THE LIMITS OF LATE-COLONIAL INTERVENTION

The nurture of a ‘moderate’ trade union movement during the 1950s was a key element in British strategy for defeating communist insurgency in colonial Southeast Asia, and has often been taken as evidence of Britain's successfully ‘managed’ decolonisation of both the Federation of Malaya and Singapore. Supposedly, one of the lasting influences of the Emergency period has been weak labour organisations, subject to high levels of state scrutiny and control. This article takes a different tack, however. For one, divisions between business and government, and within the colonial administration, limited the effectiveness of late-colonial intervention in the labour field. Moreover, the tendencies for unions to be communally based in the Federation and politically affiliated in Singapore were not expected or welcomed by British officialdom. This new narrative might provide a Southeast Asian parallel to Frederick Cooper's ‘disengagement’ thesis for late-colonial Africa: the ‘new imperialism’ after the Second World War unwittingly led to the costs of managing labour becoming unbearable for the late-colonials. Yet, paradoxically, the more that British mandarins lost control of the trade union movement in Malaya, against the backdrop of decolonisation, the more they sought to maintain influence in post-colonial labour affairs.