Tarling's "Britain, Southeast Asia and the Onset of the Cold War 1945-19"
Nicholas Tarling. Britain, Southeast Asia and the Onset of the Cold War 1945-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. x + 488 pp. Maps, references, index. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-63261-7. Reviewed by: Mark T. Berger , The University of New South Wales.
This book review clearly indicates that this is a book about British diplomacy and does not connect to the social and political history of the newly emergent post-WWII states of Southeast Asia:
"The idea that Southeast Asia has now become a zone of peace, prosperity and stability and that this flows in part from the efforts of British diplomats and colonial officials is connected to what this reviewer regards as the main weakness of the book. This is the way in which the author's tight focus on the "official mind" of British imperialism in Southeast Asia between 1945-1950 leads to the neglect of the wider forces at work in the rise of nationalism, decolonization and nation building in the early Cold War era."
"The highly contingent process of creating nation-states out of the complex and variegated former Western European and U.S. colonies in Southeast Asia ...was at once both stabilising and destabilising. For example, the instability of countries such as Burma and Indonesia is directly linked to way in which the sovereign territory of these new nations was taken to be coterminous with most of their former colonial boundaries.
[...and their pre-colonial boundaries dating at least back to Bayinnaung in the sixteenth century. Are mere boundaries really important here? Isn't the nature of the power relations along the boundary (if such a thing as a clear-cut boundary could even be delineated) between the center and periphery frontier tributary states more important? Even in the post-WWII era the frontier was still an area that the center had only marginal control over with ethnic rebellion and KMT presence and the emergent power of the PRC looming over the border...]
This book review clearly indicates that this is a book about British diplomacy and does not connect to the social and political history of the newly emergent post-WWII states of Southeast Asia:
"The idea that Southeast Asia has now become a zone of peace, prosperity and stability and that this flows in part from the efforts of British diplomats and colonial officials is connected to what this reviewer regards as the main weakness of the book. This is the way in which the author's tight focus on the "official mind" of British imperialism in Southeast Asia between 1945-1950 leads to the neglect of the wider forces at work in the rise of nationalism, decolonization and nation building in the early Cold War era."
"The highly contingent process of creating nation-states out of the complex and variegated former Western European and U.S. colonies in Southeast Asia ...was at once both stabilising and destabilising. For example, the instability of countries such as Burma and Indonesia is directly linked to way in which the sovereign territory of these new nations was taken to be coterminous with most of their former colonial boundaries.
[...and their pre-colonial boundaries dating at least back to Bayinnaung in the sixteenth century. Are mere boundaries really important here? Isn't the nature of the power relations along the boundary (if such a thing as a clear-cut boundary could even be delineated) between the center and periphery frontier tributary states more important? Even in the post-WWII era the frontier was still an area that the center had only marginal control over with ethnic rebellion and KMT presence and the emergent power of the PRC looming over the border...]
posted by Jon Fernquest at 6:59 PM
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