Following the immense praise for Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper’s Forgotten Armies, its authors now tackle with the same verve, controversy and wit the even more contentious issue of how new nations were born from the wreck of Britain’s empire in south-east Asia.

The almost continual fighting that followed Japan’s defeat scarred everywhere in the region – from the violent British occupation of south Vietnam to the horrors of Partition in India; from the hasty retreat from Burma to the Malayan ‘Emergency’, one of the first and most dramatic counter-insurgency wars of the twentieth century.

Forgotten Wars explores the lives of politicians, soldiers and ordinary people as the travails of decolonisation merged with the hatreds of the Cold War.