“COLD WAR ON FIVE CONTINENTS: ADVENTURES IN EMPIRE AND ESPIONAGE”
Alfred W. McCoy
Harrington Professor of History
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Drawing upon his forthcoming book, Cold War on Five Continents, McCoy will explore the role of individual covert operatives in the clandestine battlegrounds of Cold War Southeast Asia, focusing on their role as consequential agents of historical change. During the nineteenth century’s high imperial age, individual adventurers, known as “the man on the spot,” were responsible for the British Empire’s expansion to cover a quarter of the globe despite London’s formal policy of non-expansion. In Southeast Asia, James Brooke sailed into Kuching harbor in his yacht to establish a dynastic colony in Sarawak that survived for a century, while in Africa Cecil Rhodes sent white mercenaries armed with Maxim machine guns to slaughter thousands of Matabele warriors, thereby conquering the colony of Rhodesia (today Zambia and Zimbabwe). Just as colonization created the man on the spot, so global decolonization after World War II fostered geopolitical conditions for the emergence of their Cold War analogues. After a conceptual framing, the paper will explore the consequential careers of latter-day men on the spot, such as the murderous Turk Westerling in Indonesia, the legendary Edward Lansdale in the Philippines, and the redoubtable Pham Xuan An in South Vietnam.