Violence and Emancipation in Colonial Ideology

What does an evaluation of the colonial past of China and Malaysia add to our understanding of how ideology works? If such places made contributions, why is no-one talking about them? Is colonial ideology a dim recitation of what seemed to work at home, but insisted on with a more lethal passion abroad? Why convince locals when you can shoot them freely? Violence and Emancipation answers such questions. It compares the ideological strategies of British colonial administrations in Singapore, the Federated Malay States (Malayan Union and Federation of Malaya), and Hong Kong (1945–1960) as they encountered anti-colonial nationalism after the Second World War. Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and others, I theorise that ideology’s central role was to objectivise the subjective political claims of a colonial state.

The themes covered in this book will be familiar to those who read earlier forays of mine into colonial history, such as Anatomy of a Riot and Reading Colonies. Colonial states were compelled to disconnect anti-colonial violence from any legitimating constitutional prescription while adopting nationalist public housing, property loss compensation, and rent control initiatives as the comfort foods of decolonisation. Yet the great weaning off jangled the nerve endings like the opioidal pangs of old. Exponents of nationalism — violent or parliamentary in outlook — bravely brought on the rupture but have received zero credit for this.

A colonial state’s pleas for its objectivity enabled it to shape an equally subjective local successor. A naïve plucked from a safety zone, and holding ne’er a hint of insolence, was dressed as an apostle, and emerged as a suitable boy. Why not choose one? This type ensured there would be a symbolic political decolonisation that kept alive the economic relativity between the First and the Third Worlds well into the future for the paltry cost of maintaining a few manicured lives. Property compensation or commercial licensing were objectifying forms of partial emancipation offered to colonial subjects. Exponents of nationalist violence were the villains. New houses in model villages were exalted. Who would not put their own material need ahead of an enigma of bad poetry or a flag-caped bogeyman travelling at dangerous velocity?

Readers familiar with the old boys’ historiography club will know its gag orders. Its lives of Kuomintang (KMT) lament and colonial consolation simmer away in London and the Western states of the United States. These souls live in a network that casually pops up in The Economist and The Atlantic magazine as a government in waiting. They give an unmistakable sense to their would-be adversaries of having entered the wrong password for the third time.

Is it “Nanking” with a capital “n” or an exclamation mark afterwards? No ideologist will be lured into a stoush that could be lost.