Losing Hearts and Minds: Race, War, and Empire in Singapore and Malaya, 1915–1960

STANFORD BRITISH HISTORIES

Edited by Priya Satia

Losing Hearts and Minds

RACE, WAR, AND EMPIRE IN SINGAPORE AND MALAYA, 1915–1960

Kate Imy

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2024 by Kate Imy. All rights reserved.

This book has been partially underwritten by the Peter Stansky Publication Fund in British Studies. For more information on the fund, please see www.sup.org/stanskyfund.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Imy, Kate, 1987- author.

Title: Losing hearts and minds : race, war, and empire in Singapore and Malaya, 1915-1960 / Kate Imy.

Other titles: Race, war, and empire in Singapore and Malaya, 1915-1960 | Stanford British histories.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2024] | Series: Stanford British histories | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023044745 (print) | LCCN 2023044746 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503634626 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503639850 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503639867 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Anti-imperialist movements—Southeast Asia—History—20th century. | Singapore—History—1867-1942. | Singapore—History—Japanese occupation, 1942-1945. | Singapore—History—1945-1963. | Malaya—History—British rule, 1867-1942. | Malaya—History—Japanese occupation, 1942-1945. | Malaya—History—Malayan Emergency, 1948-1960. | Great Britain—Colonies—Asia—Race relations—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC DS610.5 .I49 2024 (print) | LCC DS610.5 (ebook) | DDC 959.5/03—dc23/eng/20231220

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023044745

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023044746

Cover design: Michele Wetherbee

Cover photograph: White women recreating the vigorous physical labor they performed while interned by the Japanese military in the Second World War. Argus (Melbourne, Vic.) Australia. Department of Information. Courtesy of State Library Victoria, www.slv.vic.gov.au

Typeset by Newgen in Adobe Caslon Pro Regular 9.75/14

For Tinny

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Race War in Singapore

2. Making Enemies between the Wars

3. The Pride and the Fall

4. Labored Intimacies

5. Making and Unmaking Martial Races

6. Forging the Commonwealth

7. Pregnant in the Jungle

Conclusion

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wrote this book when my own faith in and love for certain institutions evaporated. Doing so meant relying heavily on a network of care and support to which I owe my life. I owe deep gratitude to Michelle Moyd, Melissa Shaw, Sue Grayzel, and Tammy Proctor, who were a lifeline during the COVID-19 pandemic. They not only provided invaluable feedback on most of the chapters but always lent a helping hand when things got tough. They are a shining model of what intellectual collaboration can and should look like. Most institutions would improve by following their model of genuine leadership and mutual support.

Teresa Segura-Garcia, Erica Wald, and Elena Valdemari have been incredible collaborators for many years, enabling this project to develop from its earliest seeds. Their intellectual community and friendship took us to London, Zürich, Barcelona, and beyond and is something that I will always treasure. Selections from chapters 4 and 5 will be published in our forthcoming edited volume with Leiden University Press, Bodies Beyond Binaries in Colonial and Postcolonial Asia. Sections from chapter 4 have also been published as Dream Mother: Race, Gender, and Intimacy in Japanese-Occupied Singapore, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 52, 3 (2021): 464–491.

I am also grateful to the many brilliant, empathetic scholars, including Sara Black, Chris Bischof, King James, Courtney Doucette, Audrey Thorstad, Allison Abra, Amy Milne-Smith, and Nancy Stockdale, who provided a sympathetic ear on the road to publishing this book. Seth Koven, Bonnie Smith, Lynn Hollen Lees, Tan Tai Yong, and Sue Thompson were invaluable mentors who helped me secure the research funding necessary for this international project. David Baillargeon and Jeremy Taylor have done excellent work renewing interest in the Malayan Emergency and included me in many productive conversations.

Some institutions take seriously their role as leaders and community builders that enable and support research, collaboration, and intellectual growth. The North American Conference of British Studies has been an invaluable ally to scholars and made it possible for me to attend their national conference, present research, and maintain my networks with brilliant scholars. I am also grateful to the audiences and organizers of conferences and events that provided generous intellectual forums to refine the ideas of this work, including: the Society for Military History; the International Society for Cultural History; the Annual Conference on South Asia; Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s Research Group on Empires, Metropolises, and Extra-European Societies (GRIMSE); the University of Texas at Arlington; the International Society for First World War Studies; and Monash University Malaysia’s Malayan Emergency in Film and Literature Workshop. The American Historical Association kindly supported this project with a Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant for Research in European, African, or Asian History. This funding enabled me to complete the remaining research required for this project despite the travel limitations necessitated by a global pandemic.

The Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellowship on Southeast Asia made it possible for me to spend seven months researching at the National University of Singapore and Stanford University. These intellectual communities, including the Asia-Pacific Research Center supported by Donald K. Emmerson, Kristen Lee, and Lisa Lee, were invaluable resources for collaboration and intellectual exchange. While in Singapore, I benefited immensely from the guidance and support of Chang Zhi’An Andrew and enjoyed many fruitful conversations with Maitrii Aung-Thwin, Enze Han, Tapsi Mathur, Jess Hinchy, and Faizah Zakaria, among others. At Stanford, meeting Priya Satia, after many years of admiration, not only sated my inner fangirl over her enviable breadth and depth of research but also started the conversations that would lead to the publication of this book.

My first book, Faithful Fighters, benefited from the support, professionalism, and clarity offered by Stanford University Press, so I eagerly returned with this manuscript. While researching at Stanford, I was fortunate to meet Margo Irvin to enjoy a fruitful conversation about the exciting direction of British History at Stanford University Press. In this, Priya Satia has continued to be an invaluable ally and mentor. Her guidance for revising the manuscript, together with that of the anonymous reviewers, provided detailed and encouraging notes that improved the manuscript. Peter Stansky’s support of Stanford University Press, and his kind words after Faithful Fighters won the prize named in his honor, have been a guiding light for how senior scholars can support fellow scholars and the profession.

I also owe a major debt to the staff at numerous archives. Dolores Ho not only provided me with amazing resources at the National Army Museum in Waiouru but also shared her life story of living through the Emergency. Fiona Tan at the National University of Singapore provided me with immensely valuable assistance prior to my arrival in Singapore to make my research as efficient and rewarding as possible. Doug Henderson at the Gurkha Museum in Winchester ensured that I made the most of their rich personal and published collections. Additionally, I owe considerable debt to archivists and staff at the Imperial War Museum, Australian War Memorial, National Archives of Australia, National Library of Australia, British Library, National Army Museum, Wrexham Archives, Bodleian Library, the Hoover Institution, the UK National Archives (Kew), the National Library of New Zealand, the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, and the Cambridge University Libraries. Without their tireless efforts, scholarly work could not exist.

The University of North Texas provided financial support for this project through the Scholarly and Creative Award (SCA), College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS), UNT History Department, Creative and Research and Enhancement Activity Time for Engagement (CREATE) Grant, and a Junior Research Fellowship.

In the past several years, most people, including academics, authors, and intellectuals, found themselves subject to varying degrees of institutional horror as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. When things got bad, we realized very quickly which bonds were real and which were merely smoke screens for overwork and coercion. Institutional corruption, and the money required for research, occasionally means that institutions can provide financial assistance while also enabling abuse, overwork, and inequitable pay, pushing beneficiaries to the point of exhaustion and mental collapse. As a result, I have come to value other connections so deeply.

I am grateful to a burgeoning network of screenwriters and teachers who have reignited my joy and passion for writing. The Outfest Screenwriting Lab, Cinestory, and Stowe Lab, as well as teachers and writers at UCLA Extension, Writing Pad, Script Anatomy, and Sundance Collab, provided excellent forums for artists to workshop and collaborate. Michael Barlow and Geraldine Inoa got me to think about my writing differently while providing invaluable mentorship. I take immense inspiration from the Writer’s Guilds of America (East and West), which show with actions as well as words how important it is to protect not only the craft of writing but also the writers who tell the stories that keep us alive.

I am most grateful to my family—Collins, Imys, Polings, and beyond. I lost many in the years it took to complete this project and have a deeper and richer love for them and for those still with us. Megan, Nick, and Kitty Elizarraraz; Tara, Jason, and Remi Collins-L’Heureux; and Charlie, Benji, Cody, my parents, David, Brenda, Katherine, Danny, Taylor, Dylan, and Kamryn have reminded me many times that I am not alone. I hold in my heart those dear to us whom we lost, including Aunt Phyllis, Uncle Mike, Gumball, Tinny, and Dr. Bart. Most of all, I am grateful to Kenneth for weathering the impossible storm of the past years. Together we built a life capable of sustaining six cats and dogs while I endeavored to reimagine my career as a writer without falling into the familiar traps of overwork and underpay. I hope that I can pay it forward for our family and for other writers without the same support. Many thanks to Pinky, Tars, Jack, Ladybird, Liza, Little Miss, and Princess for many reassuring snuggles and smiles.

This work was a labor of love and anguish completed, against the odds, without the security of an academic salary. Finishing it is an investment in the belief that we can put people, and their stories, before institutional indifference. I hope that one day we can build a world in which power does not bring death. The people cited in these acknowledgements give me hope that we have the ingredients to build a better world. We just need more institutions with the courage to enable rather than thwart creativity, passion, and mutual care.

ABBREVIATIONS

AWM—Australian War Memorial

BL—British Library

CPM—Communist Party of Malaya (alternative to MCP)

CT—Communist Terrorist

EIC—East India Company

INA—Indian National Army

IOR—India Office Records, British Library

IWM—Imperial War Museum

KMT—Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party)

MCP—Malayan Communist Party

MPAJA—Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army

NAI—National Archives of India

NAM—National Army Museum

NAS—National Archives of Singapore

NML—Nehru Memorial Library

RIMC—Royal Indian Military College

RJR—Rani of Jhansi Regiment

TGM—The Gurkha Museum (Winchester)

Introduction

When Dolores Ho was a young girl in the military station of Taiping, she worried that celebrating Chinese holidays by hanging red cloth might flag her family as communists. This could have been a deadly declaration during Britain’s prolonged anti-communist campaign, known as the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960). Tamil rubber tappers frequently told her about Chinese civilians who disappeared. Her brother considered joining the military to protect their family from violence. Living through the Emergency, they found, extended the trauma of the Second World War into the postwar period. During that prior conflict, Ho’s family felt abandoned when British leaders surrendered Singapore to the Japanese military in February 1942.¹ Over the next three years, they lived in chicken coops and searched for food along storm drains to avoid Japanese soldiers, who targeted Chinese civilians for violence. British forces’ similar tendency to single out Chinese civilians after reoccupying Malaya and Singapore felt like another betrayal. For soldiers and civilians living under colonialism, war often provided continuity, rather than change, for the racialized traumas of military occupation.

Losing Hearts and Minds analyzes soldier and civilian experiences of war and anti-colonialism in Singapore and Malaya from the First World War to the Malayan Emergency. In so doing, it examines the colonial roots of military claims to win civilian hearts and minds in war. Many associate this phrase with U.S. military strategies during the Cold War, after Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson used it in this context. It gained renewed relevance when President George W. Bush said it to justify the military invasion of Iraq. It then appeared in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps’ revised Counterinsurgency Field Manual in 2006, citing the Malayan Emergency as a successful counterinsurgency campaign.² However, the phrase gained its martial popularity due to British, rather than American, militarism. Director of Operations and High Commissioner of Malaya Sir Gerald Templer (1951–1954) famously claimed that the key to success in the Malayan Emergency lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle but in the hearts and minds of the people.³ Still, the Malayan Emergency demanded an extensive military presence in the jungle, including soldiers from Nepal, Australia, New Zealand, East Africa, and Fiji. Losing Hearts and Minds, therefore, asks how colonial subjects’ experiences of imperialism and war shaped Britain’s stated emphasis on fostering positive soldier-civilian relations. It shows that the hearts and minds approach remade and replicated colonial racial and gender hierarchies, increasing rather than reducing violence against civilians.

Across multiple conflicts, British leaders tried to claim soldier and civilian loyalties despite the challenges of anti-colonial rebellion, military occupation, and the rise of communism. As a result, Singapore and Malaya became sites of some of the most impactful military and anti-colonial conflicts of the twentieth century. A 1915 mutiny of Indian troops in Singapore revealed Indian soldiers’ immersion in global anti-colonial networks and their ease in finding supporters among European, Malay, and Chinese civilians.⁴ The 1942 fall of Singapore represented a lasting blow to British imperial and military power as some colonial subjects aided the Japanese invasion and occupation.⁵ The Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) laid the groundwork for global wars of decolonization and anti-communism, bringing soldiers around the globe into contact with civilians weary from endless war.⁶ These recurring conflicts forced European, Indigenous, Chinese, Malay, and Indian civilians to resist or collaborate with British and Commonwealth soldiers, rebellious Indian troops (1915 and 1942), invading Japanese combatants (1941–1945), and communists (1948–1960). British military leaders tried—but largely failed—to win the hearts and minds of colonial subjects many times before Templer popularized this famous phrase. As a result, Losing Hearts and Minds examines the fraught history of war and empire that made British leaders like Templer believe that winning hearts and minds was innovative, necessary, and possible.

One major impediment to earning and maintaining civilian confidence was that British rule in Asia hinged on racial hierarchy. Farish Noor and Peter Carey have argued that theories of racial difference and white supremacy were at the very heart of the empire-building process in the nineteenth century. As a result, nineteenth-century conflicts in Southeast Asia were "race wars that were conceived, rationalized, fought or justified at times on the basis of racial ideas and understandings."⁷ Yet race is a complex term that deserves further analysis. As many scholars have argued, race is not a fixed biological reality but rather a shifting and relational category of power, similar to and intersecting with gender, class, and sexuality.⁸ This was especially true in colonial Asia, where diverse colonial populations vied for opportunity despite limits on their upward mobility. According to Kristy Walker, race became the primary category of social analysis in Southeast Asia, governing employment opportunities and public space.⁹ Yet racial stratification was also gendered. For Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, in societies where racial demarcation is endemic to their sociocultural fabric and heritage, gender identity is inextricably linked to and even determined by racial identity.¹⁰ British leaders in Singapore and Malaya heavily relied on gender-segregated military and labor recruitment, as well as racial stratification, to define people’s value and limit their access to power.

For Ann Laura Stoler, racial categorization is also complicated by the fact that terms like colonizer and colonized were not fixed and self-evident, but rather an historically shifting pair of social categories.¹¹ Many white settlers brought their own ideas of Britishness or Europeanness but also adopted norms and styles that would amplify their difference from the colonized. In turn, definitions of British or European identity proved complex. Some understood British to be an inclusive term that forged unity across the empire. This included colonial subjects and soldiers from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean with no direct family ties to, or experiences in, Britain but who still understood themselves as British because of their inclusion within the empire.¹² This was especially common in the military, where the idea of the imperial, and later Commonwealth, family helped secure personnel and material support from colonies in wartime.¹³ At the same time, white settlers and their descendants in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa increasingly embraced the term British to distinguish themselves from racialized Indigenous and migrant populations, as well as those living in predominantly Black or Asian colonies.¹⁴ Whiteness, in these contexts, became a precondition of British belonging, making anyone not white implicitly not British. European, similarly, was a malleable rather than fixed term.¹⁵ Entering elite clubs, cinemas, and cafés often meant an ability to pass as white. As a result, many British and Asian soldiers and civilians used British and European to mark the white colonial population as separate and distinct from Asian colonial subjects. They often extended these terms to white Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders, further emphasizing Britishness and Europeanness as whiteness. Given that not all Britons or Europeans were white, this work often contextualizes the terms European or British by adding white before them, to signify people benefiting from the status of whiteness. European, white, and British were all contested terms that had multiple meanings. Yet whiteness, in this period, carried currency for those who claimed it.

Another difficulty of early-twentieth-century racial categorization is that it often existed as a binary between Black and white. Native became shorthand for colonial leaders to cast all racialized subjects as possessing similar traits, flattening their identities and making them easier to rule. As a result, the complex meanings of Asian often get left out of the conversation. Anne Anlin Cheng has argued for reclaiming the term yellow to discuss racialization of Asian people in the present.¹⁶ In the period discussed, however, yellow was a common slur used against Asian migrants.¹⁷ Many in Southeast Asia understood it as a pejorative term that denied them connections to a specific homeland or claims to Britishness.¹⁸ It signified them as colonial others, betraying promises of inclusive Britishness that transcended racial differences. It also flagged the otherness of people with both European and Asian (Eurasian) heritage, underlining their tenuous connections to Britishness, Europeanness, and whiteness. As a result, when discussing racial bars or racial exclusion along a color line, I use the term Asian while recognizing that the term has limitations. Writing during the Emergency, Eurasian doctor and author Han Suyin explained that:

Asians now spoke of themselves as we-Asians, as if Asia were an entity, when really it was a huge agglomeration of continents and cultures and races and religions and governments further apart from each other than any European country could be from any other European country. And yet we-Asians gripped the imagination . . . It meant something. There was a feeling of akinness, from Egypt to Japan . . . and all these countries were changing, changing, running the centuries into days, hurrying and scrambling forward, at a breathless speed which left European prejudices and platitudes about them as far behind as the buggy horse was left panting after a jet plane. Somehow Europe appeared so staid, stay-behind and unimaginative beside this surging exaltation of Asia.¹⁹

As Han Suyin suggests, Asian was an important concept for how people self-identified to create transnational solidarities that transcended imperial identity. The complexity and imprecision of racial categorization, alongside its very real consequences, is exactly why race and militarism are essential to understanding British colonial rule in Asia. Racial identities enabled the implementation of, and resistance to, colonial violence in times both of formal war and colonial peace.

While this study focuses on the twentieth century, ideas about race in Southeast Asia were central to Britain’s earliest colonial and trade settlements in the nineteenth century. One of Singapore’s most influential governors, Stamford Raffles, was also a member of the English East India Company and hoped to divide Singapore into racially segregated districts. As a result, Lt. Philip Jackson mapped a (never executed) plan of the city in this light in 1828.²⁰ As British demands for trade increased, Company leaders emphasized racialized labor recruitment to encourage and coerce Chinese and Indian migrants to come to the region for work. On arrival, they often faced plantation-style discipline and severe racial hierarchy.²¹ As Lynn Lees has explained, If sugar planted a harsh, hierarchical empire in rural Malaya, plantation rubber cultivated its growth by identifying colonial rule with unfree labour, endemic violence, and racial separation.²² At the same time, British leaders relied on the heavy recruitment of men from India to maintain and defend the region’s profitable trade. After a major rebellion against the East India Company started with a mutiny of troops in India in 1857, British suspicions toward colonial subjects intensified.²³ Military investment increased across Asia, including building Fort Canning in Singapore. While this ostensibly protected the colony from external attack, defenses towered over Chinese residential districts. Military power was as much, if not more, about protecting colonial investments from colonial subjects as it was about defending against external threats.

When the British Colonial Office took control of the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Malacca, Penang) in 1867, they integrated the region more formally into networks of British military power.²⁴ This included a recurring reliance on colonial troops and police to curb Indigenous resistance, such as the heavy use of Sikh police during the Pahang Civil War (1891–1895).²⁵ A series of treaties in the early twentieth century expanded British rule even further, bringing previously independent regions under the umbrella of British kingship as Unfederated Malay states with protectorate status. These states retained previous rulers as figureheads to legitimize unpopular imperial policies.²⁶ As war and anti-colonial activity intensified in the twentieth century, British leaders hoped that policing the population with Indian men would retain colonial control.²⁷ Instead, Singapore and Malaya became fertile sites of revolt that undermined British assumptions about governance and rebellion because soldiers and civilians constantly found commonalities. Long before Singapore gained its reputation as an impregnable fortress, and Malaya became a test case for winning hearts and minds, soldiers and civilians alike dreamed of freedom from military occupation.

British leaders’ reliance on Indian soldiers also influenced racial assumptions about martial prowess in Singapore and Malaya. In particular, the Indian Army prioritized the recruitment of men who belonged to the so-called martial races. This proved to be a malleable set of ideals that defined men’s martial potential through their faith, region of origin, ethnicity, and physical stature.²⁸ Gajendra Singh has applied Ann Laura Stoler’s phrase about colonial negatives to Indian Army martial race concepts. Just as photograph negatives are colorless shadows that can be cropped, redeveloped, or discarded, martial race ideas are adjustable, half formed images that do as much to distort as portray the living breathing men they represent.²⁹ Gender, as much as race, was central to these formulations, as martial race status granted some men claims to robust, powerful masculinity, while relegating others to the marginal status of effeminacy.³⁰ This was also dehumanizing. Michelle Moyd has argued that the idealized image of East African askari, which echoed Indian martial race thinking, allowed real men to become a beautiful object—a myth—floating above history.³¹ For Moyd, martial race theories shaped how young men understood themselves in relation to colonial regimes. Tim Parsons also notes that martial race categorization was rooted in the political economies of different colonial contexts and involved inventing or hardening existing identities. Officers encouraged martial race soldiers to think of the army as their tribe, family, or community, isolating them from civilian experiences of colonialism and collective identity.³² Simeon Man suggests that diverse recruitment enabled empires to claim antiracism and anticolonialism without actually ending imperial violence.³³ In Singapore and Malaya, the reliance on international imperial soldiers, and selective racialized recruiting in local police and volunteer forces, ensured pervasive tensions around race and militarism. These echoed and duplicated the problems of British rule in India rather than laying the groundwork for a successful model of imperial war.

British militarism in India cast such a large shadow over Malaya and Singapore that it also shaped the hearts and minds approach to war. In 1891, Sir Robert Groves Sandeman, working for the governor-general in Baluchistan on the Indian borderlands, wrote to a friend that to be successful on this frontier a man has to deal with the hearts and minds of the people and not only with their fears.³⁴ This made Sandeman, rather than Templer, the originator of perhaps the most famous phrase in military history. The Sandeman system emphasized the recruitment of local personnel into militias to become a civilizing influence that could maintain colonial order. As Nivi Manchanda has argued, the perceived unpredictability of the region created an emergency episteme in which experts were born overnight to create practical knowledge recycled through an academic-military complex that served overwhelmingly . . . military purposes.³⁵ Of course, this approach did not bring stability to the Indo-Afghan border region, which remained a space of colonial militarization and brutality up to and through the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Still, the Sandeman system influenced colonial leaders beyond India. Harold Briggs, who preceded Templer as high commissioner in Malaya, had served in Baluchistan with the son of one of Sandeman’s assistants. Briggs would introduce the mass internment and resettlement of predominantly Chinese civilians, renamed New Villages by Templer, in Malaya during the Emergency. The phrase that made Templer famous in military circles, and profoundly influenced U.S. militarism, had clear roots in the high tide of British colonialism in India. Yet Templer did not understand himself as part of this imperial history. Years later, he referred to winning hearts and minds as that nauseating phrase I think I invented.³⁶ Ignoring or forgetting the imperial past enabled leaders to suggest that winning hearts and minds offered something other than a repackaged rationale for continued violence.

Rather than tracking if Templer introduced a successful model of counterinsurgency, Losing Hearts and Minds interrogates how wartime experiences made, remade, destroyed, or fortified imperial identities. While the title speaks to a famous military phrase, it does not center the voices of leaders and policy makers who inspired, defined, or took inspiration from it.³⁷ Instead, it prioritizes the people whose hearts and minds British leaders claimed to win. It does so by using a wide range of diaries, letters, oral histories, and memoirs of people who identified with or served British power. This includes Indian soldiers who longed for respect back home, Eurasian nurses who identified as British without ever setting foot in Britain, and Chinese businessmen who rushed to defend white Britons from rebelling Indian soldiers. It also examines white soldiers and civilians who saw themselves as challenging, rather than reinforcing, colonial racial hierarchies. Some white women doctors claimed to understand Malays. Many Australian internees lived beside Asian and Eurasian civilians in internment camps. A few British soldiers felt that their service was about cross-cultural collaboration. Many colonial subjects believed or hoped that serving the empire could facilitate egalitarian, interracial unity. Yet these testimonies—whether by white, Asian, or Eurasian authors—more often reveal the limitations of forging inclusivity in wartime. Most felt betrayed, in one way or another, by the racial biases embedded in colonial law, policing, and militarism, which limited their ability to secure the power promised to them. As a result, this work seeks to understand how people emotionally processed such betrayals. As Tiffany Florvil has argued, emotions could help a community cohere by serving as tools for refashioning of new transnational, diasporic, identities and kinships.³⁸ Similarly, Losing Hearts and Minds respects people’s emotions as legitimate ways of processing war and rejecting the dehumanization of colonial violence that treated them like disposable pawns.

The source base for this project includes archival resources originally produced in English, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, and Malay from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, India, Nepal, Malaysia, and Singapore. Yet the focus on those serving or proximate to British power means that many sources were translated into English either by colonial officials or archivists and scholars. Many of the Indian, Malay, and Chinese actors documented in this story left testimonies in English through either oral histories or memoirs. As Gauri Viswanathan has explored, English education in colonial spaces often inculcated Christian values that shaped how colonial subjects understood the world.³⁹ Ashis Nandy, Homi Bhaba, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak similarly warn scholars that such cultural mimicry reinforces colonial power, limiting self-formation and colonized people’s ability to speak or even know their own voices.⁴⁰ However, throughout this study, I follow Gajendra Singh in seeing these sources as contested rather than compromised. For Singh, even court testimonies were a process rather than a fixed text.⁴¹ In this, Singh goes beyond James C. Scott’s notion that sources contain hidden transcripts of resistance because colonial subjects’ intentions often went beyond simple colonial binaries of either compliance or resistance.⁴² Instead, this analysis takes all forms of collaboration, resistance, self-preservation, uncertainty, and fear as contingent responses rooted in immediate needs to survive warfare and colonial rule. Where my own language skills are inadequate, I rely on scholars such as Francis Loh Kok Wah, Mahani Musa, Agnes Khoo, and Tan Teng Phee, who provide invaluable insight into how Chinese and Malay language actors understood these events.⁴³

This study also relies on oral history interviews to understand the perspectives of those who lacked the power to write detailed reports or memoirs about their experiences. The National Archives of Singapore provides useful translations of interviews with Malay, Indian, and Chinese eyewitnesses. Translations, of course, hold many limitations, particularly when discussing emotional histories of war steeped in nationalist or anti-colonial narratives. As Sandra Taylor recalled of her research on Vietnamese communist women, she was American and her translator was a communist. As a result, she never got their true feelings but rather a dramatized account of their heroism. Since memories, like translations, are reconstructions rather than factual records of the past, they often justify certain actions or inactions that may not conform to present social, cultural, or political norms, particularly in a context of collaboration or resistance. Yet for Taylor, like Singh, these stories are not falsifications but rather paeans to the glories of a particular ideology, testaments to the righteousness of their cause, testimonies to the need to persist against what these women saw as the cruelties of a foreign imperialist and its local supporters.⁴⁴ Similarly, Losing Hearts and Minds closely tracks the stories people tell about war and colonialism to understand the long-term limitations of Britain’s perceived success at winning hearts and minds. If people’s memories of war involved discrimination, hatred, isolation, and racial persecution, then their hearts were never won.

In colonial Singapore and Malaya, people used their personal histories of war to process their experiences and forge a place for themselves within or beyond colonial society. Interpreting these diverse sources benefits from Joan Scott’s understanding of the evidence of experience, which she calls the evidence for the fact of difference. In her analysis, people use specific memories to understand and define their identities—such as framing early erotic encounters as integral to coming out stories. Instead of naturalizing identity categories, she encourages exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world.⁴⁵ Similarly, Losing Hearts and Minds recognizes that no individual account stands in as a typical British, Malay, Chinese, Australian, or Indian perspective. Instead, these sources show how people in wartime experienced similar emotional responses to the conflicts in which they were immersed but had unequal methods of coping with and acting upon these traumas. As Tan Teng Phee has argued, this makes it possible for elites and ‘small people’ alike to become the keepers and makers of the past.⁴⁶ By examining deeply emotional personal stories of militarization and military service from the high tide of imperial power to decolonization, Losing Hearts and Minds shows that military leaders rarely understood the varied human consequences of war and empire. This was especially true when they claimed to win civilian favor.

This work builds on rich war and society and post-colonial scholarship that explores the violent consequences of imperialism, war, and racism. Many scholars have examined the role of colonial soldiers in Asia during the world wars.⁴⁷ Others have considered the cosmopolitan and multilingual nature of cultural, economic, and political life in colonial Singapore and Malaya.⁴⁸ Some have shown how colonial subjects used vast interconnected anti-colonial networks across Asia-Pacific to challenge imperial rule.⁴⁹ Many more have demonstrated that British colonialism depended on everyday and exceptional violence to maintain colonial control.⁵⁰ As Caroline Elkins has recently argued, violence was not just the British Empire’s midwife, it was endemic to the structures and systems of British rule.⁵¹ Losing Hearts and Minds builds on this impressive work by comparing soldier and civilian experiences to tell a global story of various colonial and anti-colonial actors living, working, and fighting across multiple conflicts in a single colonial space. Singapore and Malaya’s populations—soldier or civilian, revolutionary or cautiously loyal—were highly mobile, with connections across the colonial world. Yet war came, again and again, to this place. As a result, Losing Hearts and Minds understands these mobile experiences of war as essential to the fabric of colonial society. It seeks to reconstruct the social and racial worlds of British Malaya and how this shaped the perceived success, and overlooked failures, of the hearts-and-minds strategy. As people lived, migrated, or served in Malaya and Singapore, they brought assumptions about difference that trembled or solidified in the face of conflict. By emphasizing the many faces of war from the perspective of those who experienced it, this book tells the story of living in a place constantly made and remade by war and empire.

Seven chapters analyze soldier and civilian experiences across conflicts. The first two chapters consider the role of colonial racism in shaping soldier-civilian relations before, during, and after the First World War. The first chapter, Race War in Singapore, examines events leading up to and including the 1915 mutiny of Indian troops in Singapore. This rebellion revealed the ease with which mutinous and non-mutinous Indian soldiers found support among civilians. This made British leaders see whiteness as a source of isolation rather than power. In response, leaders deepened racial hierarchies and systemic violence to crush Indian resistance, undermining broader civilian confidence. The second chapter, Making Enemies between the Wars, examines the impact of the 1915 rebellion on interwar politics and race relations. Many civilians who had supported, or not explicitly resisted, British efforts during the mutiny were not included in British visions of peace. Many Chinese civilians felt that their sacrifices and contributions to restoring British rule went unnoticed. Japanese civilians, who aided the British against Indian rebels, received no support against Chinese-led boycotts that protested Japanese imperialism. Instead, British leaders militarized police forces to undermine anti-colonial activities. Militarization after the 1915 mutiny encouraged colonial subjects and leaders to seek new solidarities or find new enemies.

The middle three chapters consider the breakdown and reassertion of British racial hierarchies during the Second World War and Japanese occupation. British leaders had long claimed that their military presence was necessary to defend their subjects from foreign invasion. In reality, they escaped and surrendered when facing it. Chapter three, The Pride and the Fall, shows that many white soldiers arriving in Singapore from 1939 to 1941 felt like they were stepping into a paradise. Films, movie theaters, rickshaws, and cabarets delighted the new arrivals, who felt a world away from the European conflict. Once the Japanese bombing and invasion began in December 1941, however, existing tensions of colonial militarism came to the surface. Many white Europeans departed in the dead of night, claiming that they would bear the brunt of violence from the Japanese. This left Asian friends, allies, and servants to fend for themselves, culminating in the deaths of between 30,000 and 50,000 Chinese civilians at the hands of the Japanese military.⁵² Remaining white Europeans demanded the continued labor and loyalty of Asian civilians. While imperial troops fought hopelessly against a well-organized opponent, some civilians aided the Japanese or rejected British mandates as a way to cope with the realities of war and abandonment.

The fourth chapter, Labored Intimacies, tracks the centrality of labor for dictating value, survival, and intimacy during the Japanese occupation, from internment camps to paramilitary units, from Chinese households in Singapore to Eurasian resettlement villages in Malaya. Some experiences of internment crossed lines of class, race, and faith and had the potential to challenge colonial hierarchies. White Australian nurse Veronica Clancy felt that after doing hard labor, white women could no longer retain their former prestige. Sheila Allan, who had a white Australian father and an Asian mother, believed that hard work would endear her to white internees and ensure her survival. For colonial subjects, serving British needs through hard work temporarily transcended the racial and gender segregation of the Japanese occupation while also reinforcing British hierarchies. The fifth chapter, Making and Unmaking ‘Martial Races,’ explores how soldiers fought in vain to fulfil their assigned status as martial communities after the fall of Singapore in 1942. Troops from Britain, India, and Australia, long categorized as paragons of martial masculinity, endured the humiliation of surrender. Their wartime hardships challenged their ability to claim military masculinity and racial supremacy. Some Indian men sought to rekindle or challenge the martial race ethos through service to the Indian National Army, an anti-colonial force that allied with the Japanese in the hopes of liberating India. Chinese and Eurasian civilians stepped in to claim the venerated status of being martial allies to British power while protecting their homes and resisting the Japanese occupation. At a moment when the martial race ethos of imperial military service crumbled, British leaders doubled down on the racial exclusion that underpinned colonial rule.

The final two chapters explore the recalibration of British power during the anti-communist Malayan Emergency. The sixth chapter, Forging the Commonwealth, focuses on British leaders’ efforts to recast Britain’s police and military presence in Malaya and Singapore, euphemistically referred to as security forces, as an interracial brotherhood of arms supporting an imperial family.⁵³ Following the independence and partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, British leaders lost the immense power of the colonial Indian Army. The exception was that some Gurkha soldiers, from the independent nation of Nepal, were part of the British Army under the Brigade of Gurkhas. These men became some of the first soldiers on the ground when the anti-communist Malayan Emergency broke out in 1948. Many civilians in Malaya and Singapore continued to support communists, as they had during the Japanese occupation. British leaders also relied on soldiers from Nepal, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and East Africa to carry out the campaign. The result was that British leaders emphasized the inclusivity and diversity of the British Empire and Commonwealth while portraying communists as Chinese outsiders. Like their Indian predecessors, these soldiers ultimately found more in common with the communities they were meant to control than with the British leaders demanding their loyalty.

The final chapter, Pregnant in the Jungle, focuses on how gender, sexuality, and reproduction were primary avenues through which British leaders hoped—and claimed—to win civilian hearts and minds. Chinese-language British propaganda cartoons warned women about becoming communists because of the danger of giving birth in the jungle. By contrast, they portrayed white women as civilizing forces that transcended racial differences by promoting military domesticity, nursing, and welfare. They contrasted this to frequent reports of babies abandoned by communist mothers, eliding the culpability of British-led security forces who likely killed them. While Commonwealth armies emphasized the military as an interracial brotherhood of arms, British leaders hoped that the