken, secular nationalism led the movement. In July 1927 Sukarno, a young engineer from Bandung and a gifted speaker, founded the Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI), which demanded independence and refused to cooperate with the colonial government. In the Netherlands, Indonesian students in the Perhimpunan Indonesia, led by Mohammad Hatta, developed the same ideas. Nationalists now took the name "Indonesia" for the whole archipelago.

Firstly: We the sons and daughters of Indonesia, acknowledge one motherland, Indonesia. Secondly: We the sons and daughters of Indonesia, acknowledge to be of one nation, the nation of Indonesia. Thirdly: We the sons and daughters of Indonesia, uphold the language of unity, the Indonesian language.

The Youth Pledge (Sumpah Pemuda), adopted by the Second Indonesian Youth Congress in Batavia, 28 October 1928 (English translation). The delegates came from youth organisations based on separate islands and ethnic groups, such as Jong Java and Jong Sumatranen Bond, so the pledge was a deliberate act of creating a nation that did not yet exist. Choosing Indonesian, based on the Malay used in trade, rather than Javanese, the language of the largest group, was a decision to make the nation acceptable to all.

The Dutch responded with repression. Sukarno was arrested in December 1929; his defence speech at his trial, published as Indonesia Accuses! (1930), became a classic attack on colonial exploitation. He was jailed, then exiled to Flores and Bengkulu from 1934; Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir were sent to Boven Digul and Banda. The Volksraad remained advisory, and in 1938 the Dutch rejected even a moderate petition (the Soetardjo petition of 1936) that asked for a conference on self-government within ten years. On the eve of war, the nationalist movement had a programme and leaders but no way forward.

The Japanese occupation of Indonesia, 1942–1945

Japan invaded in January 1942 and the Dutch surrendered on 8 March. The Japanese divided the Indies between the 16th Army in Java, the 25th Army in Sumatra and the navy in the east. In Java they freed Sukarno and Hatta and made them leaders of mass organisations, Putera (1943) and the Jawa Hokokai (1944), whose purpose was to mobilise labour and rice for Japan. Sukarno used the radio and rallies to spread nationalism across Java while publicly supporting the war; he later admitted helping to recruit romusha.

Japan also built up Islamic organisations under the federation Masyumi and created PETA, a volunteer army of about 37,000 men in Java, with Indonesian officers. As defeat approached, Japan promised independence (September 1944) and in 1945 set up an investigating committee (BPUPK) to prepare it. On 1 June 1945 Sukarno told the committee that the state should rest on five principles, the Pancasila, which offered a basis acceptable to both Muslims and secular nationalists.

Proclamation and revolution, 1945–1949

Japan announced its surrender on 15 August 1945. Radical youth (pemuda) wanted an immediate, anti-Japanese declaration of independence; Sukarno and Hatta hesitated, fearing Japanese reprisals. On 16 August pemuda took the two leaders to the town of Rengasdengklok to press them. That night, at the house of a Japanese admiral sympathetic to independence, Sukarno, Hatta and others drafted a short text.

We the people of Indonesia hereby declare the independence of Indonesia. Matters concerning the transfer of power and other matters will be executed in an orderly manner and in the shortest possible time.

Proclamation of Indonesian Independence, read by Sukarno and signed by Sukarno and Hatta "in the name of the Indonesian people", Jakarta, 17 August 1945 (English translation). A pemuda draft had demanded that the people seize power from the foreigners; the final text spoke of a "transfer of power" carried out "in an orderly manner", wording that the Japanese, who were bound by the Allies to keep order, could accept. The text therefore shows the caution of the older leaders and the pressure they were under.

A republic was set up with Sukarno as president, Hatta as vice-president and a short constitution. Across Java and Sumatra pemuda seized arms from Japanese troops. British and Indian troops landed from late September 1945 to accept the Japanese surrender and free the internees, and brought Dutch officials with them. In Surabaya, after the death of the British commander Brigadier Mallaby, British forces launched a three-week assault from 10 November 1945 in which thousands of Indonesians died; the Republic lost the battle, but its resistance convinced the British that the Republic had real support. In the chaotic bersiap period of 1945–1946, armed groups also killed thousands of Dutch, Eurasian, Chinese and Indonesian civilians suspected of supporting the Dutch.

The vertical timeline of the revolution shows the Republic's two methods, diplomasi (diplomacy) and perjuangan (armed struggle), working together. Prime Minister Sutan Sjahrir negotiated the Linggadjati Agreement (November 1946), in which the Dutch recognised the Republic's authority in Java, Madura and Sumatra. The Dutch then broke it with their first police action (July 1947), which seized plantation and oil areas. Under the UN-sponsored Renville Agreement (January 1948) the Republic accepted a smaller territory.

Two events in late 1948 changed the outcome. In September the Republic's army crushed a communist rising at Madiun, which convinced the United States that the Republic was anti-communist. In December the Dutch launched their second police action, captured the Republican capital, Yogyakarta, and arrested Sukarno and Hatta. General Sudirman's army fought on as guerrillas and an emergency government held out in Sumatra. The UN Security Council demanded a ceasefire and the release of the leaders (28 January 1949), and the US Senate debated cutting Marshall Plan aid to the Netherlands. The Dutch gave way, and at the Round Table Conference in The Hague (August–November 1949) agreed to transfer sovereignty.

On 27 December 1949 the Netherlands transferred sovereignty to the federal Republic of the United States of Indonesia. The price was high: Indonesia took on about 4.3 billion guilders of debt of the colonial government, Dutch companies kept their property, and West New Guinea stayed Dutch until 1962–1963. The federal states, many created by the Dutch, dissolved themselves into the Republic, and the unitary Republic of Indonesia was declared on 17 August 1950. Indonesian deaths in the revolution are usually estimated at about 100,000 or more. In 2022 a Dutch government-funded study concluded that Dutch forces had used extreme violence systematically, and Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologised on 17 February 2022.

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Why Indonesia won independence

Historians weigh several causes. The Republic's mass support and armed resistance meant that the Dutch could take territory but could not govern it; the Dutch, with about 150,000 troops in the Indies, could not afford a long war while rebuilding their own country. External support was decisive in 1949: the United States, which had wanted a stable non-communist Southeast Asia, decided after Madiun that the Republic was a better partner than a Dutch colony. Ricklefs and Anthony Reid stress the Indonesian struggle; others stress that the Dutch gave way only when the United States made the cost of continuing too high.

The first ten years: parliamentary democracy and its failure, 1950–1959

From 1950 Indonesia was a parliamentary democracy with a ceremonial president. Coalitions of many parties formed seven cabinets between 1950 and 1957, and none lasted long. The country's first general election, on 29 September 1955, was free and peaceful, with a turnout of about 91 per cent.

The chart of seats shows why the election did not bring stability. Four parties of similar size, each with its own base (the PNI among officials and Javanese nationalists, Masyumi among modernist Muslims and outside Java, NU among rural Javanese Muslims, the PKI among workers and peasants), had to share power. The Constituent Assembly elected in 1955 to write a permanent constitution deadlocked over whether the state should be based on Islam or on the Pancasila.

Political instability and regional rebellion

Several rebellions challenged the state. Darul Islam, a movement for an Islamic state led by S. M. Kartosuwiryo, fought in West Java from 1949 and spread to Aceh and South Sulawesi; it was defeated only in 1962. In 1950 the Republic of South Maluku tried to break away. In 1957–1958 army officers and politicians in Sumatra and Sulawesi, angry at Javanese domination and at the growing influence of the PKI, formed the PRRI–Permesta rebellion, which received secret support from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); its exposure, after an American pilot, Allen Pope, was shot down in 1958, damaged relations with the United States. The army, under General Nasution, crushed the rebellion and gained political power.

Sukarno blamed "free-fight liberalism" for the country's divisions. In March 1957 martial law was declared, and on 5 July 1959 Sukarno dissolved the Constituent Assembly by decree and restored the constitution of 1945, which gave the president strong powers. This began Guided Democracy (1959–1965), in which Sukarno balanced the army against the PKI.

Economic and social developments

The economy suffered from war damage, falling export prices after the Korean War boom of 1950–1951, inflation and smuggling. The Benteng ("fortress") programme (1950–1957) gave import licences to indigenous businessmen to reduce Dutch and Chinese dominance, but many licences were sold on. In December 1957, after the UN failed to support Indonesia's claim to West New Guinea, workers and then the army took over Dutch enterprises, which were nationalised, and tens of thousands of Dutch citizens left. Ending Dutch economic control was popular, but production in the seized plantations and firms fell.

Social policy had real achievements. Literacy campaigns and a rapid expansion of primary and secondary schools reached millions who had had no access to schooling under the Dutch, and Indonesian became the language of education and government. Women voted on equal terms in 1955, and women's organisations such as Gerwani (1950) and the Indonesian Women's Congress campaigned against polygamy and for marriage reform, though a national marriage law came only in 1974. Health care improved more slowly: the Republic inherited a Dutch system with very few Indonesian doctors, and government clinics and vaccination campaigns against smallpox and malaria reached the towns and Java far more than the outer islands.

Ethnic and religious tensions persisted. Debates over the place of Islam divided the Constituent Assembly. The ethnic Chinese minority faced discrimination: a treaty with the People's Republic of China (1955) required Chinese Indonesians to choose one citizenship, and a regulation of 1959 (PP 10) banned foreign retailers from rural areas, after which more than 100,000 Chinese left for China in 1959–1960.

Foreign policy: Bandung and non-alignment

Indonesia's clearest success of the decade was abroad. In April 1955 it hosted the Bandung Conference of 29 Asian and African states, which condemned colonialism and called for cooperation between the new states outside the two Cold War blocs; it later helped to inspire the Non-Aligned Movement. The conference gave Sukarno an international standing that he used at home.

We are often told "Colonialism is dead." Let us not be deceived or even soothed by that. I say to you, colonialism is not yet dead. How can we say it is dead, so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are unfree. … Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation.

Sukarno, opening speech at the Asian-African Conference, Bandung, 18 April 1955. Speaking as host to leaders of newly independent states, Sukarno presented Indonesia as a leader of the anti-colonial world; his warning about "economic control" reflected Indonesia's own continuing dispute with the Netherlands over Dutch businesses and West New Guinea.

Vietnam: from French Indochina to the Democratic Republic, 1900–1964

Vietnam was the largest part of French Indochina, with more than 17 million people by the late 1930s. It is the clearest case in the region of independence won through revolution and war. Ho Chi Minh declared the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) on 2 September 1945, France tried to restore its rule, and the Viet Minh defeated the French army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Geneva Accords then divided the country, and the DRV's first decade was spent building a communist state in the north.

French colonial rule

France conquered Vietnam in stages between 1858 and 1885: Cochinchina in the south became a colony, while Annam (the centre) and Tonkin (the north) became protectorates under the Nguyen emperors in Hue. Scholar-officials led the Can Vuong ("Aid the King") resistance against the French from 1885 until the late 1890s. When emperors showed independence, the French removed them: Thanh Thai was deposed in 1907 and Duy Tan, who backed a rising, in 1916.

Governor-General Paul Doumer (1897–1902) built a centralised colonial state paid for by Indochina itself. Head and land taxes rose, and state monopolies forced Vietnamese to buy salt, alcohol and opium from the government. French and Vietnamese landlords took over much of the newly drained land of the Mekong delta, where most peasants became tenants, and rice exports from Saigon grew rapidly. French companies, including Michelin, opened rubber plantations in the south, where many labourers died from disease and harsh treatment; strikes at the Phu Rieng plantation in 1930 became a symbol of colonial exploitation.

Colonial rule changed Vietnamese culture. The French abolished the Confucian examinations (in 1915 in Tonkin and 1919 in Annam), ending the old route into government, and promoted Franco-Vietnamese schools and quoc ngu, the romanised script. Only a small minority attended school, but quoc ngu newspapers and books spread new ideas quickly among the literate.

The origins of Vietnamese nationalism

The first nationalists were Confucian scholars. Phan Boi Chau organised the Dong Du ("Go East") movement (1905–1908), which sent young Vietnamese to study in Japan, and later founded a society for the restoration of Vietnam (1912) on the model of the Chinese revolution. Phan Chu Trinh argued instead for reform through education and cooperation with France, and helped found the Tonkin Free School (1907), which taught modern subjects in quoc ngu before the French closed it. Tax protests in Annam in 1908 showed that peasant grievances could be joined to the scholars' patriotism.

The growth of nationalism after 1914: Ho Chi Minh and the communists

The most important figure was Nguyen Tat Thanh, later Ho Chi Minh. He left Vietnam in 1911 and lived in France during and after the First World War, where he took the name Nguyen Ai Quoc. After his petition to the Versailles Conference was ignored, he joined the French Socialist Party, read Lenin's theses on the colonial question and, in December 1920 at the Congress of Tours, voted to found the French Communist Party.

What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled into me! I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted out aloud as if addressing large crowds: "Dear martyrs compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation!"

Ho Chi Minh, "The Path Which Led Me to Leninism", article written in April 1960 for the 90th anniversary of Lenin's birth, recalling his reading of Lenin's theses in 1920. Written forty years later by the leader of a communist state, the account presents Ho's turn to communism as a nationalist's discovery of a path to liberation; its purpose was to honour Lenin, so it shows how Ho wanted his choice to be remembered more than exactly what he thought in 1920.

Ho trained in Moscow and in 1925 founded the Revolutionary Youth League among Vietnamese exiles in Canton (Guangzhou). Non-communist nationalists also organised. The Vietnamese Nationalist Party (VNQDD, 1927), modelled on China's Kuomintang, launched a mutiny of Vietnamese soldiers at Yen Bai in February 1930; the French crushed it and executed its leaders, which left the communists as the main organised opposition. In February 1930 Ho united rival communist groups into the Vietnamese Communist Party in Hong Kong, renamed the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in October 1930 on Comintern instructions.

The Depression brought the first great test. In 1930–1931 peasants in the provinces of Nghe An and Ha Tinh, hit by falling rice prices and taxes, marched on district offices and set up local councils, the Nghe-Tinh soviets. The French responded with bombing of marchers, mass arrests and executions, and the ICP lost most of its leaders. Under the Popular Front government in France (1936–1939) the party could operate more openly, but it was banned again in 1939. In the south, new religious movements, Cao Dai (1926) and Hoa Hao (1939), won large peasant followings that later competed with the communists.

The Second World War and the August Revolution, 1940–1945

From 1940 the Japanese stationed troops in Indochina while the Vichy French administration continued to govern. In May 1941 Ho Chi Minh, back in Vietnam after thirty years, founded the Viet Minh (League for the Independence of Vietnam) at Pac Bo near the Chinese border, a broad front that put national independence before social revolution. With Vo Nguyen Giap and Pham Van Dong, Ho built guerrilla bases in the northern hills, and in 1945 he worked with agents of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), who provided weapons and training against the Japanese.

The vertical timeline shows how the Viet Minh used the collapse of authority in 1945. On 9 March 1945 the Japanese overthrew the French administration and set up a nominally independent "Empire of Vietnam" under Emperor Bao Dai. In the north the famine of 1944–1945 killed between one and two million people, and the Viet Minh won support by seizing rice stores and distributing grain. When Japan surrendered, the Viet Minh took Hanoi on 19 August in the August Revolution, Bao Dai abdicated, and on 2 September Ho read the Declaration of Independence in Ba Dinh Square.

"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." … Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow-citizens. … They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Center, and the South of Vietnam in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people from being united. They have built more prisons than schools.

Ho Chi Minh, Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Hanoi, 2 September 1945 (English translation). The declaration opens with the US Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, then lists the crimes of French rule, including the division of the country into three regions and the opium and alcohol monopolies. It was addressed to the Vietnamese crowd but also to the Allies, above all the United States, whose support Ho hoped to win against France.

Post-war methods: war against France, 1945–1954

At the Potsdam Conference the Allies divided Indochina at the 16th parallel for the purpose of accepting the Japanese surrender: Chinese Nationalist troops entered the north, and British troops the south, where they helped French forces retake Saigon in September 1945. To get the Chinese to leave, Ho negotiated with France. Under the Ho–Sainteny Accords of 6 March 1946, France recognised the DRV as a "free state" within the French Union, and French troops returned to the north. Talks at Fontainebleau in the summer of 1946 failed to settle the status of Cochinchina, which France wanted to keep separate.

In November 1946 the French navy bombarded the port of Haiphong, killing several thousand people (estimates range up to 6,000), and on 19 December 1946 the Viet Minh attacked the French in Hanoi. The First Indochina War had begun. Giap's forces withdrew to the northern mountains and fought a guerrilla war, following a strategy of protracted war that would move from guerrilla action to large conventional battles as their strength grew.

The Cold War transformed the war. France created the State of Vietnam under Bao Dai in 1949 to give its side a nationalist face, but few Vietnamese saw it as independent. After the Chinese Communist victory in 1949, China and the Soviet Union recognised the DRV in January 1950, and China supplied weapons, advisers and training across the border. The United States, now seeing Indochina as a front against communism, paid a growing share of French costs, close to 80 per cent by 1954. In March 1954 Giap besieged the French base at Dien Bien Phu, in a valley near the Laotian border; it fell on 7 May after a siege of nearly two months, and about 11,000 French Union troops were taken prisoner.

The Geneva Accords of 21 July 1954 ended the war. Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel into a northern zone under the DRV and a southern zone, pending nationwide elections planned for July 1956, which were never held. Under the accords people could move between the zones for 300 days, and between about 800,000 and 1 million northerners, mostly Catholics, moved south. The DRV had won independence for half the country; what happened to the south belongs to the Cold War in Asia.

Why the Viet Minh won

The Viet Minh combined three strengths. They had mass support, built through land rent reductions, literacy classes and the claim to lead the nation against France and Japan. They had an organisation, the communist party, with a clear strategy and leaders, Ho for politics and Giap for war. And from 1950 they had a secure supply base in China. France, by contrast, was weakened by the war in Europe, divided at home, and unable to offer Vietnamese nationalists a credible alternative to the Viet Minh.

The first ten years of the DRV

The DRV's first decade can be counted from 1945 or from 1954, when it took control of the north. From 1945 it launched mass literacy classes (Binh dan hoc vu, popular education), and its 1946 constitution gave women equal rights and the vote. After 1954, as a one-party state led by the Workers' Party (Lao Dong, the renamed communist party), it rebuilt the north on the Chinese and Soviet model, with aid from both.

The most important and most controversial policy was land reform (1953–1956). Party teams classified villagers by class and held "denunciation" sessions against landlords, many of whom were executed or died in prison. Estimates of deaths range from about 5,000 to 15,000 and higher; the figures are contested because the party's records are incomplete and the campaign became part of later propaganda on both sides. In 1956 the party admitted serious errors in a "Rectification of Errors" campaign, and in November 1956 peasants in Quynh Luu (Nghe An), a Catholic area, rose in revolt and were put down by the army. Intellectuals who called for freedom of expression in the journals Nhan Van and Giai Pham (1956–1958) were silenced.

From 1958 the party collectivised agriculture into cooperatives, and the first Five-Year Plan (1961–1965) aimed to build heavy industry with Soviet and Chinese help. The Marriage and Family Law of 1959 banned forced marriage, child marriage and polygamy. Health work relied on mass campaigns: village health stations, vaccination and hygiene drives against malaria, smallpox and cholera, and the training of medical assistants to make up for a shortage of doctors. Autonomous zones were created for some of the northern ethnic minorities in the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s the DRV had a disciplined state, a literate young population and an army, which it turned to the reunification of Vietnam by force.

The Philippines: revolution, American rule and negotiated independence, 1896–1956

The Philippines had the longest experience of Western rule in the region, more than 330 years under Spain, followed by nearly half a century under the United States. It was one of the first colonies in Asia to launch a nationalist revolution (1896) and the first in Southeast Asia to become independent after the Second World War, on 4 July 1946, by a negotiated, peaceful transfer.

Spanish rule and the revolution of 1896

Spain ruled through the Catholic Church as much as through officials. Spanish friars owned great estates (the friar lands), controlled parish government and education, and opposed Filipino priests. A Filipino elite of landowners and the educated ilustrados, many of mixed Chinese or Spanish descent, grew wealthy from export crops such as sugar and tobacco, but had no political rights. The ilustrado José Rizal criticised the friars in his novels Noli Me Tangere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891); he asked for reform and equality with Spaniards, not independence.

In 1892 Andrés Bonifacio, a Manila clerk, founded the Katipunan, a secret society that aimed at independence by revolution. It rose in August 1896. Spain executed Rizal, though he had not supported the rising, on 30 December 1896, making him a national martyr. Leadership passed to Emilio Aguinaldo, a provincial mayor from Cavite, whose followers had Bonifacio executed in May 1897. When the Spanish-American War broke out, the US Navy destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay (1 May 1898), and Aguinaldo declared independence at Kawit on 12 June 1898. The Malolos Republic, inaugurated in January 1899, was the first constitutional republic in Asia.

The United States did not recognise it. By the Treaty of Paris (10 December 1898) Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States for US$20 million, and President William McKinley set out American aims.

… it should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.

President William McKinley, executive order to the Secretary of War, known as the "Benevolent Assimilation" Proclamation, 21 December 1898. It was written for American commanders and for public opinion at home, where many opposed taking colonies, so it presents rule as a gift. Earlier in the order McKinley asserted US sovereignty over the islands; the US commander in Manila sent Aguinaldo a version with those references removed, but the full text reached the Filipino leaders, and war broke out in February 1899.

The Philippine–American War (1899–1902) cost about 4,200 American and 16,000–20,000 Filipino soldiers' lives (US estimate), and at least 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine and disease (some estimates are much higher). Aguinaldo was captured in March 1901, and the war was declared over in July 1902, though resistance continued for years, especially among the Muslim Moro peoples of the south.

American colonial rule, 1901–1941

American rule combined repression with co-option of the Filipino elite. The Americans worked with the landowning families, who controlled local politics, and gave them a growing share of government: an elected Philippine Assembly opened in 1907, dominated by the Nacionalista Party of Sergio Osmeña and Manuel Quezon. A public school system teaching in English, staffed at first by American teachers (the Thomasites, who arrived in 1901), spread literacy far faster than in other colonies. Governor-General Francis Harrison (1913–1921) replaced most American officials with Filipinos.

The chain of steps to independence shows how far the American approach differed from Dutch or French rule. The Jones Act (1916) promised independence "as soon as a stable government can be established". The Tydings–McDuffie Act (1934) set up a self-governing Commonwealth of the Philippines, inaugurated on 15 November 1935 with Quezon as president, and fixed independence for 1946. During the Depression, American sugar producers, dairy farmers (who competed with coconut oil) and trade unions opposed to Filipino migrant workers all supported independence as a way to put tariffs and immigration limits on the Philippines.

Economically, free trade with the United States from 1909 and 1913 tied the islands to the American market, especially for sugar, and strengthened the landowning elite. Tenant farmers in central Luzon grew poorer, and peasant protest grew in the 1930s: the Sakdal movement rose briefly in May 1935, and a small Communist Party (founded 1930) and a Socialist Party organised tenants. Filipino nationalism was therefore led by an elite that negotiated with Washington, while social discontent below it remained unresolved.

The Japanese occupation, 1941–1945

Japan attacked on 8 December 1941. General Douglas MacArthur left for Australia in March 1942, and after the surrender at Bataan in April between about 60,000 and 80,000 Filipino and American prisoners were forced on the Bataan Death March, on which thousands died. Japan set up the Second Philippine Republic under José P. Laurel in October 1943. Many of the prewar elite served it, some to protect the population, others for their own interests, while others joined guerrilla bands linked to the US army.

In central Luzon the communist-led Hukbalahap (People's Army Against Japan), founded in March 1942 under Luis Taruc, fought the Japanese and also took land and punished landlords who collaborated. US forces returned at Leyte in October 1944, and in the Battle of Manila (February–March 1945) about 100,000 civilians were killed, many of them in Japanese massacres; the capital was largely destroyed.

Independence, 1946

The United States kept its promise, and the Philippines became independent on 4 July 1946 under President Manuel Roxas, who had served in Laurel's wartime government but was backed by MacArthur. Independence came with conditions. The Bell Trade Act (1946) tied the peso to the dollar and gave US citizens "parity rights", equal rights with Filipinos to exploit natural resources and run public utilities, which required an amendment to the Philippine constitution (1947); US war-damage payments were made dependent on accepting it. The Military Bases Agreement (1947) gave the United States bases such as Clark and Subic for 99 years. Roxas granted an amnesty to wartime collaborators in January 1948.

Of the four post-war factors, negotiation and the colonial power's own decision dominate. The Philippines did not need mass mobilisation or war to win independence, because the date had been fixed in 1934. Critics such as the historian Renato Constantino argue that the price was neo-colonialism: formal independence with continued American economic and military control.

The first ten years, 1946–1956

Political instability came mainly from the countryside. In 1946 Luis Taruc and other members of the Democratic Alliance were elected to Congress but were denied their seats, partly so that the parity amendment could pass. The Huks returned to armed struggle in the Huk rebellion (1946–1954), demanding land reform. Corruption and violence under President Elpidio Quirino (1948–1953), including a fraudulent election in 1949, increased support for the rebels.

The rebellion was defeated by Ramon Magsaysay, defence secretary from 1950 and president from 1953, with US military aid and advice from the CIA officer Edward Lansdale. Magsaysay reformed the army, offered surrendering rebels land in resettlement schemes in Mindanao (EDCOR) and combined force with promises of reform; Taruc surrendered in 1954. Land reform laws in 1954–1955 were weak, however, and tenancy remained the main social problem.

Economically, import controls from 1949 encouraged Filipino manufacturing behind protective barriers (import substitution industrialisation), and the Laurel–Langley Agreement (1955) made parity rights reciprocal and gradually phased out free trade. Socially, the Philippines had one of the highest literacy rates in Asia, women had voted since a plebiscite of 1937, and a national language based on Tagalog was taught alongside English. Public health services, built up under American rule and helped after 1946 by US and UN aid, reduced deaths from cholera, smallpox and malaria, although rural clinics and doctors remained scarce outside Manila. The Muslim south remained poorer and under-represented, and settlement of Christian migrants on Mindanao land laid the ground for later conflict. In foreign policy the Philippines joined the US-led SEATO, founded at Manila in 1954.

Malaya and Malaysia: a plural society, the Emergency and Merdeka, 1900–1967

British Malaya is the case in which nationalism was weakest before 1945 and most divided by community. It became independent as the Federation of Malaya on 31 August 1957, known as Merdeka ("independence"), through negotiation between Britain and a multi-ethnic alliance of parties, while British and Commonwealth forces fought a communist insurgency. In 1963 Malaya joined Singapore, Sabah and Sarawak to form Malaysia.

British rule and the plural society

British Malaya was a patchwork. The Straits Settlements (Penang, Malacca and Singapore) were a British colony. Under the Pangkor Treaty of 1874 and later agreements, the sultans of the western Malay states accepted British Residents whose advice they had to follow on everything except Malay religion and custom; four of these states became the Federated Malay States in 1895. The five northern and southern states, including Johor and Kelantan, became the Unfederated Malay States, with British advisers and more autonomy. The sultans kept their thrones, Islam and their courts, so the Malay elite had reasons to accept British rule.

The economy created a plural society. Chinese immigrants worked the tin mines and ran much of the commerce; Tamil labourers were recruited from southern India for the rubber estates; and Malays were kept largely in rice farming and fishing. The Malay Reservations Enactment (1913) protected Malay land from sale to non-Malays, and the Malay College at Kuala Kangsar (1905) trained Malay aristocrats for the civil service. By 1931 the Chinese and Indians together outnumbered the Malays in British Malaya as a whole.

Nationalism before 1945: three communities, three directions

Each community's politics looked in a different direction. Malay reformers influenced by Islamic modernism, the Kaum Muda ("Young Group"), published the journal Al-Imam from 1906 and criticised both traditional religious leaders and Malay backwardness. In 1938 Ibrahim Yaacob founded the radical Kesatuan Melayu Muda (Union of Malay Youth), which looked to union with Indonesia. Most Chinese politics was oriented to China, through the Kuomintang or the Malayan Communist Party (MCP, 1930), whose members were almost all Chinese. Indians followed the Indian National Congress. No organisation spoke for Malaya as a whole.

Japanese occupation, 1941–1945

Japan landed at Kota Bharu on 8 December 1941 and took Singapore ten weeks later. The occupation divided the communities further. Malays were used in the police and administration; Chinese were massacred in the sook ching and made to pay a forced "gift" of 50 million dollars; Indians were recruited for the Indian National Army; and Japan handed four northern Malay states to Thailand in 1943. The most effective resistance was the MCP-led Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), supplied by the British through Force 136. When Japan surrendered, the MPAJA briefly controlled much of the country, and its reprisals against Malay policemen and alleged collaborators led to Sino-Malay clashes in 1945–1946.

Post-war methods: the Malayan Union and the rise of UMNO

Britain returned with a plan to modernise Malaya. The Malayan Union (April 1946) joined the Malay states and Penang and Malacca into one colony, with Singapore separate. It took away the sovereignty of the sultans and offered equal citizenship to non-Malays born or long resident in Malaya. Malays saw this as a threat to their position in their own land. In the first mass political movement in Malay history, they boycotted the Union's inauguration, and in May 1946 Dato Onn Jaafar founded the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO).

The chain of events shows that mass Malay mobilisation won the first victory: Britain replaced the Union with the Federation of Malaya (1 February 1948), which restored the sultans, protected the "special position" of the Malays and made citizenship harder for non-Malays to obtain. Many Chinese felt excluded, and in June 1948 the MCP turned to armed revolt.

The Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960

The Emergency began after communist guerrillas killed three European planters at Sungai Siput on 16 June 1948. The MCP's army, later called the Malayan National Liberation Army and led by Chin Peng, had several thousand fighters, supplied with food and information by the Min Yuen (people's movement) among the half a million Chinese squatters on the jungle edge. The British called it an "Emergency" rather than a war, partly so that losses on rubber estates and tin mines would remain covered by commercial insurance.

The government's answer was the Briggs Plan (1950), drawn up by Lieutenant-General Sir Harold Briggs, which moved about 500,000 rural Chinese, roughly a tenth of Malaya's population, into fenced and guarded New Villages, cutting the guerrillas off from food and recruits. After the guerrillas killed the High Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, in October 1951, General Sir Gerald Templer (1952–1954) combined military and civil power. Templer is remembered for winning "hearts and minds": he gave New Village residents land titles, schools and clinics, offered citizenship to more Chinese and promised independence once the communists were beaten. He also used curfews, food rationing, collective punishment of villages and detention without trial.

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Official figures record about 6,700 guerrillas, 1,900 members of the security forces (British, Malayan, Gurkha and Commonwealth) and about 2,500 civilians killed. Some British units also committed abuses: at Batang Kali in December 1948 British soldiers killed 24 unarmed villagers. By 1954 the guerrillas were in retreat; the Emergency was formally ended on 31 July 1960, and Chin Peng withdrew to southern Thailand.

The Alliance and Merdeka, 1952–1957

Britain wanted to hand power to a government that could hold all three communities together and keep Malaya in the Commonwealth and anti-communist. The answer came from the parties themselves. The Malayan Chinese Association (MCA, 1949), led by the businessman Tan Cheng Lock, joined UMNO, now led by Tunku Abdul Rahman, a prince of Kedah, in an electoral pact in 1952; the Malayan Indian Congress (MIC) joined in 1954. This Alliance won 51 of the 52 elected seats in the first federal election in July 1955, and the Tunku became chief minister.

The Tunku met Chin Peng at Baling in December 1955 and offered an amnesty but refused to recognise the MCP, and the talks failed, which reassured Britain. At a conference in London in January–February 1956, Britain agreed to independence by August 1957. The constitution drafted by the Reid Commission, based on a bargain among the Alliance parties, protected the special position of the Malays, made Islam the religion of the federation and Malay the national language, and gave citizenship by birth to everyone born after independence. On 31 August 1957 the Tunku proclaimed Merdeka in the new Merdeka Stadium in Kuala Lumpur.

The first ten years, 1957–1967

Under the Tunku, Malaya was a stable parliamentary democracy with regular elections, and the economy grew. Rubber replanting with high-yielding trees and diversification into palm oil raised exports, and the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA, 1956) cleared jungle to give landless Malay families farms. Abdul Razak, the deputy prime minister, directed a large rural development programme of roads, schools and clinics, and rural health centres, building on the Emergency-era clinics of the New Villages, brought health care to many Malay and Chinese villages. Education was reshaped by the Razak Report (1956) and the Education Act of 1961, which built a national system using Malay and English and put pressure on Chinese-medium secondary schools to change their language.

The great project of the decade was Malaysia, formed on 16 September 1963 from Malaya, Singapore, Sabah (North Borneo) and Sarawak, partly to balance Singapore's Chinese majority with the Borneo territories. Brunei stayed out. Indonesia under Sukarno saw Malaysia as a British neo-colonial project and launched Konfrontasi (Confrontation, 1963–1966), a low-level war of raids into Borneo and the Malay peninsula, which Malaysia resisted with British, Australian and New Zealand help. The Philippines claimed Sabah.

Ethnic tension proved the greatest challenge. Lee Kuan Yew's People's Action Party in Singapore campaigned for a "Malaysian Malaysia" of equal rights for all communities, which UMNO saw as a challenge to the special position of the Malays. After race riots in Singapore in 1964, the Tunku expelled Singapore, which became independent on 9 August 1965. Malay resentment at Chinese economic dominance and Chinese resentment at Malay political privilege continued, and after the election of May 1969 they exploded in riots in Kuala Lumpur on 13 May (the official death toll was 196; unofficial estimates are higher), which led to the New Economic Policy of 1971 to raise the Malay share of the economy.

Burma (Myanmar): from province of India to independent union, 1900–1958

Burma, officially renamed Myanmar in 1989, is the case in which colonial rule most completely destroyed the old political order and in which "divide and rule" left the deepest legacy. Burmese nationalists won independence by negotiation on 4 January 1948, after the Japanese occupation and mass mobilisation had made British rule unworkable, but the new union was at war with communist and ethnic rebels within months.

British conquest and colonial rule

Britain annexed Burma in three wars (1824–1826, 1852–1853 and 1885). King Mindon (r. 1853–1878) tried to modernise the remaining kingdom from his new capital, Mandalay; his successor, King Thibaw, lost his throne after a dispute with a British timber company, the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, gave Britain a pretext for the third war. Burma was annexed on 1 January 1886 and governed as a province of British India. The monarchy was abolished and Thibaw exiled, so the Buddhist monkhood, the sangha, lost its royal patron, and resistance continued in the countryside into the 1890s.

The economy was transformed by the opening of the Irrawaddy delta to rice cultivation. Burma became the world's largest rice exporter, Burmah Oil drilled in the central dry zone, and British firms cut teak. Indian labourers, officials and moneylenders arrived in large numbers. Chettiar moneylenders from southern India financed the rice farmers, and when prices collapsed in the Depression they foreclosed on land: by the late 1930s they owned about a quarter of the rice land of Lower Burma (estimates vary). Burmese farmers saw Indian competition and credit as part of colonial exploitation, and anti-Indian riots broke out in 1930 and 1938.

The diagram of British rule shows the political divide. Ministerial Burma, the plains and delta where most Burmans lived, was governed directly and received elected councils from 1923, while the Frontier Areas of the Shan, Kachin, Chin and Karenni were left under their own chiefs and separate administration. The army recruited mainly from the Karen, Kachin and Chin and from Indians, and Burmans were largely excluded. Christian missions converted many Karens, Kachins and Chins, and some minority leaders came to see British rule as protection against Burman domination.

The origins and growth of Burmese nationalism

Burmese nationalism began as a Buddhist movement. The Young Men's Buddhist Association (YMBA, 1906) campaigned in the "shoe question" (1916–1919) against Europeans wearing shoes in pagodas, and won. The General Council of Burmese Associations (1920) built a mass organisation in the villages, and political monks such as U Ottama and U Wisara, who died in 1929 after a long hunger strike in prison, preached against British rule. Students struck against the new University of Rangoon in December 1920, which they saw as elitist. Britain introduced dyarchy in 1923, sharing some government departments with elected Burmese ministers, but kept control of finance, police and defence.

The Depression produced the largest rising of the period. The Saya San rebellion (1930–1932), led by a former monk who promised to restore Buddhist kingship, drew thousands of peasants angry about taxes and debt. The British used troops to suppress it, killing thousands of rebels, and hanged Saya San in 1931. The Government of Burma Act of 1935 separated Burma from India (from 1 April 1937), with an elected legislature and a Burmese prime minister, Ba Maw, though the British governor kept wide powers.

A new generation of radicals then took the lead. The Dobama Asiayone ("We Burmans Association", 1930) called its members Thakin ("master"), the title Burmese had been required to use for Europeans, as a claim to be masters of their own country. Its student leaders, including Aung San and U Nu, led a university strike in 1936, and in 1938–1939, the "Revolution of 1300" in the Burmese calendar, oil-field workers marched on Rangoon. Many Thakins read Marx and Lenin, and Aung San helped to found the small Communist Party of Burma in 1939.

The Japanese occupation and Aung San's switch, 1941–1945

In 1941 Aung San and other Thakins, the Thirty Comrades, were secretly trained by the Japanese on Hainan Island. They entered Burma with the Japanese army in December 1941 as the Burma Independence Army (BIA), which grew rapidly. In 1942 BIA units clashed with Karen villagers in the delta, killing many, which deepened Karen distrust of Burman nationalists. Japan granted Burma nominal independence on 1 August 1943, with Ba Maw as head of state and Aung San as minister of war, but kept real control, and forced labour on the Burma–Thailand Railway and economic collapse made Japanese rule hated.

In August 1944 Aung San, the communists and socialists secretly formed the Anti-Fascist Organisation, later the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL). On 27 March 1945, now Armed Forces Day, Aung San's army turned against the Japanese and fought alongside the British as General William Slim's 14th Army retook Burma; Rangoon was liberated in May 1945. Aung San ended the war as the commander of a national army and leader of the strongest political movement in Burma.

Post-war methods: mobilisation and negotiation, 1945–1948

Britain's White Paper of May 1945 proposed a return to direct rule by the governor for up to three years while the country was rebuilt, followed by gradual self-government. Governor Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith tried to work with prewar politicians and sideline the AFPFL. The AFPFL answered with mass rallies and, in September 1946, a police strike and general strike that paralysed the administration. The new governor, Sir Hubert Rance, brought Aung San and the AFPFL into his Executive Council.

In so far as nationalism inculcates in us a sense of national and social justice which call upon us to fight any system that is oppressive or tyrannical both in our country and the world, there I am completely with nationalism. I hate Imperialism whether British or Japanese or Burmese.

Aung San, address to a meeting of the Anglo-Burman Council, City Hall, Rangoon, 8 December 1946, in Josef Silverstein (ed.), The Political Legacy of Aung San (1972). Speaking to a minority community, the Anglo-Burmese, a month before he went to London to negotiate independence, Aung San presented his nationalism as inclusive and opposed to all domination; his audience and timing help explain why he stressed reassurance to minorities.

Britain's position had weakened decisively. India was moving to independence, so Burma no longer served to protect India's eastern frontier, and the Labour government had neither the troops nor the money to hold a hostile country. Under the Aung San–Attlee Agreement (27 January 1947), Britain agreed to elections to a constituent assembly and independence within a year. At the Panglong Agreement (12 February 1947), Aung San won the agreement of Shan, Kachin and Chin leaders to join a union, in return for a promise of full autonomy in the internal administration of their areas; the Karens did not sign. The AFPFL won the April 1947 elections overwhelmingly.

On 19 July 1947 gunmen sent by U Saw, a prewar prime minister and rival, assassinated Aung San and six members of his cabinet. U Nu took his place, and Burma became independent on 4 January 1948 as the Union of Burma. Unlike India, it chose to leave the Commonwealth.

The first ten years, 1948–1958

Independent Burma faced armed rebellion almost at once. In March 1948 the Communist Party of Burma (the "White Flags") went underground, followed by another communist faction (the "Red Flags"), part of Aung San's veterans' militia (the PVO) and army units. In January 1949 the Karen National Union began an insurrection, and Karen forces came within a few miles of Rangoon at Insein. For a time the government controlled little more than the capital, and it survived largely because the rebels were divided and the army, under General Ne Win, held firm. From 1950 Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang) troops who had fled from China occupied parts of Shan State, with secret US support.

U Nu's government had ambitious social and economic plans. The Pyidawtha ("happy land") programme of 1952 promised a welfare state, with free education and health care, and land nationalisation laws (1948 and 1953) aimed to redistribute land from absentee and Indian landlords. Schools, hospitals and clinics expanded, though doctors were few and the civil war disrupted services in the countryside, and rice exports never recovered their prewar level and the plans were cut back. Burmese women had a relatively strong traditional position in property and trade, and the 1947 constitution gave them equal rights and the vote.

Religion and ethnicity divided the union. U Nu, a devout Buddhist, hosted the Sixth Buddhist Council (1954–1956) and later made Buddhism the state religion (1961), which alienated Christian and Muslim minorities. The 1947 constitution allowed the Shan and Karenni states to secede after ten years, which raised fears that the union would break up. In 1958 the AFPFL split, and U Nu invited Ne Win to form a "caretaker" military government (October 1958–1960). Ne Win's coup of 2 March 1962 began decades of military rule.

Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Brunei and Thailand

Five other states of the region can also be used for this study, though the evidence for them is thinner and the first four came to independence by quite different routes.

Cambodia

Cambodia became a French protectorate in 1863. The French crowned the young Norodom Sihanouk king in 1941, expecting him to be obedient. After the Japanese coup of March 1945 Cambodia declared a short-lived independence, and the nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh briefly became prime minister before the French returned. Sihanouk then won independence by diplomacy and publicity: his "royal crusade for independence" of 1953, in which he went into self-imposed exile to put pressure on France, led France to transfer power on 9 November 1953. In its first decade Sihanouk abdicated (1955) to lead his own movement, the Sangkum, which won every seat in elections from 1955, and he followed a policy of neutrality in the Cold War, rejecting US aid in November 1963. The later history of Cambodia, from the 1970 coup to the Khmer Rouge, belongs to the Cold War in Asia.

Laos

Laos was joined to French Indochina in 1893. The Lao Issara ("Free Lao") movement declared independence in 1945 but was driven into exile when the French returned in 1946. Laos became an associated state within the French Union in 1949 and fully independent by the Franco-Lao treaty of October 1953, confirmed at Geneva in 1954. Its first decade was dominated by conflict between the royal government and the communist Pathet Lao, backed by North Vietnam.

Singapore

Singapore, a British colony with a Chinese majority, gained internal self-government in 1959 under Lee Kuan Yew and the People's Action Party (PAP). It joined Malaysia in 1963 and was separated from it on 9 August 1965, becoming independent unwillingly. In its first decade (1965–1975) the PAP government built public housing through the Housing and Development Board, attracted foreign manufacturing through the Economic Development Board, made English and a mother tongue compulsory in schools, and coped with the withdrawal of British bases (1968–1971), while detaining left-wing opponents under the Internal Security Act.

Brunei

Brunei, a British protectorate on Borneo enriched by oil since the 1920s, saw a revolt by the left-wing Brunei People's Party in December 1962, which British troops crushed. The sultan declined to join Malaysia, and Brunei became fully independent on 1 January 1984 as an absolute monarchy, joining ASEAN the same week. Its first years of independence fall within this study, but it offers little evidence on nationalist movements or post-war methods.

Thailand

Siam was never colonised. Kings Mongkut (Rama IV, r. 1851–1868) and Chulalongkorn (Rama V, r. 1868–1910) modernised the state, signed treaties with the Western powers and gave up territory to France and Britain (1893, 1907, 1909), while Siam served as a buffer between British Burma and French Indochina. In 1932 a revolution by the People's Party of civilians and officers ended absolute monarchy, and in December 1941 Field Marshal Phibun allied with Japan, while the Free Thai movement worked with the Allies. Because Thailand never had to win independence, it fits poorly the questions on independence movements and the first ten years of independence, and is a weak choice as the one state for an answer.

Comparing the states

The five main states shared a region and an era but reached independence in different ways. The comparison table sets out, for each, the key evidence for the six areas of the study.

Three patterns stand out from the comparison table. First, where the colonial power accepted that it would leave (the Philippines, and after 1945 Burma and Malaya), independence came by negotiation, and the main conflicts were between local groups. Second, where the colonial power tried to return by force (Indonesia, Vietnam), independence was won by war, and the international setting decided how long the war lasted. Third, every new state faced the same tensions in its first decade, between communities, between the capital and the regions, and between communists and their opponents, but they resolved them differently: by military rule in Burma and Indonesia, a communist one-party state in North Vietnam, and elected governments in the Philippines and Malaya.

Perspectives and debates

Did the Japanese occupation create independence?

Harry Benda, in The Crescent and the Rising Sun (1958), argues that the occupation transformed Indonesian politics by destroying Dutch prestige and raising both secular and Islamic nationalists to positions of influence. George Kahin, in Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (1952), and Benedict Anderson, in Java in a Time of Revolution (1972), give a central place to the movements and the young pemuda whom the occupation mobilised. Others stress continuity: the nationalist movements, their ideas and their leaders existed well before 1942, and in the Philippines independence had been fixed before the war. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, in Forgotten Armies (2004) and Forgotten Wars (2007), show the war and its aftermath across British Asia as a single period of collapse, violence and improvisation in which empire was lost.

Was nationalism a Western import?

An older view saw Southeast Asian nationalism as the product of Western education, liberal ideas and the colonial state. Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983) gives this a new form by stressing print, schools and colonial borders. Against it, historians of popular movements show local roots: Reynaldo Ileto, in Pasyon and Revolution (1979), argues that Filipino peasants understood the revolution of 1896 through the language of the Catholic passion story, and David Marr, in Vietnamese Anticolonialism 1885–1925 (1971), traces Vietnamese resistance to the scholar-gentry. Teodoro Agoncillo's The Revolt of the Masses (1956) presents the Katipunan as a movement of the common people against the ilustrado elite.

Ho Chi Minh: nationalist or communist?

William Duiker, in Ho Chi Minh (2000), presents Ho as a patriot who used communism as the best means to independence. Sophie Quinn-Judge, in Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years (2002), stresses his work as a Comintern agent and argues that his power within the party was more limited than the official image suggests. The debate matters for judging whether the Viet Minh's success came mainly from nationalism or from communist organisation.

Who decided decolonisation?

Some historians emphasise the colonial powers' own choices: Britain's decision to leave Burma once India was independent, the US timetable for the Philippines, and the British search for a friendly successor in Malaya, where Tim Harper's The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (1999) shows independence shaped by the Emergency. Others stress the nationalists' power to make colonial rule too costly, above all in Indonesia and Vietnam. A third view puts international pressure first, from the United Nations and the United States in Indonesia, and from the Cold War in Vietnam and Malaya. In Malaya the debate continues over the Emergency itself: the older view of Richard Clutterbuck, The Long Long War (1966), saw a model counter-insurgency, while Karl Hack and Huw Bennett stress coercion.

These views are not simply alternatives. The occupation, the long growth of nationalism and international pressure all mattered, but their weight differs from state to state, which is why a judgement about one state cannot simply be transferred to another.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

The most common weaknesses in answers on this region are narrative (telling the story of the independence struggle instead of evaluating the claim), drifting outside the time frame (the Vietnam War after 1954 in an answer on independence, or 1965 in an answer on Indonesia's first decade) and generalising about "Southeast Asia". Precise evidence from one state, such as dates, laws, organisations, figures and named leaders, is what lifts an answer into the top bands.

Paper 3: the Japanese occupation

Paper 3: the impact of colonialism

Paper 3: the methods used to achieve independence

Paper 3: the first ten years of independence

Self-check

• To do:

  I can describe the colonial map of Southeast Asia around 1900 and explain how each colonial power ruled.

• To do:

  I can explain the political, economic, social and cultural impact of colonial rule in my chosen state, with specific examples.

• To do:

  I can explain "divide and rule", indirect rule and the plural society, with examples from at least two states.

• To do:

  I can explain the role of ideas, economic and political grievances, and shared religious, ethnic and linguistic identity in the origins of nationalism.

• To do:

  I can explain the influence of liberalism, self-determination, communism, the First World War, Versailles and the Depression on nationalist movements after 1914.

• To do:

  I can assess the role and importance of leaders such as Sukarno, Ho Chi Minh, Quezon, Tunku Abdul Rahman and Aung San.

• To do:

  I can explain why Japan conquered Southeast Asia so quickly and how it established and maintained its rule.

• To do:

  I can analyse the political, economic and social impact of the Japanese occupation, including on women and ethnic groups, in my chosen state.

• To do:

  I can explain how independence was achieved in my chosen state, weighing mass mobilisation, conflict, external support and colonial weakness.

• To do:

  I can evaluate the achievements and challenges of the first ten years of independence in my chosen state, including education, health, women, the economy, political stability and ethnic and religious tensions.

• To do: