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The Enemy’s Weapon: Learning Guerrilla Warfare Through an American Rifle

Sarawak, January 1964

‘You may be intrigued to hear that we have got our first Armalite rifle in Sarawak—captured from the Indos yesterday’, an officer of the British Far East Land Forces stationed in Singapore wrote to his colleague in Whitehall. ‘This may act as a suitable incentive to hasten our own.’1 In the context of the broader correspondence between these officers, preserved in the National Archives, the ironic tone becomes clear—a barely concealed frustration with the sluggish procurement bureaucracy in London, expressed through studied understatement.

Indeed, British troops fighting since 1963 in an undeclared war against Indonesian guerrillas in the jungles of Borneo felt abandoned by their leadership. While their own long, heavy rifles, designed for conventional warfare against Soviet troops, were of little use in the dense jungle, their opponents carried brand-new American weapons with which they could execute rapid raids from the undergrowth. Attempts to obtain such rifles themselves led to what amounted to organized looting expeditions; the British government could only gradually procure these still barely known weapons, today familiar under the name AR-15 and primarily known for horrific mass shootings and as an identity symbol of American gun culture.

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  1. J. F. Kenyon to T. J. Richardson, 6 Jan. 1964. The UK National Archives (hereafter TNA), DEFE 24/644. []

The Changing Face of Factory Regimes in South Asia: The Great Indian Peninsula Railway Workshops in Parel, Bombay, between 1879 and 1939

In 1879, Bombay (today Mumbai) saw the opening of the workshops of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company (GIPR) in Parel, the single largest industrial complex in the city at the time. On a site of roughly sixty acres it employed thousands of workers to maintain the locomotives and wagons that facilitated passenger travel and the exchange of mail between the centres of British rule on the subcontinent, as well as the transport of goods, especially cotton, to and from the city’s harbour. This circulation of people, information, and commodities was dependent on the smooth running of the trains, which in turn could only be assured if the staff employed at the workshops kept them in proper condition.1

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  1. Questions of maintenance have recently attracted more attention from historians, who acknowledge its centrality despite its invisibility to most observers. See e.g. Martin Meiske, ‘How to Commemorate Railways at 200? Unearthing Histories of Maintenance, Global Material Flows, and Colonialism’, German Historical Institute London Blog, 31 July 2025. []