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Britain and the Confrontation with Indonesia, 1960-66
The confrontation with Indonesia cut to the heart of Britain's desire to retain global power status in the 1960s and was central to decolonisation and British defence policy across South-East Asia. Factors such as the need to maintain a military base in Singapore drove strategy and this confrontation became a major commitment - close at times to escalating into full-scale regional war.However, 'the Confrontation' was not recorded as a conflict of this scale, and Britain was cast into a passive and defensive role. Here, David Easter reveals a radically different view, persuasively making the case that Britain waged a secret and aggressive war against President Sukarno's Indonesia. It was the covert nature of operations and the deliberate decision of British policy-makers to keep the full extent of this conflict away from public scrutiny that has allowed it to be overshadowed in the annals of history. 'Where Easter breaks entirely new ground is in his treatment of the clandestine and covert side of Britain's struggle with Indonesia... Easter gives us the best picture to date of the uncertainties generated in Whitehall during the final months of the conflict... This is a fine addition to the recent literature on the confrontation, and provides a significant perspective on the links between progress in the conflict with Indonesia and the general process of withdrawal from South-East Asia.' - Matthew Jones, Professor of Modern History, University of Nottingham.
eBook
The Politics and Economics of Britain's Foreign Aid
The Pergau dam in Malaysia was the most controversial project in the history of British aid. Because of its high cost, it was a poor candidate for aid funding. It was provided in part to honour a highly irregular promise of civil aid in connection with a major arms deal. After two parliamentary inquiries and intense media coverage, in a landmark judgement the aid for Pergau was declared unlawful.
Tim Lankester offers a detailed case study of this major aid project and of government decision-making in Britain and Malaysia. Exposing the roles played by key politicians and other stakeholders on both sides, he analyses the background to the aid/arms linkage, and the reasons why the British and Malaysian governments were so committed to the project, before exploring the response of Britain's Parliament, and its media and NGOs, and the resultant legal case. The main causes of the Pergau debacle are carefully drawn out, from conflicting policy agendas within the British government to the power of the business lobby and the inability of Parliament to provide any serious challenge. Finally, Lankester asks whether, given what was known at the time and what we know now, he and his colleagues in Britain's aid ministry were correct in their objections to the project.
Pergau is still talked about as a prime example of how not to do aid. Tim Lankester, a key figure in the affair, is perfectly placed to provide the definitive account. At a time when aid budgets are under particular scrutiny, it provides a cautionary tale.
eBook
The political economy of imperial relations : Britain, the sterling area, and Malaya, 1945-1960
\"The Political Economy of Imperial Relations considers the relationship between Britain and Malaya after World War Two in theoretical and historical terms. It develops a new approach to imperialism, situating an understanding of the state in terms of the global economy. This approach challenges existing accounts of the relationship between Britain and Malaya by positing that it can best be characterized in terms of continuity rather than discontinuity. By analyzing the period from 1945 to 1960, the book charts Britain's commitment to Malaya, as well as Malaya's value to Britain, as part of the Sterling Area and in terms of the difficulties facing both the British and global economy at the time\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Ending \East of Suez\ : the British decision to withdraw from Malaysia and Singapore, 1964-1968
In 1964, Britain's defence presence in Malaysia and Singapore was the largest and most expensive component of the country's world‐wide role. Yet within three and a half years, the Wilson Government had announced that Britain would be withdrawing from its major Southeast Asian bases and abandoning any special military role ‘East of Suez’. The purpose of this book is to document and explain the British policy process leading to the decisions to withdraw.The book argues that the Wilson Government faced two fundamental dilemmas regarding its defence policy. The first was a conflict between Britain's limited economic means, which compelled cuts to the country's defence role, and its need to maintain its relations with its major allies, especially the Johnson Administration in the United States, all of whom wanted Britain to maintain a significant military presence in Southeast Asia. This conflict was fundamentally resolved after the Labour Party revolted over defence policy in early 1967, when the Government decided to withdraw from the bases in Singapore and Malaysia. Thereafter, the Wilson Government faced a second dilemma over whether to minimise the political and symbolic impact of its decisions for the sake of its international allies, or to maximise it for domestic political advantage. This conflict was not fully settled until January 1968, when the Government announced a faster withdrawal and complete abandonment of Britain's ‘East of Suez’ role, as a means of gaining acceptance for the social cuts it was implementing in the aftermath of the devaluation of the Pound.
eBook
The political economy of imperial relations : Britain, the sterling area, and Malaya 1945-1960
The Political Economy of Imperial Relations offers a much needed historical and theoretical intervention into the relationship between Britain and Malaya after the Second World War. It challenges existing accounts and details a strong continuity in this relationship from 1945 until 1960.
eBook
Arc of Containment
Arc of Containmentrecasts the history of American empire in Southeast and East Asia from World War II through the end of American intervention in Vietnam. Setting aside the classic story of anxiety about falling dominoes, Wen-Qing Ngoei articulates a new regional history premised on strong security and sure containment guaranteed by Anglo-American cooperation.
Ngoei argues that anticommunist nationalism in Southeast Asia intersected with preexisting local antipathy toward China and the Chinese diaspora to usher the region from European-dominated colonialism to US hegemony. Central to this revisionary strategic assessment is the place of British power and the effects of direct neocolonial military might and less overt cultural influences based in decades of colonial rule. Also essential to the analysis inArc of Containmentis the considerable influence of Southeast Asian actors upon Anglo-American imperial strategy throughout the post-war period.
InArc of ContainmentNgoei shows how the pro-US trajectory of Southeast Asia after the Pacific War was, in fact, far more characteristic of the wider region's history than American policy failure in Vietnam. Indeed, by the early 1970s, five key anticommunist nations-Malaya, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia-had quashed Chinese-influenced socialist movements at home and established, with U.S. support, a geostrategic arc of states that contained the Vietnamese revolution and encircled China. In the process, the Euro-American colonial order of Southeast Asia passed from an era of Anglo-American predominance into a condition of US hegemony.Arc of Containmentdemonstrates that American failure in Vietnam had less long-term consequences than widely believed because British pro-West nationalism had been firmly entrenched twenty-plus years earlier. In effect, Ngoei argues, the Cold War in Southeast Asia was but one violent chapter in the continuous history of western imperialism in the region in the twentieth century.
eBook
Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961–1965
In the early 1960s, Britain and the United States were still trying to come to terms with the powerful forces of indigenous nationalism unleashed by the Second World War. The Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation - a crisis which was, as Macmillan remarked to Kennedy, 'as dangerous a situation in Southeast Asia as we have seen since the war' - was a complex test of Anglo-American relations. As American commitment to Vietnam accelerated under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Britain was involving herself in an 'end-of-empire' exercise in state-building which had important military and political implications for both nations. In this book Matthew Jones provides a detailed insight into the origins, outbreak and development of this important episode in international history; using a large range of previously unavailable archival sources, he illuminates the formation of the Malaysian federation, Indonesia's violent opposition to the state and the Western Powers' attempts to deal with the resulting conflict.
eBook