This book describes British wartime policy in Asia and the struggle for dominance between Britain/America and Japan.

From December 1941, Japan, as part of its plan to build an East Asian empire and secure oil supplies essential for war in the Pacific, swiftly took control of Southeast Asia. Japanese occupation had a devastating economic impact on the region. Japan imposed country and later regional autarky on Southeast Asia, dictated that the region finance its own occupation, and sent almost no consumer goods. GDP fell by half everywhere in Southeast Asia except Thailand. Famine and forced labour accounted for most of the 4.4 million Southeast Asian civilian deaths under Japanese occupation. In this ground-breaking new study, Gregg Huff provides the first comprehensive account of the economies and societies of Southeast Asia during the 1941-1945 Japanese occupation. Drawing on materials from 25 archives over three continents, his economic, social and historical analysis presents a new understanding of Southeast Asian history and development before, during and after the Pacific War.

In the early stages of the Second World War, the vast crescent of British-ruled territories stretching from India to Singapore appeared as a massive Allied asset. It provided scores of soldiers and great quantities of raw materials and helped present a seemingly impregnable global defense against the Axis. Yet, within a few weeks in 1941-42, a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, sweeping suddenly and decisively through south and southeast Asia to the Indian frontier, and provoking the extraordinary revolutionary struggles which would mark the beginning of the end of British dominion in the East and the rise of today's Asian world. More than a military history, this gripping account of groundbreaking battles and guerrilla campaigns creates a panoramic view of British Asia as it was ravaged by warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease, and famine. It breathes life into the armies of soldiers, civilians, laborers, businessmen, comfort women, doctors, and nurses who confronted the daily brutalities of a combat zone which extended from metropolitan cities to remote jungles, from tropical plantations to the Himalayas. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth century: the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.

A sequel to the author's Britain, Southeast Asia and the Onset of the Pacific War (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Britain, Southeast Asia and the Onset of the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 1998), this book discusses Britain's policy towards Southeast Asia in the period 1950-55, when it was crucially affected by the struggle in Korea. The phases in that struggle - briefly described and placed in a world context - provide a context for discussing Britain's relations with Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, and Indochina. Covering the dispute over West New Guinea and the Chinese Nationalist incursion into Burma, the book gives a full account of the Geneva conference 50 years ago, which reached a settlement in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and of the creation of the SEATO alliance. The focus of the work is on British policy, and it is largely based on a study of British official records.

This detailed study throws light on the evolution of British policy in South-east Asia in the turbulent post-war period. Through extensive archival research and insightful analysis of the British mindset and official policy, Tarling demonstrates that South-east Asia was perceived as a region consisting of mutually co-operating new states, rather than a fragmented mass. The book covers the immediate post-war period until the Colombo plan and the outbreak of hostilities in Korea. A companion volume to Tarling's Britain, Southeast Asia and the Onset of the Pacific War, it finds parallels between Britain's approach to the threat of Japan and its approach to the threat of communism. It also shows that the British sought to shape US involvement, in part by involving other Commonwealth countries, especially India. This is a major contribution to the diplomatic and political history of South-east Asia.

Arc of Containment recasts 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 on decades of colonial rule, as well as the considerable influence of Southeast Asian actors upon Anglo-American imperial strategy throughout the post-war period. Arc of Containment demonstrates 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.

War is often described as an extension of politics by violent means. With contributions from twenty-eight eminent historians, Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of the Second World War examines the relationship between ideology and politics in the war's origins, dynamics and consequences. Part I examines the ideologies of the combatants and shows how the war can be understood as a struggle of words, ideas and values with the rival powers expressing divergent claims to justice and controlling news from the front in order to sustain moral and influence international opinion. Part II looks at politics from the perspective of pre-war and wartime diplomacy as well as examining the way in which neutrals were treated and behaved. The volume concludes by assessing the impact of states, politics and ideology on the fate of individuals as occupied and liberated peoples, collaborators and resistors, and as British and French colonial subjects.