A Cross-Cultural Encounter in Pre-Colonial Burma: Henry Gouger’s Narrative of Commerce and Captivity, 1822–26

Abstract

An Anglo-Indian merchant, Henry Gouger traveled to Ava on a private trade mission in 1822 and was interned for the duration of the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26). This article offers an analysis of his well-known account of these events in A Personal Narrative of Two Years’ Imprisonment in Burmah (1860). A colorful, sentimental narrative, Gouger’s book affords a rare opportunity to study the mentality of a private trader. My article seeks to explain the diversity of views of Burma and its people found in Gouger’s text, with special emphasis on his commercial purpose, shifting fortunes, and unsettled identity. I place Gouger’s experience in the context of diplomatic and military relations between the rival expanding empires of Ava and the English East India Company, and engage with recent scholarship on cross-cultural encounters and travel writing. In so doing, I dissent from grand narratives of colonial contact and question the contention that in the early 19th century, British views of Asia coalesced into a monolithic “Orientalist” stereotype that served colonialist agendas.