Britain's forgotten war for rubber

Britain's involvement in Malaya runs in parallel both temporally and in other aspects to other more well-known colonial debacles from France and the US in southeast Asia.

> “In its narrower context”, the Foreign Office observed in a secret file, the “war against bandits is very much a war in defence of [the] rubber industry”.

Rubber was also an important Vietnamese export. For example, Michelin had a large plantation near Saigon that featured its own share of firefights.

> The centrepiece of this was the “Briggs Plan”, named after General Harold Briggs who was appointed Director of Operations in 1950. His “resettlement” programme involved the removal of over half a million Chinese squatters into hundreds of “new villages”, which the Colonial Office referred to as “a great piece of social development”.

Same as the "strategic hamlet" policy in Vietnam.

> Probably to cover up the extensive brutality of the war, which coincided with similarly vast repression in Kenya, British officials subsequently destroyed official documents on the war or refused to fully release them to the National Archives, along with other episodes at the “end of empire”.

See also George Padmore on the Mau Mau:

https://www.blackagendareport.com/essay-behind-mau-mau-georg...