In Malaya, British colonial authorities responded to workers' revolts in the rubber plantations with emergency legislation, detaining more than 30,000 people without trial, destroying the property of communist sympathisers, using chemical defoliants to destroy crops, and rationing food to starve out guerrillas. By then, rubber exports from Malaya provided Britain with its largest income from the Empire, which was used partly to fund the welfare state.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 869