At the height of the political crisis in the middle of 1951 Dato Onn took the High Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, into his confidence. ‘Independence was not the object,’ he told him. ‘The object was the good of the people to which independence was only a means’. This was all very true. The struggle for Merdeka had left much undone. Those who had led it had quite deliberately left many questions unanswered, and the unfinished business of decolonisation would dominate Malaysian politics in the following decades. It is beyond the ambition of this book to do justice to the post-colonial experience of Malaya. We can do no more than briefly identify some of the forces of change that had their roots in the late colonial period. This final chapter, or afterword, examines Merdeka in Malaysian history, rather than the history of Malaysia after Merdeka. A first theme is the nature of the colonial inheritance itself and this provokes an outline of the ways in which the British presence in Malaya was felt after independence. A second theme addresses the strategies by which the new state sought to carve out an independent course for itself, in particular the introduction of ambitious programmes to reconfigure Malaya's economy and society. A third theme is the continued attempts to define and inculcate a sense of national identity that development has necessitated: we examine how Malaya has faced the political tensions to which state-building has given rise.