Contents

Preface

Introduction

Photo Credits

Part 1: The Slow Rise of Western Imperialism

Chapter 1: Iberian Expansion Overseas 1415–1647

Portuguese and Chinese Maritime Exploration Compared

The Sea Route to India Discovered

The Formation of the Portuguese Empire

Mixed Portuguese Success in Southeast Asia

China and Japan

Chapter 2: The Struggle for Supremacy 1647–1815

Early Dutch Power

New Rivals: the French and the English

The Battle for India

Britain’s Triumph

A Chinese Rebuff

Chapter 3: Imperial Heyday 1815–1905

The Opium Wars

The Indian Mutiny

France’s Colonial Revival

The American Colony of the Philippines

The Russo-Japanese War

Part 2: An Asian Challenge

Chapter 4: The Advent of Imperial Japan 1868–1941

The Meiji Restoration

A New Balance of Power

Revolution in China

Colonial Unrest

The Sino-Japanese War

Chapter 5: The Collapse of Western Power 1941–45

The Outbreak of the Pacific War

Catastrophe in Southeast Asia

Japan’s New Order in Asia

The Fall of the Japanese Empire

The Surrender of Japan

Part 3: Western Decolonisation

Chapter 6: The Beginnings of Withdrawal 1945–50

The Post-War Settlement

The End of the Indian Empire

Dutch Failure in Indonesia

The Communist Triumph in China

The Occupation of Japan

Chapter 7: Cold War Complications 1950–99

US Intervention

Independence in British Southeast Asia

The Tragedy of Vietnam

Accommodating China and Japan

Post-colonial Conflicts

Postscript: Last Post in Hong Kong 1997

Chronology

Bibliography

Index

Copyright © 2009 Arthur Cotterell.

Published in 2009 by John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte. Ltd.

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Preface

The idea for Western Power in Asia arose from discovering an old account of a courtesy visit paid by an Austria-Hungarian warship to the Paris of the East, French Saigon. This late nineteenth-century event evoked a world that has completely vanished. Although Ho Chi Minh City still has its Catholic cathedral and opera house, and in its squares and avenues the look of a French provincial town, there is little else to recall more than a century of colonial rule. Neither Austria nor Hungary now possesses a coastline, let alone a navy capable of sailing in Asian waters. So altered is the face of present-day Asia that the length of Western dominion there is easily forgotten, from the arrival of the Portuguese at the close of the fifteenth century to the liberation of their last colony at the close of the twentieth. And overlooked, too, is the extent to which all Asian peoples were drawn into the colonial scheme of things. The Chinese and the Japanese played their very different parts in the rise and fall of Western power. This book endeavours to chart the whole course of European and American imperialism in Asia during the colonial era, from the perspective of both the rulers and the ruled.

In publishing this book I must acknowledge the invaluable contributions made by several people. First of all, my wife Yong Yap, through the translation of documents from both European and Asian languages; second, Graham Guest, an old friend whose amazingly extensive archive of pre-1900 illustrations, Imperial Images, furnished most of the fascinating material in the early chapters; third, my stalwart designer Ray Dunning, for the excellent maps as well as the work he has done once again on the illustrations; and last but not least, my publisher Nick Wallwork, a world history enthusiast. Without his timely support, Western Power in Asia would never have appeared in its present form.

Introduction

At the height of the Boxer rebellion, as an international relief force closed on Beijing, the great Qing minister Li Hongzhang pointed out how continued resistance was worse than useless until conditions changed in China. Having witnessed at first hand the military advantage enjoyed by a modernised Japan, he was under no illusion about the need for Asian states to match the technology of the Western colonial powers. The British, the Russians, the French, the Germans and even the Japanese had easily extracted concessions and territory from a tottering Chinese empire, because an unwillingness to embrace the modern world was the root cause of its weakness. There was nothing Li Hongzhang could do to stop Empress Ci Xi endorsing in 1900 the anti-Western sentiments of the Boxers, although he knew that their assault on the Legation Quarter would lead to Beijing’s second foreign occupation. His own efforts to introduce up-to-date methods in industry and the armed forces had met with a degree of success; but Li Hongzhang’s struggle to reconcile the adoption of foreign ways with traditional values—“Western learning for practical purposes” as opposed to “Chinese learning for fundamentals”—indicates the problem he encountered in strengthening China. This worldly man was still appalled by the looting of Beijing on its fall. Forty years earlier, Lord Elgin had authorised the plundering of the Summer Palace as a punishment for the deaths of captives: in 1900, there was an unauthorised free-for-all. Afterwards, Li Hongzhang suggested that the eighth commandment should be amended to: “Thou shalt not steal, but thou mayst loot.”

The vulnerability of China throughout the period of modernisation in Asia profoundly influenced the outlook of the Chinese people. They were acutely aware of the abyss into which their country sank as the imperial system declined, and the republic that followed its disintegration proved no match for either warlord politics or Japanese imperialism. It is something of a paradox, therefore, that Japan’s attempt to subdue China led to the downfall of Western power in Asia. No one could foresee in July 1937 how a skirmish between Chinese and Japanese soldiers at the Marco Polo bridge, southwest of Beijing, would start Japan along a path leading not only to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the capture of Singapore, but also to unconditional surrender after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Few could have guessed that the nationalist aspirations stimulated by the short-lived but spectacular Japanese advance were to be beyond the capability of the returning colonial powers. Britain alone was spared the agony of a bloody retreat from empire because the Labour government of the day regarded decolonisation as an absolute necessity. The granting of independence to India, Pakistan and Burma in 1947 spelt the end of Western power in Asia. London had tacitly acknowledged how conditions there had changed in the half century since Li Hongzhang deplored the looting of Beijing. The resurgence of Asia remains the most significant historical event of our time.

Western Power in Asia narrates the recent liquidation of the colonial empires belonging to Europe and the United States, as well as their gradual accumulation of territory from the sixteenth century onwards. Quite remarkable is the fact that the last colony to gain its independence in Asia was founded by the very first colonial power, Portugal. The expulsion of the Indonesians in 1999 from East Timor represented a delayed liberation since Jakarta had taken advantage of the overthrow of a dictatorship in Lisbon to annex this Portuguese possession shortly after the colony’s own declaration of independence in 1975. Because of its abundant sandalwood forests, the Portuguese had established a trading post there in 1642.

Chapter 1 surveys Iberian expansion overseas after a brief comparison of Chinese and Portuguese maritime exploration. The decision of the Ming dynasty to turn away from the sea left a power vacuum in the Indian Ocean into which Vasco da Gama unwittingly sailed. Had the Portuguese explorer rounded the Cape of Good Hope 70 years earlier, he would have found his own vessels of 300 tonnes sailing alongside a Chinese fleet with ships of 1,500 tonnes. Da Gama arrived instead at Calicut in 1498 quite unaware of China’s naval reconnaissance of the Arabian, African and Indian coasts. Delighted to set foot safely on land, he and his men gave thanks inside a Hindu temple in the mistaken belief that it was a Christian shrine. While the legendary mission of St. Thomas in India probably explains the error, it was really the absence of any sign of Moslem worship that clinched the matter. Despite this first embassy to an Indian king going off without too much misunderstanding, the Portuguese soon tired of such diplomatic exchanges and looked for a permanent trading post of their own. This foothold they secured in the Moslem settlement of Goa, which was taken by force in 1510. The colony functioned as the headquarters of the Estado da India, the name given to the Portuguese empire in Asia. While Portugal’s maritime expansion was overshadowed by Spanish exploits in the New World, the speed with which the Portuguese travelled eastwards was staggering, their ships reaching China in 1517. The first Europeans to visit Japan were three Portuguese traders who made the voyage from Guangzhou on a Chinese junk. Within a few years of their arrival in 1542, Portugal dominated Japan’s international commerce.

From the outset, the Estado da India was determined to control the spice trade, the most lucrative of all European markets. By planting fortresses at strategic locations and conducting regular sweeps of the seas, the Portuguese were able to add customs duties to the profits derived from their own trading activities. Only in disunited Sri Lanka did they manage to hold a sizable territory; elsewhere, their tiny population discouraged any challenge to organised Asian states. The total number of Portuguese men in Asia at the height of the Estado da India’s power never topped 10,000. But it was the ripple effect of European conflicts that brought this privileged position to a close: the temporary union of Spain and Portugal between 1580 and 1640 meant that the Estado da India came under assault from Spain’s enemies, most notably the Dutch.

The arrival of European competitors in Asia is the subject of Chapter 2. After the ratification of the Treaty of Münster in 1647–48, by which Spain recognised Holland’s independence, the Dutch replaced the Portuguese. Except for Britain at the start of the nineteenth century, no power ever approached the reach of early Dutch trading ventures. Once the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or the United East-Indian Company, persuaded merchants in Amsterdam of the value of cooperation, a concerted effort was made to monopolise the import of spices to Europe. But setting up a fortified settlement on the island of Java was to have unexpected consequences for Holland, because the steady extension of its influence throughout the Indonesian archipelago laid the foundation of a land-based colonial empire. The advent of the English and the French converted commercial rivalry into outright warfare, especially in India, where the decline of Mughal power provided ample scope for the acquisition of territory. And the discovery that properly trained Indian recruits could perform as well on the battlefield as European soldiers increased the possibilities of colonialism overnight. Here was an almost inexhaustible reservoir of military manpower. As Field Marshal Slim noted in his memoirs, victory over the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma had been achieved by “an army that was largely Asian”.1 Other colonial peoples under his command in 1945 hailed from as far away as Africa. By this date some 200,000 West Africans had volunteered to fight for “King Georgi”, Biyi Bandele reminds us in his novel Burma Boy.

The English East India Company eventually won the contest for India. The Treaty of Paris between the United Kingdom and the United States, along with related treaties ending wars with France, Spain and Holland, left Britain in 1783 as the major European power in Asia. If anything, the loss of the North American colonies redirected British imperial interests eastwards, where India received most attention. Yet China was soon seen as an adjunct of growing dominion in the subcontinent through the expanding trade of the English East India Company. Lord Macartney’s mission to Emperor Qian Long in 1793 was intended to place Anglo-Chinese commerce on a regular footing. What London failed to understand was China’s indifference to international trade and the anxiety of the Qing dynasty about the adverse effect foreign influences might have on its Chinese subjects. That this mission was not a success can be explained perhaps in the darker side of the English East India Company’s trading activities. So that it could acquire sufficient silver to sustain an unfavourable balance of payments involved in the China trade, caused largely by massive purchases of tea, it had deliberately stimulated the production of opium in India. Except for a single year, 1782, when its own ships sold the drug in Guangzhou because of an acute shortage of bullion, the English East India Company was careful to leave opium distribution to private merchants. This policy did not fool Beijing and in 1839 a special commissioner was sent to southern China with orders to stamp out the whole business.

Chapter 3 begins with the Opium Wars fought between China and Britain, which led to the cession of the island of Hong Kong as a sovereign base and the lease of a large stretch of land opposite, on the mainland itself. That the Second Opium War concluded with the fall of Beijing reveals how vulnerable the Chinese empire had become: fewer than 20,000 British, Indian and French soldiers were needed to force its surrender in 1860. But in India, Britain was seriously challenged by the Indian Mutiny, an uprising in the north of the subcontinent, which delayed the attack on China for almost one year. Even though the British scraped through this unexpected crisis, things could never be the same again. After the last Mughal emperor was dethroned, attitudes hardened among the Indians and their colonial masters, and the utter dominance of British authority in the subcontinent left no escape route other than the pursuit of outright independence. Its architect, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, was born in 1869, seven years after the last of the Great Mughals died in exile at Rangoon. Not to be outdone by the British, the French pushed their way into mainland Southeast Asia, the last remaining colonial prize. Even the Americans were drawn into an imperial role through the annexation of the Philippines after a brief war with Spain. The Filipinos were baffled that “the Land of the Free” felt no sympathy for their desire for immediate freedom. Although it suited President William McKinley to portray the American colony of the Philippines as an incidental result of American intervention in the Spanish Caribbean, the truth is that he had already decided to advance the United States’ position in the Pacific by the acquisition of key islands. In his mind, the chief threat to American interests was Japan, whose rapid modernisation had introduced a new imperial player on the Asian stage. Prescient though this judgement proved to be on 7 December 1941, when Japanese aircraft caught most of the US Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor, Japan drew European blood first in its defeat of Russia in 1905.

The mediation of the United States brought the Russo-Japanese War to a close. By the Treaty of Portsmouth, Russia allowed Japan to occupy the Liaodong peninsula, assume railway rights in Manchuria, take over the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, and act as protector of Korea. Chapter 4 traces the Asian challenge that Japan’s rise as an imperial power represented for the Western colonial empires. It shows how different the Japanese experience of economic as well as constitutional change was to that of Europe. Even though the emperor, his court and leading reformers all dressed in Western-style clothes, the constitution they announced by imperial decree in 1889 was unnegotiable and an “immutable fundamental law”. Influenced by Germany rather than Britain or France, the new system of government was in effect an oligarchy of shared power between civilian politicians and military leaders, which in the 1920s and 1930s tilted in favour of the latter. Revolution in China and unrest in the colonies of the Western powers seemed to create an ideal moment for an increasingly militarised Japan to strike out on its own. The result was the Pacific dimension of the Second World War, a catastrophe for imperialism throughout Asia. Everywhere Japan’s opponents were taken by surprise. Western confidence and prestige plummeted with defeats as widespread as Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, Burma and Indonesia.

As Tsuji Masonobu, staff officer responsible for operations under Yamashita Tomoyuki during the Malayan campaign, commented well after the Japanese surrender:

In military operations we conquered splendidly, but in the war we were severely defeated. But, as if by magic, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippine islands one after the other gained independence overnight. The reduction of Singapore was the hinge of fate for the peoples of Asia.2

Britain never really recovered from the surrender of the supposedly impregnable “fortress” of Singapore. Its fall heralded the end of the colonial era in Asia.

In Chapter 5, the rise and fall of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere provides the narrative focus. By using this name for its newly conquered empire, Japan hoped to enthuse the Asian peoples it had liberated from Western rule. They were encouraged to believe that a modernisation programme akin to Japan’s would be a reward for active participation in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. No concessions were made to nationalist demands for independence until it became obvious that the tide of war had turned against the Japanese. As a Burmese nationalist remarked: “If the British sucked our blood, the Japanese ground our bones!” Because the Indonesians had such a pronounced hatred for Dutch rule, they tolerated the Japanese occupation for two years without complaint. Yet their anti-Western outlook was not proof against Japan’s inability to administer conquered territories with restraint. Forced labour, rice requisitions and the Japanese military police had undermined Indonesian acquiescence by 1945. In March that year, Tokyo virtually acknowledged that its authority was at an end by asking Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, the leading nationalists, to devise a formula for political cooperation based on the so-called five principles of nationalism, internationalism, representative government, social justice and Islam. They were even allowed to draft a constitution for an independent republic, which was to incorporate under a strong presidency not only the territories of the Dutch East Indies but those belonging to Britain in Malaya and Borneo too. Because the Indonesian leaders did not want independence as a gift from the Japanese, on 17 August 1945, two days after the surrender of Japan, Sukarno proclaimed the Republic of Indonesia.

The abysmal failure of the Dutch to reassert themselves in Indonesia was a signal that the days of Western power were numbered. The French chose to ignore the warning, with dire consequences for the Vietnamese, who led the fight for independence in French Indochina. Defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 confirmed France’s colonial bankruptcy, but the surprising success of Vo Nguyen Giap’s young communist soldiers caused panic in Washington, where Cold War fears got the better of common sense. Only the British succeeded in achieving a dignified retreat from empire, in large measure because of Clement Attlee’s determination to grant India early independence. Chapters 6 and 7 follow the tortuous process of decolonisation through the second half of the twentieth century. Also described are the two great transformations of this period: the recovery of Chinese strength through the founding of the People’s Republic, and the emergence of a defeated Japan as an economic superpower. That they were both entwined with Cold War rivalry was an inevitable result of US intervention in Asia, the salient feature of the final stage of Western withdrawal. The last section of this study deals with post-colonial conflicts in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia and East Timor.

1. Slim, Defeat into Victory, p. 539. Orde Wingate had insisted that the Third West African Brigade should join the Chindits, his behind-enemy-lines force in Burma. Before the fall of France, a major African contribution to the war effort was not envisaged but, as the scale of the Second World War unfolded, Britain was obliged to recruit soldiers whenever it could do so. Bandale’s treatment of a Chindit expedition is based on his father’s reminiscences. A full account of the contribution made by colonial troops can be found in Jackson, The British Empire and The Second World War. According to George MacDonald Fraser, whose Quartered Safe Out There is one of the finest memoirs of the Second World War, “probably not even the legions of Rome embraced as many nationalities as the Fourteenth Army”, p. 94.

2. Tsuji Masanobu, Singapore 1941–1942, p. 281.

Photo Credits

Special thanks to Imperial Images © and Ray Dunning for all the older illustrations featured in the book.

Part 1

The Slow Rise of Western Imperialism