In evoking Gerald Templer’s (in)famous proclamation that the Malayan Emergency would be won not through ‘pouring more troops in the jungle but in the hearts and minds of the people’, Losing hearts and minds appears to be another in a long line of counterinsurgency studies on the Cold War conflict. But as Kate Imy’s careful retracing of the notion of ‘winning hearts and minds’ back to Robert Groves Sandeman’s attempts to pacify Baluchistan in 1891 suggests, it is rather a far-reaching and fine-grained history of the long shadow of violence cast by the British Empire across nearly half a century.
The book provides a significant contribution to intersecting literatures centred on British colonial rule over, and the extended decolonisation of, Singapore and Malaysia, as well as broader thematic scholarship on war and society and the (re)making of racial and gender hierarchies within the British Empire. Imy unpacks how a diverse cast of white, Eurasian, and Asian soldiers and civilians experienced the First World War, the Second World War, and the Emergency — as well as the interregna between them — as a series of betrayals of the ostensible promise that wartime service would facilitate a more inclusive society. The voices of those hearts and minds that the British failed to win are carefully recovered through close engagement with an impressive corpus of archival records, diaries, memoirs, and interviews spread across Britain, Australia, New Zealand, India, Nepal, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Imy begins by showing how white colonial officials’ perception of the indelible threat posed by their Asian subjects animated racialised militarism during the First World War and the interwar period. The Singapore Mutiny (1915) launched by Indian soldiers of the 5th Light Infantry reinforced beliefs about their untrustworthiness despite some soldiers choosing to protect and defend white officers and civilians. Similarly, Chinese communities, already viewed apprehensively by successive colonial governments, came to represent a more insidious threat in the wake of rising Chinese nationalism in response to the Xinhai Revolution (1911) and Japanese encroachments into China as well as communism’s expansion into the colonies following the Great Depression. Rather than addressing material concerns, both the colonial state and civic institutions turned ever more colonial subjects against them through the entrenchment of racist and gendered tropes about, and discriminatory practices — if not outright repression — against, Asian communities as they lauded their own efforts at fostering interracial amity.
The Second World War laid bare inherent contradictions in how white soldiers and civilians imagined an inclusive British Empire, while their Asian counterparts experienced racial inequalities in both quotidian and extraordinary contexts. Race, gender, and class intersected in how white males lived comfortably in the lead-up to the Japanese invasion in 1941 off the backs of Eurasian, Chinese, and Indian soldiers and civilians, whose fears about the war and their resentment at how they were treated were overlooked. The swift defeat of British and Allied forces, and the subsequent Japanese Occupation (1942–45) which saw the internment of approximately 330,000 soldiers and civilians, resulted in the upending of British colonial society. But as Imy demonstrates, this did not translate into a breakdown of colonial hierarchies. White women continued to rely on Asian and Eurasian women for labour — with some going so far as to volunteer them as so-called ‘comfort women’ — while simultaneously resenting their counterparts for their apparent disloyalty in taking on extra work or fraternising with Japanese soldiers in exchange for better conditions.
One of the book’s important interventions is its exploration of the complex impact of war on ideas of soldiering and how this in turn shaped ideas of (un)belonging within the Empire. Imy convincingly highlights how ‘martial races’ were made, remade, and unmade during the Second World War and the Malayan Emergency. In the case of the former, white POWs struggled to project British power following their internment and forced reliance on Asian civilians for survival. Those who continued fighting from the jungle meanwhile grappled with how their need to maintain racial hierarchies contradicted the reality of Asian guerrillas dominating the British-led Force 136 and the Malayan Communist Party (MCP)-led Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army. At the same time, some South Asian soldiers sought to maintain martial prowess through willingly or reluctantly joining the Japanese-supported Indian National Army commanded by Subhas Chandra Bose. In the case of colonial troops, the outbreak of the Malayan Emergency resulted in the reinforcement of the ‘martial races’ stereotype for Nepali Gurkhas, East African askari, New Zealand Māori, and Fijians; but with a twist. Alongside being celebrated for their capacity for violence, they were now also living demonstrations of the inclusivity inherent within the Empire (and subsequently the Commonwealth).
The Emergency presented an opportunity for the colonial state to rewrite other intersecting narratives of race and gender. It offered an unsuccessful redemption arc for white masculinity among soldiers, police officers, and planters but a successful recasting of white women as the compassionate face of British militarism through their welfare work despite the fact that this was primarily enabled by the labour of Asian nurses, servants, cooks, and amahs. Far beyond supporting roles, Imy deftly unpacks the ambivalent position of the hundreds of Asian women co-opted into colonial militarism through their employment in the Malayan Police while concurrently facing racist and sexist tropes impinged upon them by male colleagues. The creation of a racialised and gendered ‘Other’ was taken to its extremes in relation to communist men and women who were constructed as irredeemable enemies and consequently legitimate targets that deserved military and police violence inflicted upon them, with the latter facing additional symbolic violence through their sexualisation as promiscuous and irredeemable harlots.
While the overarching motif set out in the title is sometimes obfuscated by some unclarity in the book’s structure, Losing hearts and minds is a remarkable and much-needed corrective to the enduring myth of a kinder form of warfare. As Imy convincingly demonstrates, strategies centred on ‘winning hearts and minds’ that draw from the British experience can never really do so, given that they essentially reproduce the mechanisms of colonial violence engendered by this approach.
