The Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) stands as proof of the adage that "nothing succeeds like success." Widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent victory in the counter-insurgency field, no post-war British campaign has been studied more thoroughly. Books by scholars and by former participants have mined it for "lessons learned." As such, it provided the foundation for the development of a comprehensive counter-insurgency doctrine that was applied with varying degrees of success in campaigns from Kenya to Northern Ireland.

Because of the interest in identifying the "secrets" of the Malayan success, the literature has tended to focus on campaign strategy, operations, and tactics. What was missing from most of these studies was the wider strategic context in which the campaign occurred. The missing question was: where did the Malayan Emergency fit in British strategy? In his thoroughly researched volume, based on his doctoral dissertation, Raffi Gregorian more than adequately answers that question.

What his study shows is that the earlier focus on the campaign itself, however useful, obscured a second British victory – the fulfillment of its strategic objectives in the Far East – an achievement of greater moment than the success of the Malayan campaign alone. By 1954, Britain had established a new collective defence treaty for the Far East, had persuaded the Americans to commit themselves to the defence of the region, and had drawn Australia and New Zealand into guaranteeing the security of Malaya. All this had been achieved Gregorian says – paraphrasing US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles – at very little cost to the British themselves.

But, lest the reader think that this was an easy victory, Gregorian's book will quickly dispel that notion. It was a complex, convoluted process, with the outcome never clear or certain. Britain's post-war planning was rapidly overtaken by a whole series of unanticipated crises. The Emergency in Malaya was the centerpiece of these events in the region, but it was by no means alone. The communist victory in China, the subsequent threat to Hong Kong, and the Korean War, all loom large in this story. Complicating these regional problems were threats closer to home, creating simultaneous pressures on the defence of Britain, Europe, and the Middle East, all in a time of economic austerity.

Britain itself never had enough troops to manage all of these commitments. Indeed, woven like a thread through this story is the theme of "borrowing from Peter to pay Paul." For example, in the event of an attack, Hong Kong could only be defended (and with no certainty of success) at the expense of operations in Malaya, and vice versa. Likewise, plans for the forward defence of Malaya in Siam in the event of a communist Chinese attack through that country, had to be constructed on the basis of forces the British either didn't have in the region or couldn't shift from existing commitments. This had all the marks of a "shell game," but it was one which the British – out of necessity – played with surprising skill, particularly against its allies. This is not to suggest that they were won over easily. In one respect, Britain was helped immensely by the Korean War; it focussed America's attention on the Far East in a way that the Malayan campaign alone never could have done. Britain's tenuous hold on Hong Kong – the last Western foothold on the Chinese mainland – gained importance in US eyes, and got Britain what it wanted: an American commitment to help it there, thus allowing Britain to reduce the Hong Kong garrison in order to strengthen its highest regional priority – the Malayan campaign.

Intimately linked to this problem is the story of the Gurkhas. Gregorian argues that Britain mishandled their fate during the process of Indian independence. India, he feels, was allowed too much say in the disposition of the Gurkhas, and Britain's lack of sufficient forces for defence of the Far East was one consequence of that. Had Britain been able to retain a much larger Gurkha force, he says, the Malayan Communist Party might have been deterred from launching its insurgency in the first place. That may be a debatable assertion, but even if deterrence had failed, Britain would have been better prepared to contain the insurgency at the outset. Furthermore, Britain would have had greater flexibility in balancing the Malayan campaign and the defence of Hong Kong, and it would have precluded the need to extend the period of National Service in the UK.

The thoroughness with which Gregorian probes his subject means that his book is not an easy read. It also suffers from the common quirk of dissertationsbecome- books: over-zealous documentation. The endnotes could have been condensed to reduce repetition. Those minor problems aside, Raffi Gregorian has made a major contribution to the historiography of the Malayan Emergency by situating that campaign within the complex of Britain's strategic aims, dilemmas, and achievements in the post-war Far East.

David A. Charters is Director of the Centre for Conflict Studies at the University of New Brunswick.