I have used this approach myself in the past, describing the Emergency’s origins
as multicausal, its outbreak as ‘over-determined’. That is, when the MCP took its
decisions to prepare the ground for ‘people’s revolutionary war’, during the March
and May 1948 Central Committee meetings, it was faced with the treachery of its
former Secretary General, a record low of post-war violence around February 1948,
a decline in strikes, government clearing of its squatter supporters from the jungle
fringe, looming trade union legislation, and a communist international line now
rejecting previous over-optimism. Hence, ‘the resort to violence was massively
over-determined’.
15
In these circumstances it might appear that any few of the many factors might
have been sufficient to provoke the MCP change of strategy. This current consensus
is not only strong, but has deep roots. As long ago as 1960, McLane was saying much
the same, that given so many reasons, no one factor (including the international)
could be deemed a necessary cause. He wrote that:
However one may weight the evidence of British “provocation” versus the evidence of a
calculated strategy by the party leadership, the mood of the Malayan Communists in the
spring of 1948 was such that an insurrection not very different from the one that broke
out in June would doubtless have developed before the end of the year … short of a
major shift in world communist strategy … British ‘provocation’ … did no more than
hasten [events]