Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (8 page)

Finally, Britain took what for generations had been a rather closed and isolated place and exposed it to global society. In this regard, the simple act of making Burma part of British India was decisive, for it immediately created a single colonial market not only for goods and services, but also for labor. At a stroke, Burma was opened for business on many fronts that enabled both entrepreneurs and workers to seek their fortune. Sweeping away traditional restrictions on population movement, fusing the territory with its far larger Indian neighbor, and creating attractive conditions for capitalists from around the world, British officials in the space of a generation or two utterly refashioned much of the land. Small numbers of Europeans settled, with entrepreneurs and traders far outnumbering civil servants and establishing what Cady terms “the tone of European sentiment.” “They favored a
laissez faire
policy by government, strong police control, easy money, and abundant Indian labor and were generally opposed to political or economic reforms. Few of them associated with the Burmese people or knew anything about Burma except as a place to do business.”
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Alongside them came many Chinese and still more Indians. By the time of the 1931 census, the last surviving survey of colonial Burma, a population of roughly 14.5 million people included slightly more than 30,000 Europeans and Eurasians, around 200,000 Chinese, and in excess of one million Indians.
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Major cities were transformed, or more accurately created, and Rangoon was effectively taken out of a Burmese orbit and turned into a global commercial center populated by outsiders, marked by a range of social vices, and linked by sea to a network of ports in Britain and its other Asian colonies. As early as 1901, 51 percent of its inhabitants were Indian.
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Charney argues that “Rangoon was a mimeograph of dozens of port cities scattered throughout colonial South and Southeast Asia. A person only had to squint to be confused as to whether he or she was standing in Singapore, Penang, Calcutta, or elsewhere.”
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By the late 1930s, no more than about 30 percent of Rangoon residents were Burmese. It was “a foreign city on Burmese soil.”
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At its peak, liberal imperialism registered broad success in British Burma, introducing changes that enabled the territory to realize much of its hitherto untapped economic potential. In 1964, I. R. Sinai wrote that “As an achievement in settlement and economic development, Lower Burma ranks with Canada or the Argentine as an immense Victorian triumph.”
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In 1967, nationalist scholar Maung Htin Aung noted that in the years from 1890 to 1920 local people were “dazzled” by economic development and the restoration of law and order.
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In 1974, Adas wrote that “The expansion of the Delta rice industry in the last half of the nineteenth century represents one of the most impressive examples of sustained economic growth under the aegis of a European colonial regime.”
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Built on a base of primary commodity exports, above all rice, oil and teak, Burma was in many ways an impeccable variant of the imperial enterprise celebrated by Niall Ferguson.
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At the same time, however, colonialism contained problems that ultimately were to trigger its demise, and considerably disrupt the emergence of a stable sovereign state.

Nationalist Burma

In British Burma the core triumphs of liberal imperialism were also the source of its destruction. Indeed, each of the five main domains of colonial achievement down to 1920 came to play a part in the subsequent breakdown of British rule. The imposition of order never succeeded in generating social support for an alien regime. The mapping exercise driven above all by administrative convenience and paying only limited attention to local conditions entrenched intense ethnic cleavages. The rationalization of administrative structures in the heartland destroyed much important social ballast. Economic development and growth set the stage for recession and tension. The opening of the territory to the world made for a virulent nationalist backlash that had strong aftershocks long into the postcolonial period. Looking back on British Burma from the vantage point of 1953, Furnivall wrote that “As a business concern it flourished, but as a human society it collapsed.”
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Pacification of Burma ensured that state-society relations became “coercion-intensive.”
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Many people, Mary P. Callahan writes, “met the modern state for the first time at the end of a rifle.”
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Notwithstanding British claims to the contrary, violence remained from start to finish a feature of colonial life. Thant Myint-U notes that the effect was not unlike that witnessed in Iraq under US occupation after 2003, with an external power seeking to subdue a subject people very nearly by force alone.
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On a personal level the imperious nature of much officialdom and the “ornamentalism” imposed on Burma by the British served only to exacerbate the situation.
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Among colonial administrators, it came in for devastating critique in the “stifling, stultifying world” portrayed by Orwell in
Burmese Days
after five years of service as a sub-divisional officer in the Indian Imperial Police.
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Among outsiders, it was all too apparent to Cady, who during a Rangoon residence toward the end of the 1930s was appalled by “the aloofness of the average Britisher.”
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Some years after independence, it was recalled in Pye’s critique of “The colonialists’ casual but ceaseless stress on class, on style, on form, and above all their inflexible self-assurance, even when dead wrong.”
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British officials in the Indian Civil Service were not all detached and uncaring. Maung Maung, president in the dark days of 1988, notes that many were sympathetic characters attuned to local circumstance: “The British bureaucracy was not, therefore, completely devoid of human warmth.”
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Especially in Burma Proper, however, the imperial state created a “peculiarly unrooted colonial regime, one which started (and ended) as a military occupation with little popular support.”
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In Burma, Aung-Thwin argues, Britain imposed “order without meaning.”
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In mapping their new possession, colonial officials were conscious of ethnic and tribal divisions, and sought to respect established social boundaries. At the same time, however, they are widely held to have tried to set distinct groups in tension. Against this, Thant Myint-U argues that separate administrative practices in core and periphery were a reflection “less of a divide-and-rule policy and more of a cheap and easy policy.”
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Either way, imperial officials created internal conflict between peoples with many centuries of interaction and diverse customs of allegiance. The result, desired or otherwise, was that Britain played a key role in exacerbating racial divisions within the boundaries of the land brought together as Burma, and in sowing the seeds of a nationalist reaction that would destroy colonialism.
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Christian missionary activity, stunningly successful in the hill country but of marginal impact in the Burman core, had a reinforcing effect by creating fresh religious cleavages.
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It is no historical accident that early instances of organized resistance to British rule took religious forms. Benedict Anderson notes that the Young Men’s Buddhist Association was built in Rangoon in 1906 by “English-reading schoolboys.”
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It was superseded in 1920 by the more populist and effective General Council of Burmese Associations. Inspired by Gandhian resistance in India and led by U Ottama, Burma’s first great nationalist hero, a new generation of political monks rose to challenge imperialism.
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Precisely because it was variegated and partial, the rationalization of administrative structures undertaken by colonial officials had no more than limited social impact in peripheral parts. In the Burman core, by contrast, the destruction of traditional institutions, both formal and informal, was deeply resented. Furthermore, because Burma remained part of the Raj until 1937, there was always a real sense that it was dependent not only on Britain, but also on India. Elite administrators came from the ICS, and the repressive arm of the state was represented above all by the British Indian Army. While senior positions were taken by Europeans, other ranks were filled frequently by Indians and sometimes by minority ethnic peoples from the periphery. Indeed, until Burma was given separate colonial status, Burman participation in the state was distinctly limited, and in the army virtually non-existent. Before 1937, the Indian Army contained hardly any Burmans, though some Chin, Kachin and other minorities were recruited. Although a British Burma Army was then established, by April 1941 less than 20 percent of a total force of 10,000 men was classified as Burman alongside large Chin, Kachin and Karen contingents. Even in the Territorial Army, formed for homeland defense, only some 35 percent of a force of slightly more than 3,000 men was Burman.
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In consequence, there was a large gulf between state and society in Burma Proper. Harvey, an ICS official, wrote that “what we gave Burma was not a government but an administration. Political direction, so far as there was any, came from the Indian government, with the British parliament in the dim background. It was a curiously impersonal system.”
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Donnison, ultimately a very senior colonial official, also wrote of the “impersonal administration” that characterized British rule.
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Reinforcing nationalist divisions were the different paths along which administrative developments in core and periphery moved.
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The exclusion of Burmans from military service was especially calamitous for, as Thant Myint-U notes, it ate away at national pride and fueled dangerous aspirations. “Soon a powerful ethnic nationalism, based narrowly on the idea of a Buddhist and Burmese-speaking people, one that saw little need to accommodate minority peoples, took root. At the center of this nationalism would be a desire for a new martial spirit.”
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Rapid introduction of capitalism across Burma, while beneficial for many in the early decades, was in true Marxist fashion perhaps the most destructive force unleashed by British imperialism. In 1953, Fabian socialist Furnivall wrote that “the annexation of Upper Burma in 1886 was a milestone in the process of political and social disintegration.”
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However, it is clear from the work of Adas that the critical move was the mid-1850s opening of the southern rice frontier. What Furnivall termed “Industrial Agriculture” was most fully developed in this part of the territory.
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From the start capitalism wrought dissolution of traditional modes of life with its wildfire spread, relentless focus on commerce and enterprise, and exploitative orientation. For Simon Schama in 2000, “Burma was a paradigm of plunder.”
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Near the end of the colonial period in 1939, Furnivall was equally critical: “Normally, society is organised for life; the object of Leviathan was to organise it for production.”
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More than once he noted that British Burma placed almost no value on culture and the arts. “Even in Rangoon there was no museum or art gallery, and, one may almost say, no public library.”
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Throughout, he contended that Burma had few resources to counteract social dislocation. Unlike India, for instance, it did not have a caste system for protection against the “solvent influence of western thought and economic forces.”
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Thus, capitalism long promoted a nationalist reaction, and at a time of decaying social order and widespread criminality Furnivall was fully supportive.
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Moreover, after the First World War Burma’s economic miracle turned sour, and the economy was essentially stagnant for the next two decades.
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Bearing the brunt of downturn were local people, with high rates of disease and mortality taking a heavy toll.
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In the 1920s and 1930s, the role of Indian Chettiars in lending money with land as collateral and then reaping the benefit through property transfers was especially controversial, even if exaggerated.
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What had been a vibrant frontier became a zone of land alienation and immiseration, with close to half of all agricultural land owned by non-native absentee landlords.
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In 1948, Furnivall wrote that “Under Burmese rule the Burman was a poor man in a poor country; now he is a poor man in a comparatively rich country.”
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This part of the problem, explored in
Man, the Wolf of Man
, a novel written in Insein Prison in the early 1940s by Nu, later to become first prime minister of independent Burma, built anti-capitalist sentiment and support for socialism and communism.
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