"What went wrong?"
Those were the first words of The Malay Dilemma (1970), by Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, a young, up-and-coming Malaysian politician and future prime minister. Little more than a decade after their nation had achieved independence from Britain, many Malaysians were asking themselves the same question.
On May 13, 1969, a dozen years of relative harmony among Ma- lays, Chinese, and Indians had ended abruptly in bloody street riots that racked Kuala Lumpur. The cause of...