Colonial Burma Research Articles

Courting colonialism: considering litigation as an act of Citizenship in Colonial Burma

ABSTRACT Litigants in colonial Burma were ascribed a set of personal law codes according to their race and religion. Women were generally given the personal law status of their fathers, which imposed disadvantages on the daughters of mixed Chinese Burmese couples. In this paper, I identify efforts mixed women litigants made to reinscribe their personal law by mobilizing claims about the communities they belonged to outside the court as ‘acts of citizenship’. I describe points of rapprochement between theoretical trajectories that locate citizenship in- and outside the law. I adapt Mamood Mamdani’s classic distinction of citizen/subject to theorize the potential for enacting citizenship under conditions of colonial subjecthood.

The spectre of Ma Phyu? Loyalty, competence, and the spatial dynamics of imperial administration in colonial Burma

AbstractThis article explores the spatial dynamics of imperial administration in colonial Burma through the lens of gender, bureaucracy, and frontier. Focusing on the story of Hugh Ernest McColl, a British administrative officer in Burma who struggled for promotion as a result of his marriage to a Burmese woman, the article sheds light on the spatial dynamics regarding loyalty, competence, and political priorities in the imperial administration of frontiers. Such spatial dynamics were most clearly manifested in the diverging attitudes between central authorities and local governments towards McColl’s case. Drawing on archival sources and secondary literature that contextualize McColl’s case within the broader textures of colonial governance, this article argues that McColl’s case reveals the internal contradiction of the imperial administration, which saw a constant tension between the ideological imperatives of control and the practical demands of how to control. McColl’s story is therefore a story of broader significance—of the inherent structural contradiction of colonial rule and its inability to overcome it.

Hanging for murder in late colonial Burma

The first decades of the twentieth century saw a marked rise in the number of recorded murders in British-ruled Burma. The sentence for murder prescribed by the Indian Penal Code—in force in Burma as a province of British India—was death or transportation for life. However, while Burma's murder count was rising sharply, the number of executions taking place in the province's jails remained broadly stable, with perhaps a tendency to fall, and indeed it fell decisively at the end of the 1930s. By that point, a high standard of evidence was being increasingly demanded for conviction for murder and increasingly the death penalty was being imposed only when murder had clearly been premeditated. In other words, in the administration of justice in murder cases, the rule of law had been markedly tightened. The focus in the article will be on the local pressures, on the practices and perspectives of Burma's colonial administration and of the Burmese themselves that led in time to a decisive fall in the number of convicted murderers who were hanged for their crime.

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.

Global circulation of low-end expertise: Knowledge, hierarchy, and labor migration in a Burmese oilfield.

This article examines the phenomenon of the "global circulation of low-end expertise" through an exploration of the social dynamics surrounding American oil drillers who migrated from the Pennsylvania oil region to British colonial Burma during the early 1900s to the mid-1930s. These working-class drillers, with practical knowledge in oil drilling acquired through familial and community networks, played a crucial role in operating mechanized oil wells and providing geological expertise in colonial Burma. Positioned between labor-intensive agricultural economies in colonial Asia and the higher echelons of British colonial society, these drillers occupied an intermediate social location. Despite their indispensable expertise, they were marginalized due to their lower social standing, leading to their expertise being disregarded by their superiors and forgotten over time. By understanding the complexities of the "global circulation of low-end expertise," this study sheds light on the social construction and erasure of the expertise held by these working-class drillers, revealing overlooked aspects of global histories of science and labor and highlighting the need to reassess dominant historical narratives on knowledge-labor.

Categorical confusions: gender and the colonial construction of the ‘Chinese Buddhist’ in Burma

British law in colonial Burma separated the legal personhood of imperial subjects by religious status. However, colonial law failed to clarify boundaries around religious categories. This lack of clarity was amplified when the court was forced to consider how to apply Buddhist law between different Buddhist communities, like the Chinese and Burmese. Owing to differences in how marriage, divorce, succession, and other rights are handled in Chinese- versus Burmese legal traditions, recognition as either Chinese or Burmese carried significant weight. Through a historical anthropology of Chinese-Burmese Buddhist family law in colonial Burma, this article argues that the British colonial judiciary’s failure to appreciate connections between Burmese and Chinese Buddhists produced novel legal segregations of mixed communities. Further, this categorical splitting was generated along gendered lines, where judicial acceptance of men’s claims of Chinese separateness disenfranchised native, mixed, and migrant women who sought to foreground their connections to Burma.

Psychiatrists Explore Their Inner Hemingway

Psychiatrists Explore Their Inner Hemingway

From the Allegheny to the Irrawaddy: American Oil Drillers in Colonial Burma

Colonial Burma was once a major center of world petroleum production in the early 20th Century. A notable group in the oil-fields of Burma was the working-class American oil drillers, most of whom with ties to the oil regions of western Pennsylvania. Drawing from fragmented primary sources such as censuses, consular registrations, passport applications, and death reports, this article reconstructs the life story of three ordinary and obscure blue-collar American drillers working in Burma between 1905 and 1920. With an individual perspective, this article proposes a more human history of the non-human, which takes seriously the visions, desires, and experiences of ordinary people in the oil industry. For oil history, this approach decenters conventional narratives of state structures, national successes, or larger-than-life heroic figures in the making of the age of oil.

The twofold challenge for Karen Baptist intellectuals in colonial Burma: A national claim and its failure

Two years after the Anglo-Burmese War, with the British colonial takeover of Burma complete and yet still subject to outbreaks of rebellions, a small group of Karen Baptist intellectuals in Rangoon who formed the Karen National Association (KNA), attempted to assert a political claim to Karen nationhood. This article focuses on two letters, in English and Sgaw Karen, presented by Karen delegates on the occasion of the ceremony to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887 in Rangoon, to investigate the colonial politics of loyalty and national claim. It argues that the letters were written for two different audiences, and by doing so the Karen Baptists were asserting dual claims; one directed at the British colonial authorities and the other, the wider population of Karen in Burma, with their multiple Karennic languages and religious and other affiliations. Both appeals failed to get the desired responses, however. This article then discusses the contradiction that this assertion of Karen nationhood alienated the Baptist leaders from their own diverse community.

Bringing Murderers to Justice in Late Colonial Burma

ABSTRACT For senior British officials in late colonial Burma, an important part of the explanation for the province’s soaring murder rate was the reluctance and often outright refusal of Burmese witnesses to murder to engage with the police and courts in bringing killers to justice. That reluctance or refusal, it was said, substantially reduced the arrest and in particular the conviction rate in murder cases, thereby weakening the deterrent impact of the law. British officials explained the reluctance or refusal in terms of alleged weaknesses in the Burmese character and social organisation. In contrast, this paper argues that the Burmese had strong reasons for failing to engage, in that they could have little confidence that the colonial police and courts would in fact bring murderers to justice. Self-help justice, revenge-killing, was a far more certain path. The final section of the paper examines a number of measures considered or implemented by the British colonial administration in the 1920s and 1930s to curb the murder count, measures which in fact merely exposed the Burma administration’s limited reach and indeed ambition in seeing murderers caught and convicted.

Introduction toVisual Arts ResearchSpecial Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Introduction to<i>Visual Arts Research</i>Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Mission Education in Burma, 1600–1948

AbstractScholars, historians, and researchers who are keenly interested in Burmese studies have not paid enough attention to the considerable roles Christian missionaries played in the history of precolonial and colonial Burma. This article explores the neglected and hidden history of the Western missionaries who introduced modern education to Burma and who educated some of the best minds of the Burmese at that time. Despite missionaries being underrated and criticized by some Burman nationalists and politicians, they made a remarkable contribution to education in Burmese history. Education was and has always been crowned in Christianity, and advancing education remains indispensable to Christian mission in Burma and elsewhere. Public knowledge of this constructive story in history would be helpful for Buddhist–Christian relations.

Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty by Peggy Kamuf

Reviewed by: Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty by Peggy Kamuf Jeremy Tambling Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty. By Peggy Kamuf. New York: Fordham University Press. 2018. 161 pp. $25. ISBN 978–0–8232–8229–6. Peggy Kamuf translated the first of two volumes of Jacques Derrida’s seminars, published posthumously, called The Death Penalty; these transcripts appeared in English from Chicago University Press in 2014 and 2015. She says nothing about her work of translation, but her book offers footnotes, as it were, to Derrida’s work, which itself gives a fascinating range of arguments against the death penalty, drawing many examples from French literature: thus Hugo and Camus appear in both Derrida and Kamuf, and Kamuf analyses Baudelaire through the récit given in Le Spleen de Paris, translated here as ‘A Heroic Death’. Kafka appears here; while there are chapters on Orwell’s ‘A Hanging’, an account of an execution he was responsible for in colonial Burma (Myanmar), and on two American texts: Robert Coover’s A Public Burning (1977), his treatment of the electrocution of the Rosenbergs in 1953, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979). The American emphasis reflects Kamuf’s desire to concentrate on America’s history: apparently ending capital punishment in the early 1970s, only to reintroduce it, Gary Gilmore being the first to die under the new permission to kill in 1977. Gilmore (Mailer’s subject), shot for a double murder, brings out an irony Kamuf explores: Gilmore wanted to be executed and refused to appeal against his sentence; lawyers tried to save him because of the precedent that would give for capital [End Page 108] punishment to resume in America. And where much of the rest of the world has abolished the death penalty, America, Kamuf says with further irony, ‘is struggling to survive in a largely hostile world’ given the protection of secrecy, everything to do with execution even being exempted by law from the Freedom of Information Act (pp. 65–66). The interest in discussing the death penalty through literature comes from Derrida claiming that literature, not philosophy, has advanced the cause of abolition, and that literature always speaks against it: ‘literature’, as Derrida considers it, is distinct from ‘belles-lettres and poetry’ (Kamuf’s quotation, p. 19); it is modern, post-French Revolution, metatextual, almost halfway towards theory; Kamuf quotes Derrida saying that it ‘has the right to say anything’ (p. 23)—that being almost a definition of modern literature, as with Blanchot, another writer discussed. (This modernism cannot really claim Orwell, but interestingly, Kamuf has good things to say about him.) Such a literature is essential for a democracy and can only live in one; its power is to question the death penalty, which is read as a particular aim to define the limits of life, terminating its openness to chance. Kamuf makes good points about literature as a witness to capital punishment—a witness being essential to say that an ‘execution’ (a word whose etymology she traces) has taken place. The chapter on Coover shows how modern executions demand secrecy, and how they relate to the obscene. The death penalty is ‘driven by the urge to indecent exposure, which has to call up the contrary drive to keep hidden what should not be exposed’ (p. 82): in this novel, the Rosenbergs are made to die publicly, as a way of bringing home what that shamefulness involves; Kamuf here invokes Freud’s idea of the passage à l’acte, an acting out of unconscious desires (p. 85)—disavowed desires projected in front of spectators who can see what they have repressed. The book is full of sharply suggestive points, mostly unusual in debates of this sort, affirming literature’s inherent value in contesting the absoluteness of the death penalty, cutting off life and language together. Jeremy Tambling SWPS Warsaw Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

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.

Phantoms of silenced pasts: Lessons for today from the forgotten history of Burmese Indians’ exodus from Burma

This article explores the lives of Burmese Indians – Indian minorities that had migrated to and subsequently settled in Colonial Burma but later repatriated or fled Burma between the 1930s and 1960s. The stories of Burmese Indians who once made up a noticeable minority in Burma are conspicuously under-represented from historical records of both India and Burma today. Due to this silencing, these stories have receded to the periphery of public memory and now survive as grandparents’ tales of immigration and folk memories. Furthermore, the invisibilization of these stories from the Burmese memory-scape has created a peculiar situation wherein not only is the Burmese Indians’ exodus disembedded from Burma’s wider history but the current ethnic tensions, particularly the violence against the Rohingya Muslims, is perceived as delinked from any anti-India rhetoric of the past. This article attempts to weave the Burmese Indians’ exodus into the larger historical trajectory of the state and read the Rohingya Muslims’ exodus as another illustration of Burma’s haunting legacy of dealing with the ethnically different ‘other’.

The Bullinger Pool in Burma, 1921 to the mid-1930s

One of the most important developments in the history of the rice trade of colonial Burma was the creation of the Bullinger Pool in 1921, a combination of four large British milling and export firms based on a common price policy for the purchase and sale of paddy and rice. These firms dominated the rice trade at a time when paddy was the “true currency” of the country [Binns 1948:50]: as the source of livelihood for the majority and the form of payment for rent, loans, and wages. The collective position of the four companies—Steel Bros. and Co., Ltd., Bulloch Bros. and Co., Ltd., Ellerman’s Arracan Rice and Trading Co., Ltd., and Anglo-Burma Rice Co., Ltd.—reached such magnitude in the rice trade that by the 1930s, the conglomerate had become the subject of a legislative inquiry and the object of organized Burmese protest. The accusation against the Pool was that it manipulated prices in order to rake in huge profits, especially at the time of economic depression in the early 1930s. Even if the allegations of what one today might consider unfair trade practice were officially dismissed, as they were, the paper demonstrates that the Pool’s primary advantage, especially its access to paddy supplies, was the cornerstone of its position in the rice trade, making any measure of control plausible at the least. Since the relationship between paddy and rice prices was crucial to the industry’s pricing mechanism, the existence of a combination to set prices for both paddy and rice in the local market made the industry vulnerable to manipulation.

SALT AND SOVEREIGNTY IN COLONIAL BURMA

AbstractAcross monsoon Asia, salt is of such vital necessity that controlling its production or supply has historically been connected to the establishment and expression of political authority. On the one hand, rulers maintained the allegiance of their subjects by ensuring their access to salt of suitable price and sufficient quantity. On the other hand, denying rebels their salt was a strategy of conquest and pacification, while the necessity of salt meant it could reliably be taxed to raise state finances. This article first sets out this connection of salt and sovereignty, then examining it in the context of colonial Burma, a province of British India from its annexation until its ‘divorce’ in 1935 (effected in 1937), and thus subject to the Government of India's salt monopoly. Focusing on salt brings into view two aspects of the state (while also permitting analysis of ‘Upper Burma’, which remains rather marginal in the scholarly literature). First, the everyday state and quotidian practices constitutive of its sovereignty, which was negotiated and contested where indigenes were able to exploit the chinks in the state's administrative capacity and its knowledge deficits. Second, in turn, the lumpy topography of state power. The state not only failed to restrict salt production to the extent it desired (with the intention that indigenes would rely on imported salt, whose supply was easier to control and thus tax), but conceded to a highly complex fiscal administration, the variegations in which reflected the uneven distribution in state power – thicker in the delta and thinnest in the uplands.

‘Sensations of Rootedness’ in Cosmopolitan Rangoon or How the Politics of Authenticity Shaped Colonial Imaginings of Home

ABSTRACT Colonial Rangoon was once a famously cosmopolitan city, a significant trade port of the British Empire and one of the world’s largest migrant destinations. Mobility, foreignness and cross-cultural hybridity was essential to Rangoon’s make-up during the colonial period. This paper compares three texts, each written from one of Rangoon’s resident mobile cultural identities, that represent ‘sensations of at-homeness’ in the colony. I analyse associations and metaphors of ‘rootedness’ in the personal correspondence of Gordon Luce, the self-published memoir of Kenneth Tun Tin and an interview with a Japanese businesswoman, Ikuyo Okuma. Drawing on Kristeva’s (1991. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press) examination of the figure of foreigner in Western society in Strangers to Ourselves, as well as Greenblatt’s (2009. Cultural Mobility, A Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Manifesto, I argue that ‘sensations of rootedness,’ imagined through associations with blood and soil, may be expressed as maintaining equilibrium. This paper contributes to understandings of ‘plurality’ in colonial Burma and ‘Anglo-Burmese’ experiences and identities.

‘Buddhism Has Been Insulted. Take Immediate Steps’: Burmese fascism and the origins of Burmese Islamophobia, 1936–38

AbstractIn light of the current Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, this article investigates the emergence of Islamophobia in colonial Burma. Focusing on the under-examined Islamophobic riots that broke out countrywide in 1938, my research reveals that a nascent fascist movement used Muslims as a scapegoat for political and economic crisis. The colonial agribusiness economy had collapsed during the Great Depression, while the vast contract labour system of the Indian Ocean had brought millions of low-wage Indian migrants to Burma, causing a glut in the labour market. Burmese socialism provided a popular response to these issues. To compete, Burmese fascism emerged to appeal to a rising sense of nationalism, racially scapegoating Indians and the religion of Islam as the exploiters, colonizers, and invaders behind Burma's problems. Using the racialized termkalato conflate the ideas of colonizer, Indian, and Muslim, Burmese fascists inflamed hatred against Indian Muslims, Indian Hindus, and even indigenous Muslims, such as the Rohingya. By revealing the origins of this racialization, this article both deconstructs the lasting Burmese perception of the Rohingya as ‘Bengali immigrants’ and provides a generalizable case study into how races and racisms develop from specific historical factors and political movements. It also argues that the British amplified fascist ideas in Burma by focusing repression on movements that directly challenged their material control, such as socialism and communism. Therefore, it highlights how ruling classes often prefer nationalistic movements because they redirect popular unrest from the project of overthrowing structural factors to that of eliminating scapegoated minorities.

Teak & Lead: Making Borders, Resources, and Territory in Colonial Burma

ABSTRACT Through a comparative historical analysis of two sites on Myanmar’s borders with China and Thailand, this article explores how natural resources affected border-making in Zomia. Firstly, the article argues that demand for natural resources drove lowland states’ territorialisation of the highlands in the late nineteenth century, including their desire to demarcate borders. Secondly, local actors chose different political strategies in response to lowland state penetration. Some chose to attempt to repel lowland states, others to avoid them. The type of natural resources available (‘lootable’ versus ‘unlootable’ resources) enhanced or diminished the effectiveness of the political tactics chosen by local actors. Thirdly, the article explores whether local politics or the ‘knowability’ of natural resources determined the differential success of border-making in the region. This attention to natural resources can deepen histories of ‘state-escaping’ highland peoples. This also has implications for the question of human agency and environmental determinism in Zomia, a question which is often implicit but unaddressed when scholars use the concept of the ‘friction of terrain’. In the context of accelerating climate change and the global spread of pathogens, understanding the potential for agency of non-human objects is more important than ever. Drawing on archival materials from the Myanmar National Archives, India Office Records, and the British Library, this study gives insights into both the politics of this region today, and how natural resources affected border-making at the margins of states.