Before the second World War - in fact as late as 1940 - huge areas of what we call the East were under the flags of Britain, France, Holland and the US. The Japanese invasion ended most of this: European nations had their hands full with Hitler and could not properly protect their colonial lands abroad. On the whole, the kind of planter society which was overthrown (well depicted in Somerset Maugham's novels) does not seem much loss, and though Japanese occupation was generally a calamity, at least the way was open after the war to growing independence from the West. The ignominious fall of Singapore in 1942, the sufferings of the Philippines (Manila was bombed to pieces so that MacArthur could fulfil his bombastic promise "I shall return"), the postwar disaster of a French army in Dien Bien Phu, the obliteration of 300 years of Dutch rule in the East Indies - these are all highlights of an absorbing historical chronicle.