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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 November 2021
In 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.
1 Wiener, Martin J., An empire on trial: race, murder, and justice under British rule, 1870–1935 (Cambridge, 2009), p. 1Google Scholar. It is important to acknowledge here that the rule of law ‘is an exceedingly elusive notion’. For the present context: ‘to live under the rule of law is not to be subject to the unpredictable vagaries of other individuals – whether monarchs, judges, government officials, or fellow citizens. It is to be shielded from the familiar human weaknesses of bias, passion, prejudice, error, ignorance, cupidity, or whim.’ Brian Z. Tamanaha, On the rule of law: history, politics, theory (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 3, 122.
2 Cheesman, Nick, Opposing the rule of law: how Myanmar's courts make law and order (Cambridge, 2015), p. 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Maitrii Aung-Thwin, ‘Discourses of emergency in colonial and postcolonial Burma’, in Victor V. Ramraj and Arun K. Thiruvengadam, eds., Emergency powers in Asia: exploring the limits of legality (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 187–212.
3 George Orwell, Burmese days (London, 2009; orig. edn New York, NY, 1934), p. 250.
4 ‘Minute dated the 9th December 1940, by the hon'ble minister of home affairs’, British Library, India Office Records (IOR) M/3/419.
5 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 39, 199.
6 That judgement of the criminal justice system was made by John Clague, a vastly experienced British official. He had been first appointed to the Burma administration in 1906 and he ended his career as adviser to the secretary of state for Burma in London between 1937 and 1942. Papers of Sir John Clague, Autobiographical fragments, p. 15, IOR Mss Eur E252/72.
7 Keally McBride, Mr. Mothercountry: the man who made the rule of law (New York, NY, 2016), p. 11.
8 Three examples with respect to British India: Anand A. Yang, ed., Crime and criminality in British India (Tucson, AZ, 1985); Wendie Ellen Schneider, Engines of truth: producing veracity in the Victorian courtroom (New Haven, CT, 2015), ch. 3, ‘Perjury and prevarication in British India’; and David Arnold, Police power and colonial rule: Madras 1859–1947 (Delhi, 1986).
9 Antoinette Burton, The trouble with empire: challenges to modern British imperialism (New York, NY, 2015), p. 4.
10 Callahan, Mary P., ‘State formation in the shadow of the Raj: violence, warfare and politics in colonial Burma’, Southeast Asian Studies, 39 (2002), p. 514Google Scholar.
11 For an overview of Burma in the 1920s and 1930s, see John F. Cady, A history of modern Burma (Ithaca, NY, 1958), part 3. There are further references when the crises are briefly discussed towards the end of the article.
12 Perpetual anxiety on the part of officials that practice often fell far short of the principles they claimed to represent was evident too in colonial administration of the opium monopolies: Kim, Diana S., Empires of vice: the rise of opium prohibition across Southeast Asia (Princeton, NJ, 2020), pp. 16–17Google Scholar.
13 And apparently was to rise sharply in the following year. In late 1940, the secretary in the Home Department of the Government of Burma estimated that the total number of murders in that year would probably exceed 1,500: ‘Extract from home secretary's letter for 1st half of December 1940, dated 23 December 1940’, IOR M/3/419.
14 ‘Burma crime statistics circulated by K. B. Harper, delegate to Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform, 23–30 January 1934’, IOR M/1/88.
15 Saha, Jonathan, ‘The male state: colonialism, corruption and rape investigations in the Irrawaddy Delta c. 1900’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 47 (2010), pp. 362–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar passim.
16 ‘Burma crime statistics circulated by K. B. Harper, delegate to Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform, 23–30 January 1934’, IOR M/1/88.
17 Report on the police administration of Burma (RPAB) 1927, p. 33.
18 RPAB 1935, p. 28.
19 RPAB 1921, p. 19.
20 Wiener, An empire on trial, p. 2.
21 For a major study, see Kolsky, Elizabeth, Colonial justice in British India: white violence and the rule of law (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar.
22 Quoted in Taw Sein Ko, Burmese sketches, II (Rangoon, 1920), p. 111.
23 RPAB 1919, p. 17.
24 Meena Radhakrishna, Dishonoured by history: ‘criminal tribes’ and British colonial policy (rev. edn, New Delhi, 2008), p. 37.
25 Report on the administration of Burma, 1918–19, p. 24.
26 RPAB 1932, p. 44.
27 RPAB 1936, p. 50.
28 Brown, R. G., Burma as I saw it, 1889–1917, with a chapter on recent events (London, 1926), p. 86Google Scholar.
29 H. Fielding-Hall, The passing of empire (London, 1913), p. 105. The emphasis is in the original.
30 RPAB 1918, p. 8.
31 RPAB 1921, p. 28.
32 RPAB 1925, p. 21.
33 RPAB 1926, p. 64.
34 For example, RPAB 1912, p. 19.
35 Cheng Siok-Hwa, The rice industry of Burma, 1852–1940 (Kuala Lumpur, 1968), pp. 201, 25.
36 Furnivall, J. S., Colonial policy and practice: a comparative study of Burma and Netherlands India (Cambridge, 1948), p. 105Google Scholar. Furnivall's views on colonial Burma's social and economic order were strongly influenced by his Fabian socialist beliefs: Pham, Julie, ‘J. S. Furnivall and Fabianism: reinterpreting the “plural society” in Burma’, Modern Asian Studies, 39 (2005), pp. 321–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
37 RPAB 1926, p. 26.
38 RPAB 1921, p. 16.
39 RPAB 1921, Res., pp. 3–4.
40 Kolsky, Colonial justice in British India, p. 24. For a fine study of perjury in the courts of British India in the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, and of government attempts to curb it, see Schneider, Engines of truth, ch. 3.
41 Lauren Benton, Law and colonial cultures: legal regimes in world history, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 130 n. 3.
42 Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p. 188.
43 Fielding-Hall, The passing of empire, p. 91.
44 Ibid., pp. 269, 86. Fielding-Hall's language here reflected an age-old resentment on the part of the colonial official towards the silver-tongued lawyer who, it was felt, stood in the way of the truth, justice, and order they sought to secure.
45 Ibid., p. 91.
46 Schneider, Engines of truth, p. 139.
47 Jonathan Saha, Law, disorder and the colonial state: corruption in Burma c. 1900 (Houndmills, 2013).
48 John D. Rogers, Crime, justice and society in colonial Sri Lanka (London, 1987), p. 41.
49 Ibid., p. 244.
50 Kumar, Radha, ‘Policing everyday life: the FIR in the Tamil countryside, c. 1900–1950’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 54 (2017), p. 362CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
51 Kolsky, Colonial justice in British India, p. 2.
52 Schneider, Engines of truth, p. 106. Much the same argument was made by McBride, Mr. Mothercountry, p. 18: ‘If the rule of law failed to prevent criminality by the native population, it demonstrated the lawlessness inherent in the indigenous culture, [thereby] underscoring the need for outsiders to import the principle.’
53 RPAB 1924, p. 13.
54 Report of the Crime Enquiry Committee, 1923 (Maymyo, 1923), p. 16.
55 Figures from the annual Report on the administration of Burma, various years from 1920–1. See also Lalita Hingkanonta Hanwong, Policing in colonial Burma (Chiang Mai, 2015), p. 19.
56 The description of Rangoon at the beginning of the 1850s, as it came under British rule following the second Anglo-Burmese war, is from a speech by Edward, prince of Wales, on a visit to Burma in 1922, cited in Donald M. Seekins, State and society in modern Rangoon (London, 2011), p. 28.
57 Reprinted in Peter Davison, ed., Orwell and politics (London, 2001), p. 18.
58 Michael Carritt, A mole in the crown: memoires of a British official in India who worked with the communist underground in the 1930s (Hove, 1985).
59 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London, 1992), p. 47.
60 A. J. S. White, The Burma of ‘AJ’: memoirs of A. J. S. White (London, 1991), p. 216.
61 Papers of Sir John Clague, Autobiographical fragments, p. 15, IOR Mss Eur E252/72.
62 Jeffrey A. Auerbach, Imperial boredom: monotony and the British empire (Oxford, 2018), p. 188.
63 Jon Wilson, India conquered: Britain's Raj and the chaos of empire (London, 2016), p. 498.
64 Robert Mole, The temple bells are calling: a personal record of the last years of British rule in Burma (Bishop Auckland, 2001), p. 281.
65 Ibid., pp. 283, 284.
66 C. J. Richards, ‘Burma 1921–1947: random recollections of a district officer’, IOR Mss Eur F.180/40.
67 White, The Burma of ‘AJ’, p. 216.
68 Papers of Sir John Clague, Autobiographical fragments, p. 15.
69 Typed paper, no title, author, or date, 6 pp. included in Papers of Sir John Clague, General notes on Burma and India, IOR Mss Eur E252/60.
70 Martin Thomas, Violence and colonial order: police, workers and protest in the European colonial empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge, 2012), p. 32.
71 ‘Extract from home secretary's letter for 1st half of December 1940, dated 23 December 1940’, IOR M/3/419.
72 R. N. Gilchrist, ‘Mr McDougall's letter of 18 December 1940’, 23 Apr. 1941, IOR M/3/419.
73 Major studies of the rebellion include James C. Scott, The moral economy of the peasant: rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT, 1976); Michael Adas, Prophets of rebellion: millenarian protest movements against the European colonial order (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979); and Maitrii Aung-Thwin, The return of the Galon king: history, law, and rebellion in colonial Burma (Athens, OH, 2011).
74 Ian Brown, A colonial economy in crisis: Burma's rice cultivators and the world depression of the 1930s (Abingdon, 2005).
75 Furnivall, Colonial policy and practice, p. 116. The Chettyar (or Chettiar) is a Tamil caste, heavily involved in moneylending. Native in Tamil Nadu, India, they had a major presence in colonial Burma.
76 Cady, A history of modern Burma, p. 305.
77 Ibid., pp. 387–8.
78 ‘Minute dated the 14th December 1940 by his excellency the governor’, IOR M/3/419.
79 Potter, D. C., ‘Manpower shortage and the end of colonialism: the case of the Indian Civil Service’, Modern Asian Studies, 7 (1973), p. 72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
80 Ibid., p. 48. The emphasis is in the original.
81 Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian attitudes: the mind of the Indian Civil Service (London, 1993), p. viii. For a detailed account of the declining authority of the European ICS official in these years, see Philip Woodruff, The men who ruled India: the guardians (London, 1954), pt II, ‘The demission of power’.
82 James Chancellor de Vine papers, IOR Mss Eur F246.
83 Zachariah, Benjamin, ‘Rewriting imperial mythologies: the strange case of Penderel Moon’, South Asia, 21 (2001), p. 53Google Scholar.
84 Ibid., p. 69.
85 Penderel Moon, Strangers in India (London, 1944), p. 62.
