| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper. Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. xxxiii, 555. $29.95.
The aim of this important and fluent book is to recover the history of "the connected crescent of land between Calcutta and Singapore" (p. xxi)—including eastern India, Burma, and Malaya—during the years of war and (for much of it) of Japanese occupation. The book's emphasis is on the experiences of indigenous peoples, civilian as well as military, as much as on their colonial rulers, and as much on political, social, economic, medical, and cultural developments as on the military campaigns themselves. In all this, it is strikingly successful.	1
The prologue includes an evocative survey of the region during the "jazz age imperialism" (p. 34) of the later 1930s—wealthy Malaya, economically the model colony with its resources of rubber and tin, and prosperous, clean and multiethnic Singapore, which Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper plausibly claim as the first truly global city of the twentieth century—seen partly through the eyes of the French writer Jean Cocteau, who traveled there in some style in 1937. This was the world the Japanese would sweep away, but it was already threatened by subversion from within, and by popular metropolitan hostility to people later memorably described (by The Times's correspondent Ian Morrison) as "whisky-swilling planters" (p. 60).	. . .

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