Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (5 page)

The position taken by early postwar writers was picked up by many subsequent analysts. As Tinker put it roughly a decade after independence, this was that “The old Burma has bequeathed much to the new, but not in the sphere of government; the origins of the representative institutions of today must be sought in the British period.”
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Some 45 years on, Thant Myint-U made much the same point in
The Making of Modern Burma
(2001): “the end of the [nineteenth] century witnessed the birth of Burma as we still know it today.”
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In
The River of Lost Footsteps
(2006), he identified 1885 as the “watershed year,” marked by “a break with the ideas and institutions that had underpinned society in the Irrawaddy Valley since before medieval times.”
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Charney also endorsed this approach by opening
A History of Modern Burma
(2009) in 1886.
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The line taken by Cady in 1958 was different, however, making reassertion of the past the core theme. “Generally speaking, the structure of governmental administration in newly independent Burma follows closely the improved patterns developed in British times, but the spirit of the exercise of authority owes much to pre-British custom as popularly recognized.”
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In this way he identified vital cultural and political traditions as important conditioning factors in the contemporary state. Later, this departure from the established focus on the colonial period was endorsed and extended by Cady’s student, Robert H. Taylor. In a book that appeared as
The State in Burma
in 1987, and in a revised and extended edition as
The State in Myanmar
in 2009, Taylor reached decisively into the past to argue that “the contemporary state in Myanmar cannot be understood other than through an appreciation of the nature of the early modern pre-colonial state.”
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He thereby made a case for a very deep historical understanding of Myanmar’s current political situation.

Taylor did not argue for analysis to go all the way back through more than 1,000 years of recorded history. For him, Burma’s first chronicled centuries, corresponding to the medieval period in Europe, are best viewed as prehistory. They contain the revered Pagan Dynasty, founded in 1044 and maintained until 1287.
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They feature the legendary King Anawrahta, who ruled from 1044 to 1077 and was identified as a founding father by Hall, sometime Professor of History at Rangoon University: “He was the first king of Burma and with him Burmese history proper begins.”
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They span a mix of kingdoms and tribal societies marked by shifting forms of government and patterns of alliance. Thus, while the Pagan Dynasty managed for more than two centuries to dominate not only the plains at the heart of the territory, but also parts of the surrounding hill country and delta lands, it was equally possible for central control to break down and peripheral leaders to extend their dominion into the heartland. Shan people to the east and Mon people to the south both boast long-dead monarchs able to project power from the periphery into the core.
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Indeed, as Victor B. Lieberman noted in
Burmese Administrative Cycles
(1984), “the waxing and waning of royal power constitutes a major theme in the political history of the region.”
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Rather, Taylor argued that in a context of fluid patterns of control stretching across many centuries, Burmese political history became settled in the late 1500s. The key figure in implanting a more consistent and ultimately modern pattern was King Bayinnaung, who from 1551 to 1581 consolidated the Toungoo Dynasty, which ruled from 1486 to 1752. Subsequently, from 1752 to 1760, King Alaungpaya formed the equally important Konbaung Dynasty, which exercised power for more than a century. Taylor demonstrates that for some 300 years down to the late 1800s the Burman state sustained reforms that considerably enhanced its capacity to exercise control over a broad range of territory. In his words, “the power of the state relative to society increased because of more effective taxation and greater military strength; increased and centralized military strength was also a consequence of advances in technology, together with an altered external political and economic environment, the result of increasingly rapid changes occurring in Europe and in neighbouring areas.”
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One consequence was that when, in the late eighteenth century, East India Company officials looked beyond Bengal into lands to the south and east, the Burma they encountered had a coherent core dominated by an established state and underpinned by a pervasive Buddhist faith. That state was also able supervise, regulate and exact tribute from much of its mountainous periphery.

An additional move is critical. Having shown that a competent Burman state was constructed in the centuries preceding British imperial rule, Taylor argues that pre-colonial governance patterns and political culture exercised a decisive shaping power over every succeeding polity down to the present day. “Both the colonial state and the contemporary state developed in the same geographical and ecological condition as the precolonial state, and there are significant cultural continuities between the periods of the state’s existence.”
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He thereby holds that a full understanding of the state established by Burma’s unifying Toungoo and Konbaung Dynasties across 300 years from the late sixteenth century onward is necessary to any attempt to capture contemporary governance. At the start of this book, the validity of this important methodological claim requires careful examination.

When that is done, it looks decidedly problematic. The first part relates to geographical conditions, for Taylor unchanging across pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial states. In the broad sense of brute facts, there may be some truth in this. However, it was only by British officials that an entity corresponding to contemporary Myanmar was first mapped, and even then its borders were no more than rough approximations of those that exist today. Additionally, abundant change in the past 200 years, comprising something like a tenfold population increase, the rise of new urban centers, major population movements, and a revolution in the technological underpinnings of state-society relations, further undermine the idea of constant conditions. Any human geographer can show that in many important respects they are radically different, and anthropologist James C. Scott demonstrates that dramatic change in the control capacity of the modern state has drastically reduced space available to “the art of not being governed.”
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The second part states that ecological conditions have also been the same across the past two centuries. However, that is not the case either. In a largely rural setting, modes of agricultural production shifted markedly in many parts of the country. In particular, the opening of a new rice frontier in the second half of the nineteenth century had a wide impact.
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The final part argues for significant cultural continuities, and is bolstered by Cady’s original contention. For Taylor, political dynamics have always been established by a controlling state. “It is the nature of the state and its personnel which provides meaning to [Burma’s political history since the late sixteenth century], for it is the state which has been the dominant institution in shaping economic, social and other opportunities for the population.”
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This state-centric claim is distinct from society-centric arguments reaching much the same conclusion by the different route of the country’s allegedly authoritarian political values.
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Taylor argues not that local people have long got the government they deserve, but rather that local rulers have always felt the need to adopt a maximalist, assertive conception of their role. Under threat, elites project power.

There is much to be said for this interpretation. Throughout history, state leaders have sought to boost central command, and often they have succeeded. Looking to this heritage, Michael Aung-Thwin argues that Burmese independence came not in 1948 when authority was vested in an elite shaped by colonialism and beholden to western powers, but rather in 1962 when Ne Win destroyed a crumbling democracy, shrugged off external influence, and asserted full national sovereignty through a centralizing state.
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Moreover, it is strictly within this tradition that military leaders operated in 1988, that Than Shwe worked in the 1990s and 2000s, and that disciplined democracy is intended to function under Thein Sein in the 2010s. Nevertheless, it is stretching the point to argue that broader ecological conditions remain sufficiently unchanged for analyses of the pre-colonial political system to be centrally relevant today. The very year after Taylor’s book was first published witnessed the four eights uprising.
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In turn, this mobilization for democracy also looked to tradition as individuals walked consciously in the steps of protesters from every decade since the 1920s. Thus, while the state certainly remains what Taylor calls “the determining partner” in relationships with civil society, in modern times its authority and legitimacy have been fiercely contested.
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Indeed, once the focus of inquiry shifts from a persistently dominant state to the larger context in which it is embedded, many features of the political landscape exhibit clear discontinuity. Already noted is the development of democratic aspirations among a broad spectrum of citizens and evident at many points since at least the 1920s. Alongside it is politicization of ethnic identity across the country, triggered in colonial times and painfully present thereafter. Also significant is the absence prior to British rule of anything remotely resembling the modern nation-state successive elites have sought to impose on the country. Moreover, many attributes associated with such a construct were also missing in the pre-colonial period. Infrastructure and communications were poor, and interaction between people in the central plains and surrounding hill country was fundamentally different from what is witnessed today. Internal trade was chronically underdeveloped. Outlying parts now and then fell under Chinese, Indian or Siamese control. Crucially, there was no sense of a notionally unified Burma spanning core and periphery. Largely for this reason, the ethnic identities that in many ways have come to define the modern state, and have also come close to tearing it apart, are also modern constructs.
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The firm boundaries that mark them out are often located in different places from the informal borders existing in the pre-colonial period, and both are distinct again from the frontiers set in place by the British.

In 1958, Furnivall wrote that “Burma, secluded from the outer world by mountains and the sea, appears destined for political unity by nature.” However, his argument was that only rarely has unity been realized.
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Furthermore, it was under the British that a single legal entity was definitively marked out and established on the map of the world. “Burma, as we know it with its present boundaries,” wrote Bertil Lintner in 1994, “is a colonial creation rife with internal contradictions and divisions.”
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Indeed, Taylor himself made the same point some two decades on from his 1987 analysis: “Though this flies in the face of the official nationalist historiography of the country, it is no exaggeration to say that the British made modern Myanmar.” Only under the British were demarcated “the internal conceptual and administrative structures of the modern state.”
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If, then, the colonial period was decisive in creating the contemporary state, it is to British rule and the consequences flowing from it that analysis should chiefly turn, and not to earlier eras and the procession of indigenous monarchs that dominated them.

For these reasons, the analytical orientation underpinning the next four chapters is a variant of orthodox scholarship, with one modification. First, it endorses the need to look to the past. “The most striking aspect of the Burma debate today is its absence of nuance and its singularly ahistorical nature,” wrote Thant Myint-U in 2006.
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Both are to be avoided. Second, it acknowledges that Britain’s colonial adventure was decisive. “The speed with which Burma changed after the arrival of the British was alarming,” wrote Aung

San Suu Kyi in 1990.
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Third, though, it looks back not to 1886, when full imperial rule was imposed, but rather to the 1850s, when dramatic reshaping of a traditional society began to be registered both internally and externally. Inside, annexation of Burma’s large southern delta in 1852 and formal creation of a new province within the British Raj in 1862 were key landmarks enabling colonial officials to embark on purposeful exploitation of their new possession. Outside, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 transformed the territory’s place in the global economy. “During the forty years prior to the outbreak of World War I, Burma was caught up in a maelstrom of worldwide commercial and industrial activity far in excess of anything the country had ever before experienced,” writes Cady.
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As he also notes, the economic dynamic unleashed by these developments was at least as revolutionary as the extensive administrative reforms introduced after 1886. The social impact was enormous.