Britain's place in the world

It was only in the Second World War that the term ‘Southeast Asia’ came to be commonly applied to the region to which it now applies. The region is so diverse that no one name is likely to be apt. Earlier names for it had indeed been more inexact and partial than the geographic phrase of the Allied Command, and the peoples of the area would not have seen themselves as Southeast Asian, even to the extent that they do so now. Yet if the region was difficult to describe, it had shared a common experience: that of domination by Western powers through the nineteenth and the earlier decades of the twentieth centuries. The relationships of the various states and territories with those powers were themselves diverse, but an imperial framework stretched over the whole region.

That framework had been created during the heyday of British power, and it reflected the nature of British interests in Southeast Asia. Though Britain itself rarely, if ever, seemed to make policy for the whole region, and though it conducted its policy through several different agencies, it tended to see the area as a whole. That was especially the case when the structure seemed to be threatened from outside. To treat the region as a whole, however, was difficult, since British policy itself had encouraged its political fragmentation.

In the nineteenth century, Southeast Asia had been of intermediate rather than prime importance to the British: intermediate in two senses. First, it lay between India and China.