Last Post: The End of Empire in the Far East [Paperback]

This book is full of the anecdotal information that made Keay's Explorers of the Himalayas so enjoyable. A good, if mean-spirited critique of the end of the colonial era in South East Asia, then a bad assessment of the post colonial regimes in which nervous excuses and some highly Aesopian language (to put it mildly) stand in for a more clear-eyed assessment. This book lost all meaning for me when the author began to hem and haw over the modern atrocities of the region - Indonesia's massacres in East Timor and West New Guinea, for example. Keay practically exonerates Japanese atrocities in World War II (in which 20 million Asians died, along with of course thousands of European civillians and Allied soldiers) in the name of anti-colonialism!

In general the author gets too bogged down in pushing his theory of the "rise of the Asian tiger economies" (he wrote this book before the collapse of those Asian economies) and to praise these countries he must ignore the violence, intolerance and corruption of their regimes.

Keay obviously liked living and working in South East Asia, but his ludicrously over-optimistic assessment of this politically brutal and economically impoverished region makes little sense in 2001.

Good photos, valuable bibliography.

(For a taste of the real Singapore (where this reviewer lived) I suggest Christopher Lingle's Singapore's Authoritarian Capitalism (buy it here -its banned in S'pore), or the novel Saint Jack by Paul Theroux. Both have much more to say about that particular modern Asian success story than Last Post. For Hong Kong (where he also lived), try a novel in which viewpoints like Keay's come under scrutiny: Paul Theroux's Kowloon Tong (or Theroux's Singapore short story, A Deed Without A Name).

This book was written before the 1997 collapse of the Asian "Tiger" economies, which considerably dates it. Purpotedly an overview of the end of European colonialism, there are several interesting anecdotes here of Singapore, Hong Kong, the Netherlands East Indies, etc. But the book is just too full of "the superiority of Asian Values" nonsense to be taken seriously in 2003. An updated paperback, stripping out the author's support for such racist falderol and just leaving the history of the end of colonialism would be a good future publisher's decision. The author's apologies for the police state antics of Singapore's Harry Lee Kuan Yew and Japanese atrocities in WWII is particularly unpleasant.

Good books to read along side this are Christopher Lingle's two titles on the rise and decline of the Asian tiger economies. The author of the Last Post sees nothing but good in Asia today; the reader may want to compare his assessment with Stan Sesser's great book, The Lands of Charm and Cruelty, where he can read, for example, about Singapore, and "the fear that even the best educated Singaporeans feel towards their government." John Pilger and Norman Lewis have fascinating accounts of Indonesia's horrible modern-day repression, and Paul Theroux's novel Kowloon Tong perfectly captures the unpleasant underbelly of Hong Kong at the time of the Handover. Bo Yang's The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis in Chinese Culture give a Chinese perspective of the problems of Asian history, focusing of course on China (something of a "bible" for expats living in Hong Kong, by the way).

Lastly, Last Post's author asks in conclusion what the British colonial administrators now in old-age retirement have to say to themselves to feel good about their careers. Very obviously, it is the satisfaction of having run their areas far better under discredited colonialism than most of the Far Eastern dictators and police state-honchos who have succeeded them.

As another reviwer says, the Last Post contains valuable footnotes.

John Keay has built up a reputation for writing a series of singular narrative histories dealing with Asia in relation to European imperialism as in this book or his history of the British East India Company (The Honourable Company), as well as more general histories of individual countries (China and India). His books have formed, for me at least, an excellent introduction into the history of the East, and been a starting point for further enquiry into their variety of pasts.

Keay begins with a number of concise accounts of how the Empires that were to be lost were gained in the first place, before moving onto the end of formal imperialism in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, ending up with the handing over of Hong Kong to China. His narrative gives the main facts, as well as a good deal of detail that is strongly flavoured by Keays keen eye for the oddities of Empire. He perhaps over indulges his interest in such characters as James Innes who complains of having "no time to read his bible" while smuggling opium into Fukien; or the Commissioner of Weihaiwei who shares his office with a number of imaginary friends including the "outrageous and improper" Mrs Walkinshaw, the Earl of Dumbarton, and (most intriguingly) "The Trouserless one". History no doubt has its funny moments, and its funny characters, but these anecdotes are just the tip of the iceberg as Keay wrings out the laughs at a furious rate, some of them are very funny, though there is an occasional flop. I ended up longing for a few pages of sober narrative and analysis; the history of the end of Empire in the Far East was after all no joke for many of those concerned.

One of the strengths of Keays book is the broad coverage of the French, American, and particularly the Dutch, and their Empires in the East, as well as the Japanese "co-prosperity sphere" of 1941-45. When I first read "Last Post" a number of years ago, I had little knowledge of the Dutch in Indonesia, nor of the brutal British attack on the town of Surabaya after WW2, nor of the use of Japanese troops in support of re-Imperialising the East in the same period, and the book awakened a curiosity regarding European Imperialism in the Far East. Re-reading it now, and while still appreciating the scope of the events related, I felt disappointed in the quality of Keays accompanying analysis which can be a bit slap dash, especially with regard to the French then American involvement in Vietnam.

In short, this isn't a bad place for a reader unfamiliar with the subject to start, if they can get through the relentless word-play, the excess of eccentrics, and the torrent of humour (which to be fair can raise a smile but ought to have been rationed) they will get a good general overview of events, accompanied with some less than spectacular analysis of what was going on. For the reader who has read a good deal of the subject already, Keays "Last Post" maybe a little beyond the joke, its certainly not his best work.