Empire's End: A History of the Far East from High Colonialism to Hong Kong

by John Keay

Book Overview

John Keay's epic, expert study of the twenthieth-century demise of colonial rule in the Far East The names echo like the last long notes of a bugle call: Hiroshima, Dien Bien Phu, Tiananmen Square;... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684815923
• ISBN13: 9780684815923
• Release Date: May 1997
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 385 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Empires End

Keay provides an enthralling account of why and how the British, Dutch, French and American Empires developed in the Far East, especially in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Then he describes how each of these Empires unravelled in the few short years after WW II. The book provides fascinating insights of the differing techniques utilized to control (and divest) their respective Empires e.g. British vs. Dutch. Keay tells the whole complex story in a very readable, colorful way. This is a book that the reader will want to come back to re-enjoy in the future.

Popular history

I have to ask myself sometimes about the benefit of reading popular history of the type sold retail, and this book might be one of the reasons. Sure, it's very entertaining and well-written and part of my reason for reading history is a form of distraction easier on my liver than Old Crow. However, as a journalist, the author lays entirely too much stress on the antics of the usual bunch of adventurers and lunatics who fantasized, like Lansdale ("The Quiet American" who drummed up support for Diem's Catholic *regime* in South Vietnam in order to manufacture the support of American Catholics for the war), that they influenced policy. The fact is that the West needed the markets and resources of the Far East more than the Far East needed the West and the result was the struggles of countless wacks and lunatics, and working folk, to create "colonialism". Furthermore, the narrative comes to a perhaps premature end in 1997, with Prince Charles bidding adieu to Hong Kong. I say this because only six years later, after a sort of world colonialist half-time around the millennium year, the British and the Americans invaded Iraq in a paleo-colonialist fashion, basically for the oil. Lenin may have been right. Economic forces, while not overdeterminate, force our hand into a colonialism which then appears to be a marginal matter of people like the original Brooke and other adventurers who've scuttled out of the home counties with trollops and debt-collectors in pursuit, and who embody the contradiction, that smallish Western European states of the 18th century were not in fact sustainable economies. Today, the USA having deindustrialized during the fat years may not be sustainable either and the result is a new colonialism. Fortunately, East Asia is spared so far. But we need to read these accounts with care. Tolstoy may have been right: personalities cannot influence great events, only ride the tiger.

Excellent overview of Western empires in East Asia

At one time almost all of the countries of East Asia - over half of the world's population if one included India - were under varying degrees of colonial control by the nations of the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Some of these areas had been under imperial control for centuries, yet within a few decades of the end of World War II, all were to one degree or another independent. Parts of the Netherlands East Indies never saw Dutch rule reinstated after the war and those that did only experienced it for five trouble-filled years. France would hang on in Indo-China for only nine years and at the cost of incessant trouble in the south and a major war with the north. While the British in Malaya and Borneo did manage to put down an insurrection and restore economic prosperity, they too would be out within twelve years of the end of World War II. Was there any common denominator in the exodus of European colonial powers in East Asia? Author John Keay says that too many works have focused on one particular colonial power - generally the United Kingdom - and pegged all of the reasons for the end of empire to certain aspects of national politics, economics, and character. Keay has sought in this book to compare and contrast the Dutch, French, British, and American experiences in East Asia, to see if there were any common threads that lead to the rise of independent nations in the region. Keay found that all of the colonies were alike in learning first-hand that guaranteed prosperity under their distant imperial masters was at least partially mythic thanks to the worldwide depression of the 1930s as orders for colonial products disastrously declined and the average person in Asia could see that many Europeans were reduced to now unenviable standards of living. The myth of imperial invulnerability was shattered time and again by the incessant advance of Japanese forces in the early days of World War II, exposing to colonial subjects the lack of real imperial power, an absence that the colonial powers had tried to mask by informal and indirect rule and administrative flexibility. Any possible show of imperial force in retaking the colonies during the war evaporated with the sudden Japanese surrender following the atomic bombings; the colonies were simply reoccupied, not retaken, and the imperial powers were deprived of a "splendid spectacle" to help restore colonial prestige. Further, the author asserted that the Japanese occupation in World War II heightened Asian expectations of independence and gave many at least a passing acquaintance with self-rule despite the fact that the states the Japanese set up during their occupation were generally geared towards supporting their empire and thwarting the goals of the Allies rather than from any sense of benevolence or Asian solidarity on their part. The advance of technology in the 20th century he maintained actually served to weaken colonial control, not strengthen it.

A simple guide to the end of colonialism in Asia

John Keay seems to love Asia. In this book he deals with the factors that brought the end of European's empires (and Non-European empires) in Asia. He talks about Nationalism, Communism, the Great Depression and World War Two. Cut into three parts or 'books' each chapter focuses on another empire or region of Asia. The Dutch, the English, the French, the Americans and even touches on the Japanese and their invasions. Background is given and how the different nations dealt with their 'subjects' and their goals. Full of history, a must for anybody interested in Asia's history or on how colonialism seems to work. Some overlap because he has to run up and down time when moving from one part of Asia to another, but comes with a simple map and full of humor.