British Burma Research Articles

The Church in British Burma

This essay has explored the vital but mostly neglected story of the church in British Burma, looked at the complex intersection of religion, ethnicity, and colonialism, and presented fundamental factors for ethnic and religious divide between diverse nationalities. It has been observed that historically hallmarks of Christianity in colonial Burma included conflict, violence, and suffering.

The Pre-Colonial Roots of Colonial Coercion: Evidence From British Burma

Under severe fiscal constraints that plagued colonial states, how did governments allocate their coercive power throughout the colonized territory? In this paper, I highlight the pre-colonial state consolidation as an important determinant of colonial coercion. When the state established control over society by appointing new local agents, the society became more compliant to state demands, reducing the need for coercion over the long run. To evaluate this argument in British Burma, I collected new data from indigenous land revenue inquests and colonial police reports, using the pre-colonial variation in local headman appointment after a plausibly exogenous extinction of a hereditary line. I find that places closer to locations that received new pre-colonial headmen experienced significantly lower colonial police presence. Neither spatial correlation nor the presence of other state institutions can explain the results. The findings emphasize the deep origins of contentious state-society relations that extend beyond colonial legacies.

The Global Vice: The Historiography of the Opium Issue in British Burma (1900–Present)

Myanmar has long been under the scrutiny from international drug control agencies. Given that such realistic problem comes from a deep historical root, this paper revolves around the origin of the opium issue back in British Burma. With a focus on research pertaining to the opium issue in British Burma, this paper divides the historiographical changes of this topic from 1900 to present day into four phases, and ends with providing personal determinations about future research of this topic.

The Yunnan–Burma railway, 1860s–1940s: Imagining, planning and rejecting a railway that was never built

In the late nineteenth century, British commercial interests in Asia and back home visualised a railway connecting British Burma with inland China, which they saw as a vast unexplored market. British engineers and adventurers were then employed by the commercial bodies to investigate the economy and geography of Yunnan and Upper Burma for the project. The railway was eventually rejected by the British as being unviable and unprofitable. The colonial knowledge created by these missions (in the form of travelogues, survey reports, interviews and studies) was later interpreted by Chinese nationalists as evidence of Britain's ambitions to colonise southwest China in 1905 (the Russo-Japanese War) and 1927 (the Northern Expedition) when the Chinese nation was in deep crisis. But the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War led the Chinese Nationalist government to reconsider the Yunnan–Burma railway as necessary infrastructure for obtaining foreign supplies to save the nation. The colonial knowledge produced by British explorers and merchants earlier was reinterpreted by the Nationalists to try to persuade the British authorities to construct the Burma section of the railway. By tracing the history of this failed project, this article argues that nationalist understandings of colonial infrastructure were far from fixed and consistent. It recounts the circulation of colonial knowledge on the Yunnan–Burma railway from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, showing how different nationalist agents in Asia interpreted and reinterpreted colonial infrastructure at various critical periods.

Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory, by Brian Masaru Hayashi

Brian Hayashi has written a consistently informative and often frustrating study of Asian Americans and their wartime service with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). While Hayashi’s deft writing makes his monograph read like an espionage thriller, it is no mere adventure tale as it offers a detailed examination of the OSS, Asian American communities, and the fluid nature of loyalty, especially in wartime. Here, in examining how loyalty is developed and understood by multiple communities, Hayashi excels, and his work eclipses even that of Masayo Umezawa Duus’s Unlikely Liberators (2006). These strengths notwithstanding, the book does not, as the subtitle promises, tell the story of how Asian Americans helped win the war; instead, it often leads readers down a winding path to a disappointing historical dead end. Hayashi begins with a thorough review of the historiography of the OSS and uses Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean language sources to bring to life the work of heretofore historically marginalised Asian American agents serving both stateside and overseas. Chapters One and Two examine the creation of the Office of Strategic Services, its basic structure and the functions of its various sections, as well as how the OSS became, by the standards of wartime America, ‘an ethnically and racially inclusive organization’ (p. 17). Here, Hayashi does an outstanding job of guiding readers through the labyrinthine process that William Donovan, head of the OSS, and others followed to identify and recruit agents from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean communities. These chapters offer a solid look at figures such as Donovan and Cornelius Vander Starr, whose wartime business, C.V. Starr and Company, grew into today’s multinational finance and insurance corporation, American International Group. These chapters also produce some highly useful and unexpected nuggets of information as, for example, when Hayashi concludes that Japan’s rapid conquest of British Burma and Malaya resulted in part from the Secret Intelligence Service’s preoccupation with ‘suppressing nationalist movements within their empire’ (p. 20). Equally impressive is his coverage of COMINTERN recruitment within the Asian American community and the contribution of Japanese leftists to the Allied victory.

Insurgent law: Bengal Regulation III and the Chin-Lushai expeditions (1872–1898)

AbstractThis article studies the adjudicatory practices deployed by colonial military and police forces during a series of punitive British expeditions in the eastern frontiers of British India and the northern reaches of British Burma, specifically the Lushai and Chin Hills in the late nineteenth century. It magnifies the lives, deaths, and afterlives of two ‘tribal’ chiefs of Lushai Hills. Among others, these figures were held responsible for a series of raids carried out in the settled British territories of the northeastern frontiers in the 1890s. After a few inconclusive skirmishes with the British expeditionary force, they were apprehended and imprisoned in a jail in Hazaribagh under the preventive detention act of Bengal Regulation III of 1818, which was reserved and designed to arrest political dissidents of the empire. After a few months, two of them, Liengpunga and Khalkam, were found hanging from the windows of their prison latrine. The British administration labelled these deaths as suicides and closed the cases. The article opens them up. In doing so, it narrates an oblique history of the Scheduled District Act of 1874 which removed hill districts from the jurisdictions of regular courts. By focusing on the historical imbrication of Bengal Regulation III of 1818 in the Scheduled District Act, the article highlights the punitive techniques embedded in the seeming protectionist impulse of the colonial state, something that persists in India's administration of the Northeast region. Closer to the concerns of this issue, it reflects on a legal genealogy of tribal subjects in South Asia.

Follow the Footsteps of Leonardo Fea: An Example of an Integrative Revision of Freshwater Mussel Taxa Described from the Former British Burma (Myanmar)

Leonardo Fea, an Italian explorer and traveler, sampled a comprehensive collection of continental Mollusca during his travels throughout the former British Burma (currently Myanmar) in 1885-1887. Cesare Maria Tapparone-Canefri, an Italian malacologist, studied this sample and published a paper with a description of numerous terrestrial and freshwater molluscan taxa new to science. This collection was partly deposited in the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Genova (MSNG), Italy and the Indian Museum (ZSI: Zoological Survey of India) in Kolkata. Here, we provide a re-analysis of C.M. Tapparone-Canefri’s Burmese Unionidae collection. Our study reveals that the type series of only four nominal taxa described by Tapparone-Canefri as new to science in 1889 are still available in the MSNG, i.e. Unio rectangularis, U. pulcher, U. protensus var. obtusatus, and U. marginalis var. subflabellata. The first taxon is a valid species belonging to the genus Yaukthwa, while U. pulcher and U. protensus var. obtusatus are considered here as junior synonyms of the widespread Lamellidens generosus, and the last nominal taxon corresponds to L. savadiensis. The MSNG collection also contains shell lots of Indochinella pugio pugio, I. pugio paradoxa, Indonaia andersoniana, Radiatula chaudhurii, R. mouhoti haungthayawensis, Lamellidens savadiensis, L. generosus, Yaukthwa nesemanni, and Y. zayleymanensis, most of which were listed in Tapparone-Canefri’s work under incorrect names. We revise all the freshwater mussel taxa listed by Tapparone-Canefri based on the original descriptions, available DNA sequences, morphological data, and biogeographic evidence. A freshwater mussel from the Haungthayaw River that was identified by Tapparone-Canefri as Unio exolescens is described here as Trapezoideus mitanensis sp. nov., a fourth species in this small Contradentini genus with a restricted range. Finally, new taxonomic opinions are proposed here for Leoparreysia tavoyensis, Trapezidens dolichorhynchus, Lamellidens generosus, and Lamellidens savadiensis.

Intersectionality and belonging: Muslims in the census of British Asia

AbstractThe British territories of greater Southeast Asia were administratively connected to London and Calcutta, and while local censuses show that these centres could exert some influence at the furthest peripheries of the Empire, a close analysis of the ways in which race and religion were approached in the classification of colonial subjects in Southeast Asia shows peculiarities specific to the region.In this article I argue that the demographic and socio-political contexts of British Burma and Malaya (with references to Hong Kong) led to a framing of ‘race’ that challenged European ‘scientific’ definitions and embraced instead the interweaving of multiple aspects of an individual's identity, most prominently religion. This shift, potentially empowering as reflective of local understandings of belonging, and an improvement from the period's anthropometric framework, was to backfire, however. With the emergence of nationalism, majoritarian identities came to be homogenised in these ethno-religious intersectional communities, marginalising and excluding those who did not fit.

Understanding Labour Migration and Modern Slavery in British Burma: A Reading of Early Bengali Travel Writings

Understanding Labour Migration and Modern Slavery in British Burma: A Reading of Early Bengali Travel Writings

Law and Order, the Rule of Law, and the Legitimation of the Colonial Presence in Late British Burma

AbstractIn Britain's empire across Asia and Africa from the mid-nineteenth century, two political-legal principles were central to colonial modernity, law and order, and the rule of law. These two principles secured the legitimation of colonial rule, in the eyes of those who ruled. It is striking then to see that in late colonial Burma, in the 1920s and 1930s, the colonial government struggled to maintain law and order and to embed the rule of law. Violent crime soared while the criminal justice system failed hopelessly for serious offences. This article seeks to explore the ways in which senior British officials in Burma navigated the disjuncture between the imperial principles that were central to colonial justification and Burma's reality. Perhaps most notably, they did so by putting blame for the soaring crime rates and the failures of the criminal justice system firmly on the Burmese. In the early 1940s, however, with the end of colonial rule clearly imminent, the legitimation of the colonial presence became of less pressing importance, and the failure of colonial practice to live up to its ideological rhetoric could now be more openly faced.

Salt, Smuggling, and Sovereignty: The Burma-China Borderland, c. 1880–1935

ABSTRACT The formal demarcation of what is today the Burma-China border began following the British conquest of Upper Burma from the Konbaung dynasty in 1885 and the signing of international agreements with the Qing Empire (1886, 1894, 1897), the process only completed in the 1960s. Around the turn of the century and into the twentieth, therefore, the highlands between British Burma and Qing (later Republican) China remained a contested ‘borderland’; specifically, one over which successive lowland states had never been able to exert direct control – a space James C. Scott and others have named ‘Zomia’ – but toward which they had been expanding by the mid-nineteenth century (if not earlier). This article looks not at the ways in which Zomia’s inhabitants contested this expanding state authority, which has been the focus of most work on this space, but how the British pressed their territorial claims over part of this contested borderland vis-à-vis the Chinese. Salt was a monopoly of both the Government of India (of which Burma was a province until 1935) and the Qing and Republican states. Smuggling – trade, to British eyes – salt from Burma into China thus undermined Chinese sovereignty qua the expression of the latter’s monopoly powers. Complaints about smuggling were met with ‘masterly inactivity’, not only because the colonial administration was weak in Upper Burma and along the frontier, but also because it meant the British imperial state could permit the expansion of ‘legitimate’ trade and thereby contest Chinese sovereignty qua its territorial claims over the borderland. In contrast to other works positing that smuggling over defined borders undermined state power, this article shows how a permissive attitude to complaints about smuggling undergirded British sovereignty and was very much part of the making of the border.

Petitioning by clerks and the colonial state in late nineteenth-century Burma

ABSTRACT Many indigenous people in British Burma were employed as subordinate officials in governmental agencies. This article focuses on the Burmese clerks in the delta region, and explores the characteristics of their relationship with the colonial state in the late nineteenth century. First, the recruitment process and careers of specific clerks are overviewed. Their position was gradually institutionalized by appointment rules. However, population growth and the development of a rice-export economy entailed not only a surge of judicial and revenue work but also territorial changes in administrative units and rearrangements of staff. The workload of the delta’s administration increased, placing additional burdens on clerks. By examining the case of a clerk who experienced dismissal and reinstatement, the article reveals that high-ranking officials, under the pedagogical functions of the colonial state, adopted a stance of restricting dismissals. Moreover, regarding the significance of petitions produced and submitted by clerks, each clerk, as a petitioner, appeared to have a distinct strategy, since not every document is stereotypical in its form or phraseology. In other words, petitioning, in this study, is not treated as a one-sided supplication but rather as an interaction between petitioners and recipients.

Gurkha's Quest for Justice: Possible Remedies for Gurkhas under International Human Rights System

There is a 205-year long history of Gurkha’s entanglement with the British. In 1816, the British East India Company defeated Nepal in the Anglo-Nepalese war. Dominant narratives of this history suggests that the British were impressed by the war-fighting capabilities and loyalty of the Gurkhas, and recruited them- not as mercenaries but part of their army- to fight in the World Wars, to maintain imperial administration in British India, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong. After the 1947 Tripartite Agreement between India, Nepal, and Britain, Gurkha soldiers were recruited annually in both British and Indian armies. For decades, the Gurkhas have carried out a movement seeking equal pay and pension in comparison to their British counterpart. After a long struggle, their movement reached the European Court of Human Rights wherein the Court did not find a violation of the European Convention regarding the differential treatment of Gurkha soldiers. The paper, briefly subscribes to the available literatures about the magnitude of problems and the status of Nepali Gurkhas in the British Army, including an overview of the commitments and obligation of United Kingdom towards human rights. The paper fills the scholarly gap by taking international human rights as an analytical framework in approaching the Gurkhas’ issue. In making a case for possible remedies, Gurkhas as ‘rightsholders’ is proposed as a suitable frame. It concludes with recommendations, grounded in international human rights law, as a possible remedial mechanism for the Gurkhas — in their quest of justice.
 "We never got equal terms and pay, and we are not even bothered about that. What we are seeking is justice for our pensions, getting equal to what the British get, according to the service rendered." (Retired major Tikendra Dal Dewan)

Looting and commissioning indigenous maps: James G. Scott in Burma

Based on indigenous maps collected in British Burma by James George Scott (1851–1935) and kept at the Cambridge University Library, this paper offers an alternative history of the first years of British colonisation in Upper Burma in the 1880s and 1890s. The entangled scripts – Chinese characters, Shan, Burmese and English – as well as the materiality and the visual codes of these documents bring into view forms of contact that did not last long. Contextualising these maps with other kinds of sources – including Scott’s diaries and administrative reports – allows us to reconstruct their production as part of processes of intelligence gathering and frontier settlement. By tracing the more or less willing role of Burmese clerks, notables, guides and interpreters in the cartographic processes implemented by the English on the ground, we can reintroduce these actors into a history of cartography that has long been Eurocentric. Doing so reveals how the British had to rely on indigenous knowledge to control a territory quite unknown to them during the early years of colonisation.

‘On the Road to Mandalay’: The Development of Railways in British Burma, 1870–1900

ABSTRACT This article examines the history of railway development in British Burma between 1870 until 1900. In particular, it focuses on how railways and public works projects became a key site of contestation about Burma’s prospects, value, and future during the late nineteenth century, as well as how a litany of agents – both official and non-official – influenced the path of railway development in the colony. This article not only reveals the difficulties and disputes that impacted railway construction in Burma, but also how these debates led to the eventual privatisation of Burma’s railway system in the 1890s. In doing so, this article demonstrates how myriad agents with often competing aims affected the colony’s social and economic development, as well as how the results of these debates and the subsequent construction of railways produced a new geography of occupation in British Burma.

The Journal of Burma Studies

About the Cover Catherine Raymond Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page i] Cover Illustration of a Yang Hsek couple with a child. From a bound album entitled “Tribes of Burma,” ca. 1900, artist unknown. Watercolor on paper. Courtesy of Burma Collections, Center for Burma Studies, Northern Illinois University. This is a hand-painted illustration of a Yang Hsek couple, one of the names given to the Karen ethnic group. The couple is recognizable by their iconic garments, which feature a long vertical red-and-white-striped cotton tunic worn by mothers and their children. Yang refers to Karen in Shan, while Kariang is the Siamese rendering of the name. Above the couple and their child (not visible on the cover of this issue), the word Yang Hsek is written in pencil in three different languages from left to right: Southern Shan, Burmese, and Tai Khuen, as well as English, apparently added later in black ink. In the middle of the page and written in Burmese, the number “13” indicates the original page number in the album. This representation comes from a rare illustrated album, encompassing twenty-two plates of twenty-two other ethnic groups living in the Eastern part of Burma where these languages were heard. This album is undated and includes no further information regarding its provenance, but we can assume that it came from the Kengtung area, Eastern Shan States (in the extreme Northeast of Burma) where similar albums were found, and where the groups represented in this album used to live. This bound album made of paper gives detailed visual depictions of couples from a wide range of ethnic groups of this area with their specific attire and accessories such as the earrings, the woven bamboo basket on her back, the hair band, the pipe, the tools, and so on. This type of album was probably produced by a local artist, sometime in the twentieth century who may have had access to previous albums done locally and likely intended for a European clientele then living in British Burma.1 Such albums had a long tradition in Guizhou provinces in China where they were known as the Miao Album since the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century it became a commodity highly appreciated by missionaries and travelers. Acquired by Northern Illinois University (NIU) in 2005 to celebrate their second millionth volume, this album is now in the Rare Book and Special Collections at the NIU Founders Memorial Library. [End Page ii] Footnotes 1. C. Raymond. “An Ethnographic Illustration of Wa People in British Burma during the Early 20th century: Notes on A Shan Album from the NIU Burma Collection, with Reference to Similar Illustrations from Other Sources,” The Journal of Burma Studies, 17, no. 1 (2013) 221–41. Copyright © 2020 Center for Burma Studies, Northern Illinois University

The Pre-colonial Roots of Colonial Coercion: Evidence from British Burma

Given fiscal constraints, how did colonial states allocate coercion within their territories? This paper proposes a new explanation for variation in colonial coercion: the extent of pre-colonial state consolidation. When the pre-colonial state achieved control over local society via capture of local agents, the latter became more compliant to the state’s demands and received less coercion from the colonial state. I evaluate this argument in British Burma, exploiting two novel data sources: revenue inquests collected by the pre-colonial state that recorded the new local headman appointments, and colonial gazetteers that recorded the distribution of colonial police. I find that villages closer to locations with newly-appointed headman before colonization received significantly fewer colonial police. The main results are not explained by spatial correlation or the presence of other colonial institutions. Further evidence shows that these differences in colonial coercion also influence political violence patterns after independence.

Legal Mediators: British consuls in Tengyue (western Yunnan) and the Burma-China frontier region, 1899–1931

AbstractBritish consuls were key agents for the British imperial presence in China from 1842 to 1943. Their role, which was to perform administrative duties that protected the rights of British subjects, is most prominently remembered in connection with the east coast. Here larger foreign communities and international maritime trade necessitated their presence. However, British consuls were also posted to the far southwest province of Yunnan and the Burma-China frontier region. This article sheds light on the role of consuls working in the little-known British consular station of Tengyue, situated close to the Burma-China frontier. Using the reports of locally stationed consuls and Burmese frontier officials, it argues that consuls were important mediators of legal power operating at the fringes of empire for British imperial and colonial interests in this region. They represented British and European subjects, and were mediators in legal disputes between British Burma and China, helping to smooth over Sino-British relations and promoting British Burmese sovereign interests. The article serves to shift our attention from the British presence in China on the east coast to the southwestern frontier, demonstrate the importance of consular legal duties, and emphasize the trans-imperial nature of British legal roles across this region.

Ashley Wright. Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating Consumption in British Burma.

Ashley Wright. Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating Consumption in British Burma.

Southeast Asia. British economic development in South East Asia, 1880–1939 Edited by David Sunderland London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014. 3 vols. Pp. lvii + 356, 486, 468. Notes, Sources, Index.

British economic development in South East Asia, 1880-1939 Edited by DAVID SUNDERLAND London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014. 3 vols. Pp. lvii + 356, 486, 468. Notes, Sources, Index. British economic development in South East Asia, 1880-1939 is an impressive, three-volume set of primary sources, covering the countries that are now Brunei, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), Singapore and Thailand (Siam). The eighty selected documents deal with a broad range of issues related to British economic policies and their impact during the late colonial period. These texts are organised into broad thematic groups. With its focus solely on agriculture, Volume One includes sources on the mainstays of the export-oriented economies such as rice, rubber and timber but also finds room for some exploring of the roles of fishing and hunting. Volume Two, meanwhile, showcases documents related to mining (such as that of tin, gold and coal), trade (local, intra-regional and international), and manufacturing and processing industries (including textiles, canned pineapples and coconut oil). Lastly, Volume Three broadens the collection's scope beyond economic issues to explore what its subtitle calls 'the building blocks of development'. The sources therein cover governance, transport and communications infrastructure (including railways, shipping and postal services), human capital (specifically, the healthcare, sanitation and housing of migrant populations), and, finally, financial capital (banking, cooperative societies and currency). The collection starts with a General Introduction in which David Sunderland outlines British economic goals in the region and how they sought to achieve them. This essay is heavily descriptive and provides the necessary context for appreciating the sources. Each of the thematic sections is also prefaced by a short introduction that expands upon the related information in the General Introduction. In all of these essays, Sunderland shows a high level of familiarity with the relevant historiography. However, he does not really engage with any of the debates concerning the nature and effects of British economic policy; seeming to prefer to let the sources speak for themselves. These are a mixture of publications and archival records drawn from libraries across the United Kingdom, especially the British Library in London, the National Archives in Kew and the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). They range from extensive sets of statistics on, for example, the imports and exports of the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang and Malacca) to detailed discussions of mining in British Malaya and the indigenous cotton industry in British Burma. …