At one level, this is a history of the way race and conflict shaped Malaya and Singapore: from the February 1915 mutiny of part of an Indian Infantry battalion in Singapore to the official end of the Malayan Emergency in 1960. But at a second level, this is not so much a history, as a prosecutorial case, seeking to distill evidence that Britain was consistently losing hearts and minds, and failing its subjects and particularly its militarized subjects.
Losing Hearts and Minds executes this aim across seven chapters on: the 1915 mutiny; the interwar period; the fall of Malaya in 1941–42; Japanese Occupation; and two chapters on the Emergency dealing respectively with the men who did the fighting and with female communists. The source base ranges from official reports through oral history to interviews. This throws up fascinating detail and perspectives, including racist stereotyping by some Europeans (including White Australia-minded Australian individuals). That some internees viewed Eurasians who did not adhere to European expectations with racist attitudes is, for instance, all too clear. As an exercise in retrieving thinking along racial lines, and in presentation of gender perspectives, this book is compelling. As a collection of examples that worked against imperial legitimacy, its tapping of multiple Asian memories is useful.
It is, however, not an attempt to assess the balance of how far Britain was retaining, winning, having no effect on, and losing hearts and minds. Nor to judge the representativeness or not of its examples. Instead, it presents a single-minded argument that colonialism was damaging people through militarism and racism, and so losing hearts and minds.
At times, that approach seems to over-determine interpretation of evidence. For instance, chapter 1 on the 1915 Mutiny of Indian troops in Singapore is called “Race War.” That some saw it that way, then and later, was almost inevitable. But the majority of the Regiment involved were reassembled and sent to fight in Africa, just as vast numbers of Indians fought elsewhere. Meanwhile, the killing by mutineers of nineteen civilians (in addition to military casualties) is glossed over, so that European fears are presented as more irrational than they were; and the response to the violence can seem disproportionate and anti-Indian.
The panic-reversion to 1857 mutiny style fears is interesting, and the overkill of publicly executing 47 mutineers speaks volumes about performative punishment. But reframing a murderous mutiny as race war against Indians is unconvincing, as is portrayal of the revolt as justified by soldiers’ fears of violence (other than that involved in their duty to fight). These were volunteers asked to go to Hong Kong, fearing they might be sent to fight in Europe, if not Turkey. So other works tend to see this as an episode of failure of Imy's “racialized inclusion”—due to a concatenation of facts, including war developments and soldiers’ fears. This chapter should, therefore, be read critically alongside others, for instance Gujendra Singh's in The Testimony of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars (2014).
Meanwhile, two examples can show how the chosen framings may over-determine interpretation of some evidence. Sheila Allan, who had an Australian father and Malayan mother, was interned in Changi in 1942 aged 17. Her memoir (based on diaries) shows her winning acceptance amongst leading European internees. They also reveal enjoyment of internee performances and tea parties. Over Christmas to New Year 1942 these included a Nativity Play, Sleeping Beauty, and a “Fancy Dress Ball” where one Mrs Lancaster provided a convincing “Indian,” Mary Winters a “cute Chinese,” and another a “Hawaiian Girl.” The tone is excited, events carnivalesque. But for Imy this must have been “to perform and mock Asian women.” Furthermore, Allan's roles (she once played an Irish Jew in The Tempest) allegedly involved proving Britishness by a semi-alienating “dressing up as racialized others for amusement.” All of which seem divorced from the tone in the relevant parts of the memoir. So, though the interpretation rests on something real—Europeans’ varying views about Eurasians—this extrapolation makes it difficult to know which interpretations are justified, which imagined; what is representative, what less so; how far countervailing attempts at “racial inclusion” had effect, how far not.
Elsewhere, F. Spencer Chapman, who liaised with the anti-Japanese resistance in Malaya, supposedly praises uneducated Chinese fighters because they would be the sort who “supported” British lives prewar, and criticizes the educated. Except the leader Imy cites as most disliked was distrusted for perceived dishonesty. In fact, Chapman respected leaders including Chin Peng and the “very educated” Lee Far, and felt illicit tin workers were the best fighters.
In short, the book's judgements about racial inclusion and alienation should be treated as a case for the prosecution that “racial inclusivity” was failing: one that filters and frames evidence accordingly. This is not, therefore, a book that would draw wider inferences from Lee Kuan Yew being staunchly pro-British until at least 1942, or author Souchou Yao including his shopkeeper father as likewise into the postwar period. Nor is it the place to learn that “winning hearts and minds” has more sophisticated treatments, which acknowledge that in counterinsurgency it was sometimes winning minds more than hearts: by blends of positive policy, control, and negative coercion, with area dominance the key prerequisite (a point sorely missed in Afghanistan). Nor is it the place to assess the many other elements to colonial power, such as legal and economic performance legitimacy. Or the idea that the “plural society,” by creating space for “racial” difference that many valued as identity, and for cosmopolitanism, was part of Malaya's attraction, even as it facilitated racial hierarchy.
This book is, therefore, valuable if read as one part of a bigger puzzle, about how colonial projects and attitudes jostled against each other. It is part of a broader trend in “argument” pieces, such as Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence (2022), that mine for particular negative aspects. Like that work, this one does not recognize the major changes in approaches and reductions in violence over Emergency phases, so vital to sustaining momentum. As such this book is at times powerful (notably on the Indian National Army and Dalforce). But as a case for the prosecution, it can't evaluate the success and failure of “winning hearts and minds” across time. Such broader judgements require broader histories, and wider conceptions of what engendered and eroded loyalty.
