In the aftermath of war a struggle began for the soul of Malaya. The troubled years between the British reoccupation in September 1945 and the declaration of the Emergency in July 1948 set in motion politics that would dominate the transition to independence. This period has concentrated the minds of a great number of Malaya's historians. Much of their work has focused on the restructuring of the British presence in Malaya under a military administration and the introduction of, and opposition to, the Malayan Union scheme in 1946 and the Federal constitution which succeeded it in February 1948. This period saw the emergence of the movement that became the main vehicle of Malay nationalism the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). It also witnessed the floundering of a range of radical challenges to its primacy. In the historical writings on the period many of the foundation myths of modern Malaysia have been carved out and contested. A nation is defined by its tragedies as much as its triumphs, and for many the communal and insurrectionary violence of these years set the constraints that would govern subsequent political life and defined the limits of what the structure of Malaya's plural society could tolerate. To others, the constitutional struggles appear as a lost opportunity to effect its transformation. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of these events in shaping the landscape of Malayan politics.