Roychowdhury on Streets-Salter, 'World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict'

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H-War Roychowdhury on Streets-Salter, 'World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict'

Review published on Thursday, November 14, 2019

Heather Streets-Salter. World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xii + 236 pp. $29.99 (paper), ISBN 978-1-316-50109-2; $99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-13519-2.

Reviewed by Sharmishtha Roychowdhury (Queens College, CUNY) Published on H-War (November, 2019) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53225

In February 1915, the mutiny of Indian soldiers of the 5th Light Infantry rocked Singapore. The Singapore mutiny barely lasted a week but, as Heather Streets-Salter demonstrates in her ambitious book World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict, the uprising was “an important case study for what it reveals about the ways larger global forces set in motion by the war affected Southeast Asia” (p. 25). Streets-Salter (world historian at Northeastern University) incorporates political history, diplomatic history, and military history to illuminate the larger history of the First World War in Southeast Asia, a region not usually studied in relation to the Great War. Using archival sources from British, French, Dutch, and Singaporean repositories and a wide range of secondary sources, Streets-Salter traces the shifts and reorientations of anticolonial activists and colonial governmentalities in the face of wartime urgencies. Her book is part of a growing literature of empire as global entities, active networks through which pulsed ideas, people, and conflicts. It is also a significant contribution to the field of First World War studies.

The 1915 Singapore mutiny lit up the imperial routes carrying colonial labor, anticolonial activism, and imperial officialdoms in the wider region. At one level, Streets-Salter shows how the mutiny brought questions of authority and subordination to the forefront around the contentious topic of subaltern mobility. Just prior to the Singapore mutiny, an attempt to reassign the Malay States Guides—a unit raised from Sikhs, Pathans, and Punjabi Muslims—from the Malay peninsula to Singapore and then East Africa caused discontent to the point where the regiment had to be repatriated to the Malay peninsula in January 1915.

Further, this disaffection had larger connections with pan-Islamic and revolutionary anticolonialism. The Guides’ disaffection had a link to the 1914 Komagata Maru incident when the ship with migrant Indian laborers—mainly Sikh—was turned away from Canada and made the epic journey back to India, stopping at Singapore to refuel. Revolutionaries of the Berlin India Committee centered around Virendranath Chattopadhyay (brother of Sarojini Naidu, the poet and anticolonial activist) also scoped out possibilities through German connections to arm revolutionaries and to propagandize Indian communities already present in Southeast Asia. Singapore 1915 was therefore just one of many ripples from a global conflict that would have far-reaching consequences for Southeast Asia.

The multi-archival approach to imperial networks requires a skillful selection and juxtaposition of different sources to shed light on adjacent and, as it turned out, interpenetrated imperial zones. Streets-Salter does this deftly, mining biographies and memoirs, governmental correspondence, and secondary sources to illustrate how wartime Southeast Asia became a zone of competing anticolonial and governmental mobilities and politics. The local truly became the global as anticolonialists exploited the spaces opened up by the First World War to challenge imperial authority.

In Indochina, Luong Lap Nam, and Phan Bội Châu, exiled leaders of the Viet Nam Revolutionary Association (founded in 1912) utilized new opportunities afforded by the war to renew revolutionary struggle against the French. A tactic they deployed was the exploitation of the porousness of local frontiers such as those of neighboring Siam and China. Already part of the Dong-Du (Travel East) movement that looked to Japan as a model for modernization, Vietnamese anticolonialists added Sun Yat-Sen’s Chinese republican model to their array of political frameworks suitable for a nation- building movement.

These anticolonial networks tried to utilize German consulates in Southeast Asia to expand revolutionary strikes on British and French colonial regimes. The well-connected Helfferich brothers, Emil and Theodor, who were implicated in the Singapore mutiny, also used their business and political clout to advance German war aims in the Dutch Netherlands, blurring the boundaries between consular, commercial, and intelligence activities. Preexisting networks fed into wartime globalizations in Southeast Asia, nexuses that Streets-Salter traces very effectively to demonstrate how neat constructions of colony-metropole linkages broke down in the face of global war.

The author’s methodology of interweaving memoirs with government correspondence restores individual agency and the drama of human lives to what might have been otherwise an impersonal account of global empires in wartime. Each chapter in Streets-Salter’s book investigates different local outcomes of this porosity of regional and global networks. Chapter 1, for example, details the different facets of the Singapore mutiny and its connections to global politics. Chapter 3 shows how German agents leveraged the web of German consulates in the region to aid anticolonialist efforts in South and Southeast Asia against French and British imperial authority. Exploiting consular privileges in the Dutch East Indies and gaps in wireless communications elsewhere, the lightly armored German cruiser Emden moved between Diego Garcia and different ports in the East Indies to refuel, repair, and liaise with German naval authorities until it was finally sunk on November 9. In other chapters, the author examines the vexed issues of interimperial cooperation, competition, and rivalry to present Southeast Asia as a region affected profoundly by the shockwaves of the Great War.

Demonstrating the larger global interconnectedness of seemingly disparate incidents in wartime southeast Asia would have been a sufficient analytical and scholarly achievement. But Streets-Salter goes further, using the variety of her sources to establish how colonial powers also used the war to consolidate their reach and authority. Even before the Great War, French colonial authorities in Indochina under Governor-General Albert Sarraut had set up a secret police force to track exiled and émigré revolutionaries in China and elsewhere. Always punitive, French colonial authority used the war as a justification to intensify state violence against revolutionaries. Tran Huu Luc, a Vietnamese revolutionary, and his associates who were captured after a failed 1915 attack in Tonkin were tortured and swiftly executed.

Similarly, spectacular violence such as the public executions of the Singapore mutineers was a British wartime reassertion of the structural racial violence underpinning imperial supremacism. In 1916, David Petrie of the Indian Department of Criminal Intelligence became the head of the Far Eastern Intelligence Agency to conduct surveillance on Indian revolutionaries in Southeast and East Asia and to coordinate intelligence work more effectively with British consuls in the region. In the interwar years, these agencies would use these networks to pursue the new threat of communism in the colonies.

In order to disrupt the collaboration between German agents and revolutionaries, British and French authorities also began interimperial cooperation, using ceremonial occasions such as official visits as well as joint pursuit of each other’s fugitive anticolonialists to display interimperial solidarity. When British authorities in Hong Kong arrested the Vietnamese revolutionary Luong Lap Nam in 1914, for example, they handed him over to French consular authorities, who took him to Hanoi for a trial. Both Allied and Central Powers thus used the affordances of regional networks to advance their own wartime missions. This is one area where Streets-Salter might have gone further with her analysis, for it is quite possible, for example, to read the linkages British officials drew between revolutionary organizations such as the Anusilan Samiti of Bengal and German financial support as a departmental move to claim greater resources and to emphasize standing within governmental hierarchies.

The book throws very useful light on the problem of wartime neutrality in Southeast Asia. While American neutrality is well documented in First World War historiography (which may account for the omission here of the Philippines, a US colony at the time), the tensions generated by the neutrality of other powers is less well known. Streets-Salter engages with the scholarly literature on the Dutch East Indies and official correspondence to trace the disruptive impact of the First World War on Dutch authority in Southeast Asia. Her meticulous analysis brings out the tensions and anxieties of a neutral European power caught between the collapse of shipping and trade, rising anticolonialism, and imperial rivalries.

In addition, the Dutch had to deal with aggressive German and British intrusions into Dutch territorial waters as they aimed to strike each other’s shipping, arms-trafficking, and intelligence networks. In 1915 the American-made ship Maverick arrived in Batavia, without its cargo of German munitions destined for India but with alleged Sikh Ghadarites on board. Turning witness for the United States in the 1917-18 German-Hindu conspiracy trial, John Starr-Hunt also gave detailed information about the interactions between the Indian revolutionary M. N. Roy (Narendra Nath Bhattacharya) and the Batavia-based Helfferich brothers. He also provided information about German support from Southeast Asia for US-based Ghadar revolutionaries. Chided by the British, pressured by the Germans, the Dutch found neutrality in the East Indies to be a painful balancing exercise of placating British, Japanese, and German suspicions of Dutch sincerity about neutrality.

Siamese and Chinese neutrality also came under stress on the question of territorial violations and intrigues by competing Allied and Central Powers. Although the Thai ruler Vajiravudh was an Anglophile, concerns about strategic space and autonomy dictated the official policy of Siamese neutrality. Given the access Siam’s location offered to French and British colonies in the region (Indochina, Burma, India, and Malaya), it was only a matter of time before the kingdom became the site of several tie-ups between German agents and Vietnamese and Indian revolutionarycomplots against the French and the British. Pro-German factions at the court conspired to overthrow the

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Roychowdhury on Streets-Salter, 'World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict'. H-War. 11-14-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/reviews/5358158/roychowdhury-streets-salter-world-war-one-southeast-asia-colonialism Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-War monarch and after a careful assessment of Siam’s chances at maintaining strategic space in postwar negotiations, King Vajiravudh persuaded his court officials to declare war on Germany in July 1917, thus ending Indian and Vietnamese anticolonialist activity on Thai territory.

China, too, became an important post in the revolutionary trail connecting India, Vietnam, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies during China's period of neutrality from 1914 to 1917. Grappling with multiple political challenges—from the establishment of a fragile republic in 1911 to the 1915 crisis of Japan’s Twenty-One Demands—the Chinese government was initially unable to secure its borders. The porosity of Yunnan province’s border with Laos offered an opportunity for Vietnamese revolutionaries to strike at the French. German consuls could offset expulsion from British territories by relocating to Bangkok, Canton, Shanghai, and other Chinese cities and continue their work of attacking Allied colonial power in the region. A beleaguered China finally declared war on Germany in August 1917 but was able to maintain only a weak sovereignty in the postwar period.

Bringing together numerous wartime developments in Southeast Asia and placing them in multiple imperial and regional contexts might have resulted in a welter of analytical confusion, but Streets- Salter’s skillful handling of the sources allows the investigative thread to run smoothly, presenting the varied local outcomes of the First World War in the region. Viewing wartime Southeast Asia as a network of revolutionary and imperial connections and mobilities brings into focus the global contexts of local instances of solidarities and resistance.. Heather Streets-Salter’s contribution to world history through World War One in Southeast Asia is a fine piece of scholarship and an informative study of imperial and anticolonial globality in a time of total war.

Citation: Sharmishtha Roychowdhury. Review of Streets-Salter, Heather,World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict. H-War, H-Net Reviews. November, 2019. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53225

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.