Although dependent on the taxation of landed wealth like any other regime in the past had been, the British Empire was especially interested in overseas trade. India was beginning to play a major role in Britain’s own engagement with the world economy, as a market for its manufactures, chiefly textiles, machinery, and metals; as a source of food, unskilled labor, and industrial raw materials; and as a destination for capital going into the railways, tea, jute, and banking. Britain, likewise, was crucial to a vast range of new capitalistic enterprises run by the Indians, and for sustaining the consumption of cheap cotton cloth.

A new land and sea frontier for Britain had opened up in Burma after the conclusion of the Anglo-Burma wars (1823–26). The conquest yielded the British control of the Tenasserim isthmus and the Arakan state, and allowed the British to become entrenched in Rangoon and Pegu. The direct value of these territories for private commerce was not great, but the conquest made the prospect of overland transactions between India and China brighter than before. In the 1820s, the attempt to grow tea in India led enterprising Europeans to take an interest in the Burmese trade with Yunnan. The immediate economic possibility, however, was located in Burma itself. Lower Burma was beginning to become a commercial hub, not least because of the diversion of Burma’s cotton exports from the overland China route to overseas trade. The protection of these newly developed commercial interests fueled further rounds of colonization in Burma, continuing up to 1885.