aristocratic Tunku Abdul Rahman, and the moder-
ate Chinese under Tan Cheng Lock formed an
Alliance Party calling for independence. It won
overwhelming support in Malaya. The negotia-
tions for independence were long and drawn out,
but they reached a successful conclusion in 1957.
The Federation of Malaya, independent but a
member of the Commonwealth, was created.
Singapore was to receive independence separately
when it withdrew from the federation in 1965.
The end of British rule and the peaceful trans-
fer of power to the elected representatives of
Malaya came in 1957. The Chinese communist
guerrillas could not now credibly claim that theirs
was a struggle for independence from colonial
servitude. Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tan Cheng
Lock could no longer convincingly be pictured by
the communists as mere stooges and puppets of
the British. Their tough stand in negotiations and
their subsequent success had earned them, in the
eyes of the majority of Malayans, a reputation as
genuine patriots who had created an independent
nation. The British departed voluntarily, with the
respect and friendship of the founders of the
nation, leaving a Malaya, moreover, from which
the menace of communist violence had been vir-
tually eradicated. Britain’s greatest imperial
achievement, perhaps, was not the acquisition of
its worldwide empire, but the manner in which it
gave it up. Its more realistic and far-sighted atti-
tude stood in dark contrast to those of France and
the Netherlands.
The British, in the end, accommodated them-
selves to national aspirations in south-east Asia,
despite their military superiority. The Dutch, by
contrast, were militarily weak, but refused to give
way to Indonesian nationalism until forced to
yield. Yet it was the Dutch colonisers in the nine-
teenth century who had made a critical contribu-
tion to the emergence of an Indonesian sense of
nationalism by bringing together for administra-
tive convenience the cultures and ethnic groups
of the many islands of their Dutch East Indies
empire. The dominant group, 40 per cent of the
whole, are the Javanese people, Muslims whose
ruling class could look back on an ancient and
splendid culture. Their social structure was sub-
ordinated rather than destroyed by the new
Dutch masters.
The majority of Indonesia’s large population,
which had reached 60 million in 1930, lived on
the overcrowded island of Java. Living standards
were low, despite belated efforts by the Dutch to
improve the lot of the ‘natives’, and population
increases – as elsewhere in the underdeveloped
world – outstripped improvements and depressed
living standards even further. Rice production in
Java could no longer feed the people adequately,
and the price of sugar, the principal export,
collapsed in the blizzard of the world economic
crisis of the 1930s. The outer islands, much less
crowded, provided the important exports of oil
and rubber. It was these commodities, essential
to any war effort, that decided Japan to launch its
‘southern drive’ of conquest and so brought it
into collision with the West.
In the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese
invaders were generally welcomed as liberators in
the spring of 1942, and the Dutch bureaucracy
quickly collapsed. The mass of the people now
turned against the traditional social structures,
with the Javanese aristocracy at their apex,
through which the Dutch had ruled the islands
and imposed their policies. After years of Dutch
repression, the nationalist movement – after a
chequered history – surfaced more strongly than
ever. Communism had failed to gain a hold,
almost entirely due to the fierce repression of the
Dutch colonial government of the 1920s, which
resorted to internment and to the mass arrest of
its leaders. The continuing resentment against the
Dutch, however, enabled the two most outstand-
ing nationalist leaders, the economist Mohammed
Hatta and the engineer Achmed Sukarno, to rally
the various nationalist movements and to win
adherents among the educated elites. Their hour
seemed to have struck when the Dutch were
humiliated and defeated by the invading Japanese
army. But for the Indonesians one system of
repression was now replaced by another.
Although four centuries of European rule had
at one stroke been destroyed, the new Asian ‘lib-
erators’ gave no encouragement to social revolu-
tion or national experiments, let alone to
1
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