Land Tenure Reform in Upper Colonial Burma

Abstract

This article is an attempt to use settlement reports in order to clarify what kind of land tenure was introduced by the British colonial government and what conflict it brought about in Upper Burma. There is little research on cultural conflict between Burmese society and the British colonial government regarding law and social order. Because the most of the existing research on the economic history of colonial Burma focuses on exploitation of the Lower Burma delta, which had been very thinly populated jungle before the colonial period, the author intends to contribute to our knowledge about social transformation from kingdom to colonial society by focusing on Upper Burma, which had been the center of population and economics in pre-colonial times.The British colonial government's Upper Burma Land and Revenue Regulation of 1889 provided two kinds of tenure by which people could hold land: one was state land; the other non-state land. State land meant land belonging to or at the disposal of the government and consisted of (a) land hitherto termed royal land under direct control of the king, (b) land which had been held on condition of rendering public service, (c) island and alluvial formations in rivers, and so on. In sum, state land was intended to correspond to royal land. On the other hand, non-state land was all the land other than state land.Land tenure was formally declared by the settlement officers during settlement operations; but the settlement officers met some difficulties, for cultivators in Upper Burma often made claims against their declarations. As a result, in settlement operations, discretion of the settlement officers were widely admitted. The settlement officers often reported that if they had observed the Regulation of 1889, they should have declared state land, but did not so.In sum, the British government did not only translate the royal land of pre-colonial times into state land, but also forced the new land tenure system on Upper Burma, where people had lived for centuries. The author concludes that there was a conflict between the concept of Burmese land tenure and that of British colonial government.