The Second World War set Malaya upon a new course and forced British planners to rationalize the structural anomalies that had kept Malay constitutionally disunited and racially divided. The revolutionary plan unveiled was the Malayan Union which sought to embrace the Malay states and the Straits Settlements, excluding Singapore, under a constitutional union, and to confer, for the first time, political rights on Malaya's non-Malay population through...