Britain and regional cooperation in South-East Asia, 1945-1949.

This thesis examines efforts by the British Foreign Office between 1945 and 1949 to establish an international, yet British-led, regional system in South-East Asia, initially on the economic level but eventually including political and defence cooperation as well. Part 1 looks at vain efforts by the Foreign Office in 1945 to use South East Asia Command (SEAC) under Lord Mountbatten as the basis for an international regional commission. It then examines the Foreign Office's appointment in 1946 of Lord Killearn as Special Commissioner in Singapore, and it highlights British hopes that the Special Commission, which organised international action against the acute shortage of rice in the region, would one day become the nucleus for a wider regional organisation. Part 2 looks at the impact of Asian nationalism on British regional policies. By February 1947, the Foreign Office contemplated the eventual inclusion of India and of other fledgling Asian states in its regional plans. Part 3 shows the subsequent decline of the Special Commission after London's decision on financial grounds to merge the organisation with the office of the Malayan Governor-General. It also examines competition by Australia, India and the UN in trying to take the lead on regional cooperation, and it shows how British policies were negatively affected by the hardline policies of France and the Netherlands in their respective South-East Asian colonies. Part 4 looks at the revival of British regional plans towards the end of 1948 following the Malayan Emergency. The Foreign Office convinced the rest of Whitehall of trying to organise regional cooperation as a means of containing communism in South-East Asia. At the same time, it launched a diplomatic offensive to secure Asian cooperation and American financial backing for its regional plans. The thesis ends in November 1949 with the Cabinet's adoption of regional cooperation as official British policy, paving the way for the Colombo Conference in January 1950 and the subsequent Colombo Plan. One of the recurring themes of the thesis is the conflict between the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office over regional policies; another one is the Foreign Office's shift from colonial cooperation concepts to the idea of cooperating primarily with the new Asian states

Unfinished Decolonisation and Globalisation

This article locates John Darwin’s work on decolonisation within an Oxbridge tradition which portrays a British world system, of which formal empire was but one part, emerging to increasing global dominance from the early nineteenth century. In this mental universe, decolonisation was the mirror image of that expanding global power. According to this point of view, it was not the sloughing off of individual territories, but rather the shrinking away of the system and of the international norms that supported it, until only its ghost remained by the end of the 1960s. The article then asks, echoing the title of Darwin’s Unfinished Empire, whether the decolonisation project is all but complete, or still ongoing. In addition, what is the responsibility of the imperial historian to engage with, inform, or indeed refrain from, contemporary debates that relate to some of these issues? The answer is twofold. On the one hand, the toolkit that the Oxbridge tradition and Darwin provide remains relevant, and also useful in thinking about contemporary issues such as China’s move towards being a global power, the United States’ declining hegemony, and some states and groups desires to rearticulate their relationship with the global. On the other hand, the decline of world systems of power needs to be recognised as just one of several types of, and approaches to, analysing ‘decolonisation’. One which cannot be allowed to ignore or marginalise the study of others, such as experience, first nations issues, the shaping of the postcolonial state, and empire legacies. The article concludes by placing the Oxbridge tradition into a broader typology of types and methodologies of decolonisation, and by asking what a new historiography of decolonisation might look like. It suggests that it would address the Oxbridge concern with the lifecycles of systems of power and their relationship to global changes, but also place them alongside, and in dialogue with, a much broader set of perspectives and analytical approaches