The Malayan Union Controversy 1942 - 1948

The Second World War set Malaya upon a new course and forced British planners to rationalize the structural anomalies that had kept Malay constitutionally disunited and racially divided. The revolutionary plan unveiled was the Malayan Union which sought to embrace the Malay states and the Straits Settlements, excluding Singapore, under a constitutional union, and to confer, for the first time, political rights on Malaya's non-Malay population through the creation of common citizenship. This provoked an impassioned constitutional controversy which threatened to undermine the very basis of British rule in Malaya and forced the British, barely three months later, to scrap their experiment. This book unravels the inside story of how the Federation of Malaya was formed in February 1948 in the face of an attempt by British planners to form a constitutional union.