WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

At the end of World War II, the European empires found themselves in terminal decline, facing both domestic devastation and powerful anti-colonial movements. My research on the British Empire in Southeast Asia has found that British officials planned for their retreat by selecting ‘reasonable parties’ that would serve their two key interests: maintaining the extractive capitalist market and ensuring a continued British geo-strategic presence. In a comparative study between Burma and Malaya between 1945 and 1948, my recently-published work has found that, in both cases, colonial officials preferred anti-immigrant ethnonationalist parties. The Myochit Party in Burma and the United Malays National Organization in Malaya both promoted the ‘immigrant problem’ as the foremost issue. Both demonstrated that neither had any interest in reforming extractive capitalism or even in resisting British influence, but simply in replacing the British at the top of the political and economic hierarchy in their countries. Therefore, these parties could retain existing structures while harnessing revolutionary energy into persecuting scapegoats. My research’s intervention is to use the framework of passive revolution to explain why ethnonationalism has been the most successful form of anti-communism in the twentieth century, and to make progress toward explaining its worldwide prevalence today. In presenting this work, I will also explore ways in which this strategy was more global by citing similar British policies in India, in Ceylon, and in Mandatory Palestine. These last three cases will be pointing toward future research, and hopefully will invite feedback from the audience.