Colonies in Ruins is a collection of intriguing short-stories about foreign colonies of the Asia-Pacific region — British Malaya, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and the US Philippine Islands. For a long time these colonies generated fabulous wealth from mining, oil production, and agriculture for their colonial masters, but colonial life came to an abrupt end on December 8, 1941, as they were each attacked by Japanese forces soon after the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor was devastated.