Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (7 page)

British Burma

Britain’s entanglement with Burma’s final Konbaung Dynasty, which governed land to the east of territory accumulated by the East India Company in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, initially took place through exploratory and often defensive moves on the part of company officials. Although a common frontier was established in 1784 when Burma secured control of Arakan and thereby confronted British rule in Chittagong, tensions did not arise until after 1811.
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Still the imperial preference was for some sort of informal control, rather than outright annexation. “In the eighteenth century, Britain had achieved supremacy in India by diplomacy where feasible, by war when necessary,” writes Trager. “During the nineteenth century, British rule was extended to Burma in the same way.”
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As in India, however, diplomacy eventually did fail and wars fought in 1824–26, 1852 and 1885 saw the full might of the imperial state incrementally gain total control of the territory. In the first engagement, coastal strips of Arakan to the west and Tenasserim to the south were taken. In the second, what the British called Lower Burma around the Irrawaddy Delta and Rangoon fell, placing the entire seaboard under colonial rule. In the third, Upper Burma, including Mandalay, historic heart of the territory and last regal capital, was seized.
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The expulsion of Burma’s final monarch, King Thibaw, and his two principal queens into the long Indian exile captured by Amitav Ghosh in
The Glass Palace
took place on November 29, 1885.
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On New Year’s Day 1886, Britain’s complete annexation of Burma was proclaimed by Lord Dufferin, Viceroy of India, acting through Secretary of State Lord Randolph Churchill and by command of Queen-Empress Victoria. Parliamentary delays consequent on the British general election of November-December 1885 meant that formal legislative ratification came in February 1886.

In the early years, Britain’s new imperial possessions were not only assembled but also governed piecemeal. At the start, in the mid-1820s, Burmese territory was administered from Penang in Britain’s Straits Settlements. Quickly, however, Burma was brought within British India, of which it remained part until 1937. Even then, though, Britain ran its initial holdings as “backwaters of the Bengal presidency” for which it had no particular vision or plan.
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In this period, Harvey writes, “Burma was governed by post from Calcutta.”
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More purposeful development set in only after the second round of conquest in 1852 and subsequent creation of a unified Indian province of Lower Burma in 1862.
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Then, particularly after the province filled out to its full extent in 1886, widespread administrative reform took place. For many years, however, this did little more than institutionalize a subordinate position within the British Raj. Rarely was Burma viewed by its imperial masters as anything other than a marginal colonial possession, and never did it wholly erase the stigma of the fateful decision to make it an appendage of British India.

One important consequence was that self-government came slowly to Burma. Only in 1897 was a Legislative Council created with nine nominated members. In 1909 the principle of election was established when the Rangoon Chamber of Commerce was allowed to vote one person on to the 15-member Council. Not until 1923, however, was anything resembling a popular poll introduced. Then under a system of dyarchy the Legislative Council was expanded to 103 members, of whom 79 were elected through household suffrage at age 18 with no gender discrimination, and some aspects of public policy were ceded to local control.
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Eventually, the Government of Burma Act 1935 provided for the territory to be separated from India on April 1, 1937, and given a distinct colonial status and identity. While ultimate authority in the British Crown Colony of Burma rested with the Governor and, through him, with the Secretary of State for India and Burma located in London, a measure of home rule could henceforth be exercised through a prime minister, cabinet and legislature.
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In the late 1940s, Furnivall’s assessment remained scathing: “the [Legislative] Council had no root among the people …; in reality it represented only the western superstructure divorced from national life.”
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British rule in Burma is often seen as a vintage case of liberal imperialism. Initially of interest to agents of the East India Company, Burma had a colonial experience driven throughout by a forceful commercial logic. In 1931, Furnivall echoed themes already explored more broadly by J. A. Hobson and V. I. Lenin in holding colonialism in Burma to be a machine driven by economic motives.
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In 2011, Neil A. Englehart qualified this interpretation by showing that in the first phase of imperialism after 1824 British engagement was so slight that local practices inevitably prevailed, and that in the second phase after 1852 officials drafted from India read that colonial model into Burma. Only after 1886 was a full market orientation imposed, and by then a considerable body of constraining precedent had built up. Furthermore, some globalization impacts registered in Burma in the nineteenth century were largely independent of British action.
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Indeed, as colonial administrator Maurice Collis wrote in 1956, “it can be argued that the Burmese did not learn anything from us which they could not have learned had they been lucky enough to remain independent.”
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Nevertheless, liberal imperialism did have lasting effects, and was certainly seen as momentous by the socialist officials and intellectuals who dominated Burmese public life for much of the twentieth century.
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While there were some positive sides, the eventual impact on the society was profoundly negative.

Liberal Burma

Colonialism started to reshape Burma in significant ways as soon as the delta region to the south was incorporated into the British Empire in 1852. Changes made from the 1850s onward built to a “high tide” that for Cady came within years of the imposition of full imperial control in 1886, and lasted for some three decades thereafter.
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Indeed, from 1890, when pacification was judged complete, to 1920, when the nationalist reaction developed in earnest, the British attained many of the objectives invigorating their colonial adventure.
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Five stand out. First, they secured a measure of order across the territory. Second, they mapped their new possession. Third, they rationalized administrative structures in its core. Fourth, they set it squarely on the path of economic development and growth. Fifth, they opened it up and located it firmly in global society. While every one of these achievements was ultimately to turn bad, the period from 1890 to 1920, prefigured by an equally successful interlude in Lower Burma from 1852, cast them chiefly in a good light.

Order was enforced in Burma through a series of pacification campaigns designed to impose passivity and security. In 1912 Sir Charles Crosthwaite, Chief Commissioner from March 1887 to December 1890, described “the methods by which a country of wide extent, destitute of roads and covered with dense jungle and forest, in which the only rule had become the misrule of brigands and the only order systematic disorder, was transformed in a few years into a quiet and prosperous State.”
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Formally concluded in 1890, pacification gave way to nothing other than a permanent military occupation that saw villagers especially in the Burman core subjected to an alien form of direct rule that could turn arbitrary and violent when necessary. Vested in the person of the colonial official was a striking amount of power.
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In a province widely reputed to be the most lawless part of a sprawling Empire, this generated sufficient order for the core purposes of liberal imperialism.

Mapping Burma was a large exercise undertaken through an extension of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India to the new province.
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It involved not only negotiating external frontiers, notably with China and imperial France, but also establishing internal boundaries.
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In a territory containing a variety of ethnic and linguistic groups never before treated as a single political entity, the British solution was to carve out a Burman core and a patchwork periphery of minority groups. For years colonial officials termed the central plains Burma Proper, and the surrounding hill country the Excluded Areas. However, as political institutions were developed and a Legislative Council was established in Burma Proper, the additional designations Ministerial or Parliamentary Burma came into use. Similarly, to reflect their separate status and the schedule of the 1935 Act in which their distinct political arrangements were listed, the Excluded Areas took on the label Scheduled Areas. At the end of the colonial period they were often known as the Frontier Areas. From the start, the divisions created by the British were rough and ready. In Burma Proper lived most of the country’s Burman majority population, though some minority communities such as lowland Karens in the Irrawaddy Delta were also present and still others including Mons in the south were slowly being assimilated. In the Excluded Areas lived chiefly a complex mosaic of minority ethnic groups adapted in diverse ways to neighboring civilizations.
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However, so intermingled were individual and group identities even across lowland and highland areas that in many parts it was difficult to specify ethnic composition with any clarity.
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Of the two major mapping exercises, the external frontiers turned out to be more durable than the internal boundaries. Although contemporary Myanmar does not have precisely the same borders as were given to colonial Burma in 1886, the differences are small. Internally, by contrast, quite substantial changes have been made. In particular, several new minority ethnic territories have been carved out of what for Britain was Burma Proper.

The colonial attempt to rationalize administrative structures was variegated and partial. Within the complex and essentially artificial entity created in 1886, the British tailored their governance practices to the different physical terrains they encountered. In Burma Proper, traditional authority structures were largely destroyed following the expulsion of Thibaw at the end of 1885. “The monarchy, the nobility, royal agencies, the army, all disappeared, virtually overnight,” reports Thant Myint-U. “In the countryside, local ruling families, many of whom had governed their charges for centuries, lost their positions as all hereditary status effectively came to an end.”
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Colonial reform thus stretched down to an unusually local level and village life, long the vibrant core of social organization, was substantially disrupted as customary relations were transformed by imposition of a novel administrative system in Upper Burma in 1887 and Lower Burma in 1891.
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“The old categories … all dissolved into a new and undifferentiated pool of Burmese peasants.”
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Codification, regulation and rule by paper became widespread.
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By contrast, in the mountainous Excluded Areas ringing the Burman core, existing authority structures were kept in place and Britain adopted a form of indirect rule through local princes, notables and village chiefs mirroring imperial practice in other parts of Asia. Throughout, many border lands remained “largely forgotten by the colonial state.”
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At the extreme, some almost impenetrable areas were never fully conquered.
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In these margins of empire, soon after the final British victory in the mid-1880s, Daniel Mason set
The Piano Tuner
.
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Perhaps the most stunning change introduced by the British was the rapid economic development witnessed in the early decades of Burmese dependence. The key zone was analyzed by Michael Adas in
The Burma Delta
.
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Located in Lower Burma and captured by Britain in 1852, this rice frontier was an engine of colonial economic growth throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Adas argues that the British introduced to Burma both the liberal economic framework found across the whole of India, and specific measures designed to accommodate or stimulate capitalist expansion. Considerable infrastructure investment was made, with a national railway system built mainly between 1870 and 1915.
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Coupled with external changes, notably the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869, these reforms exposed the enormously fertile yet underdeveloped region of Lower Burma to both domestic and foreign exploitation. One result was a shift to “peasant exports and the growth of the money economy.”
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Another was “economic growth and social change on a scale and at a speed unequaled in Southeast Asian history.”
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In half a century from 1855 to 1905–06, the area of Lower Burma under cultivation increased from 700–800,000 acres to nearly six million, and annual rice exports grew from 162,000 tons to two million. Indeed, in the early part of the twentieth century, economic growth above all in the delta turned Burma into the rice basket of Asia. At the same time, social change saw substantial internal migration chiefly from Upper to Lower Burma, boosting the delta population from roughly one million to more than four million in the half-century from 1852 to 1901.
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So substantial was the process of relocation in a province of broadly 10 million that “By the end of the nineteenth century the Burman heartland had grown to include most of Lower Burma.”
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The other great imperial industries, never close in size to rice but still important, were mining (mainly oil) and forestry (mainly teak), romanticized by J. H. Williams in
Elephant Bill
.
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