Rethinking the Rise and Fall of the Malayan Security Service, 1946–48

An item of conventional wisdom in our understanding of the Malayan First Emergency is that the original security organisation, the Malayan Security Service (MSS), was a comprehensive failure, prompting its dissolution and replacement with the Malayan Special Branch. This article challenges that orthodoxy, arguing first that MSS actually produced accurate assessments of Malayan Communist capabilities and intentions prior to 1948 although the actual outbreak of violence did come as a tactical surprise. Second, recently released documents show that the abolition of the MSS arose instead from a protracted turf war over the control of intelligence in Malaya with the Security Service (MI5), particularly in the person of the latter's director general, Sir Percy Sillitoe . An outsider to the intelligence and defence communities, Sillitoe was disinclined to manage inter-agency disputes in the joint fashion that had developed during the Second World War, and instead marshalled opposition to the MSS in Whitehall that resulted it being dismantled. This in turn led to a breakdown in security intelligence activity, at the very start of the Emergency, that would not be fully resolved until the Malayan Special Branch became fully operational nearly four years later.     

Place and Innovation in Popular Music: The Bebop Revolution in Jazz

This paper explores the relationship between place and processes of innovation in popular music, focusing on the example of the bebop style of jazz. Bebop emerged during the 1940s both as a reaction against older jazz styles and as an expression of artistic innovation within a community of younger jazz musicians. The process of its creation and early development was situated in a set of "nested'' locales centered in New York City. This analysis examines the diverse nature of these locales and the distinctive ways in which they fostered interactions among bebop's creators and their various audiences. The analysis reveals that different locales played dissimilar roles during specific stages in bebop's emergence, as it evolved into an increasingly coherent form of cultural expression. Most importantly, certain jazz clubs in Harlem provided a setting for the early experimentation that culminated in the bebop style, but the style's subsequent formalization and popularization depended on its exposure in jazz clubs in midtown Manhattan, at first along 52nd Street and later on nearby sections of Broadway. These findings confirm the importance of place in understanding the dynamic nature of popular music and the processes of innovation integral to it.     

Two Vanished African Maritime Traditions and a Parallel from South America

Maritime traditions that extend along coastlines are more vulnerable to disruption and disappearance than areal trading networks. The paper describes two cases from Africa, the likely early movement of Bantu speakers down the coast of West Africa and the Swahili trading diaspora that reached southern Mozambique by at least the seventh century. Both of these have disappeared from the ethnographic and historical record but can be recovered through archaeology and linguistics. A parallel is made with the trade route that linked the coastal region of Peru and Ecuador with Western Mexico and may have been active from as early as 4,000 bp until the Spanish conquest. The hypothesis is that areal networks, such as those in island Southeast Asia and the Pacific, which are driven by colonisation and bidirectional exchange, are more likely to persist because they are more resilient due to the number of broken ‘links’ they can withstand. Linear expansions may be driven by a quest for trade and resources but are usually not necessary to survival.