Mind and Matter: The Practice of Military History with Reference to Britain and Southeast Asia

Abstract

Wayne Lee is right: military historians need not see any contradiction between studying operational and humanistic dimensions of their subject. The Western military experience in Asia only underlines his argument; in study of that history, mat ter side of equation has never been neglected, and field remains war-centered. This does indeed provide the significant advantage of encouraging transnational and comparative perspectives.1 But most scholars in that field have, when framing their questions, paid careful attention to connections between military operations and societies, cultures, and peoples that fought in them. That approach was driven more by nature of military experience than by a preference for certain methods or techniques. The Western military presence in region, a product of imperialism, total war, and Cold War, had to be examined through a broad humanist prism in order to make sense of it. English-language scholarship naturally concentrates on British and American experiences, with two notable caveats. The literature on French war in Vietnam remains lively and multifaceted, as does study of other, be it Impe rial Japanese Army (ija), Chinese People's Volunteers, or Vietnamese National Liberation Front. Wayne Lee and Ron Spector have already explored more familiar American questions related to World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War. My commentary will try to broaden this round table by discussing how recent scholarship examines military history of British presence in Malay world during and after World War II. While that literature may remain war-centered, revolving as it does around global war and conflicts driven by Cold War and decolonization, its evolu tion justifies Lee's argument that cultural analysis bolsters, rather than undermines, importance of contingency in military history. The staying power of clich?s is enormous. Take for example Winston Churchill's de scription of fall of Singapore in 1942 as worst disaster in British military his tory. His assertion cannot stand up to any examination based on consequences; loss of thirteen colonies in 1783 surely outranks even a humiliating defeat in a war British went on to win. But his label framed a generation of scholarship that emphasized contingency: a shallow British gamble on grand strategy was exposed by a Japanese on slaught that underlined how overstretched British Empire really was. The military