Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-9q27g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-22T14:24:53.031Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The British “Pacification” of Burma: Order Without Meaning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2011

Michael Aung-Thwin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

One of the most frequently made remarks concerning British colonialism, both in print and in informal settings, has been the British role in bringing “law and order” to the colonies. Although serious scholarship has successfully questioned this assertion for some areas of the world, particularly India, for Burma, very little has been done. The reasons for proposing that Britain brought law, and especially order to Burma seem to stem from at least two factors. First, the study of Burmese law in the West is at best in its infancy, despite recent efforts by Burmese historians. Second, and more importantly, historians by and large have tended to ignore Burmese criteria for defining order, and have therefore misinterpreted as simple lawlessness what were on many important occasions traditional forms of expressing dissent and symptoms of social dysfunction, as well as cultural and psychological ambivalence of identity, especially amongst certain new classes created by colonialism itself. Thus what often appeared on the surface as order after so-called “pacification” and in general throughout the colonial period is an incomplete picture, for it was almost certainly as well, if not more so, the political, military, and psychological inability of the Burmese to present a united front against a technologically superior power. But because the entire colonial period cannot be dealt with here—although I suspect it would only further support the major thesis of this essay—and because the British concept of “pacification” (and as a result the literature on the subject) had established the intellectual framework and parameters for evaluating the subsequent colonial and post-independence periods, I feel it is adequate to have centered my arguments around the so-called period of “pacification” only. I intend to approach this topic by first describing briefly what we might call indigenous methods of pacification, contrast it to the general pacification policies and methods pursued by the British, observe the significance of the differences, and then conclude by showing how the coup of 1962 could be interpreted more as a resurrection than a true revolution.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , September 1985 , pp. 245 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1985

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For example, see Spear, Percival, India: A Modern History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), p. 452.Google Scholar

2 Dr Aye Kyaw, presently teaching Burmese at Cornell, has been preparing his manuscript for publication on a comparison of Burmese and Thai legal systems and codes. Access to his published works in Burma however remains difficult.

3 Burmese refers to the national group; Burman, to the ethnic.

4 Ness, Gayle D., Bureaucracy and Rural Development in Malaysia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), Chapter II.Google Scholar Though Ness deals specifically with Malaysia, his model of a dependent society under colonial rule is extremely applicable to Burma.

5 Sir Crosthwaite, Charles, The Pacification of Burma (London: Edward Arnold, 1912).Google Scholar See also Woodman, Dorothy, The Making of Burma (London: The Cresset Press, 1962),Google Scholar Part Four. She argued however that pacification was not achieved until the first decade of the 20th century when the last “rebel” leaders of the Chins were captured or killed.

6 For a variety of reasons, I'm referring to the core of Burma's political, economic, and cultural area, namely Upper Burma and the Irrawaddy River Valley. Lower Burma was annexed earlier, but the problem of pacification and meaning poses little or no problem in an area considered the fringes of Burmese society and is largely irrelevant to the issues addressed here.

7 Crosthwaite, ibid., pp. 2,13,14,104.

8 Alaungmin Taya Ameindaw Mya [The Royal Edicts of Alaungmin Taya] (Rangoon: Burma Historical Commission, 1964), pp. 219–20.Google Scholar

9 For the Pagan period, see Aung-Thwin, Michael, Pagan: The Origins of Modern Burma (Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1985).Google Scholar For the Toungoo Period, see Lieberman, Victor, Burmese Administrative Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest, c. 1580–1760 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For accounts in Burmese, see the standard chronicles, particularly Konbaungset Mahayazawindawgyi [The Great Royal Chronicle of the Konbaung Dynasty], ed. Tin, U Maung Maung, 3 vols. (Rangoon: Latimantaing Press, 1968).Google Scholar Other types of indigenous sources include such works as Zambudipa Oksaung-kyan, ed. Tin, Pe Maung and Furnivall, J. S. (Rangoon: Burma Research Society, 1960).Google Scholar

10 For work on the Shans, Sao Saimong Mangrai is virtually the only person who has published in English. See his The Shan States and the Annexation of Burma, Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, Data Paper no. 57 (1965) and his more recent The Padaeng Chronicle and the Jengtung State Chronicle Translated, Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia, no. 19, The University of Michigan (1981).

11 For a detailed account of the period 1885–86, see Kyan, Daw, Myanma Naingnan Akhye Ane 1885–86 [Situation in Burma 1885–86] (Rangoon: Sapebiman Press, 1973).Google Scholar For a longer period of British rule from the Burmese perspective, see also Myint, Ni Ni, Burma's Struggle against British Imperialism, 1885–1895 (Rangoon: The University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

12 Crosthwaite, p. 14.

13 ibid., p. 15.

14 Military Operations in Burma, 1890–1892: Letters from Lieutenant J. K. Watson, K.R.R.C, ed. Pearn, B. R., Cornell Data Paper, no. 64 (February, 1967), p. vii.Google Scholar

15 Crosthwaite, p. 14.

16 ibid., p. 15.

17 ibid., p. 31.

18 ibid., p. 32.

19 ibid., p. 33.

20 ibid., p. 88.

21 ibid., p. 148.

22 Woodman, p. 335.

23 Crosthwaite, p. 216.

24 ibid., p. 202.

25 ibid., p. 306.

26 Our analysis omits the attempts by the British to implement certain aspects dealing with cultural pacification in the 1920s and 1930s. But the indigenous history of that period suggests that those attempts were made not in the interests of the majority of Burmese society, and were therefore ultimately unsuccessful. See for example, Fumivall, J. S., An Introduction to the Political Economy of Burma, 3rd ed. (Rangoon: People's Literature Committee and House, 1957)Google Scholar; and also his Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (New York: New York University Press, 1956), pp. 85–98, and passim.Google Scholar

27 Kala, U, Mahayazawindawgyi [The Great Royal Chronicle], vol. II (Rangoon: Hanthawaddy Press, 1960), pp. 304–309.Google Scholar

28 Reynolds, Frank E. and Clifford, Regina T., “Sangha, Society and the Struggle for National Integration: Burma and Thailand”, in Transitions and Transformations in the History ofReligions, ed. Reynolds, Frank E. and Ludwig, Theodore M. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980), pp. 56–88.Google Scholar

29 Harvey, G. E., British Rule in Burma, 1824–1924 (London, 1946), p. 27.Google Scholar

30 Aung-Thwin, Michael, “Jambudipa: Classical Burma's Camelot”, Contributions to Asian Studies XVI (1981): 38–61.Google Scholar

31 Thus argues Wiant, Jon, in his “Tradition in the Service of Revolution: The Political Symbolism of Taw Hlan Ye Khit”, Military Rule in Burma Since 1962: A Kaleidoscope of Views, ed. Lehman, F.K. (Singapore: Maruzen Asia, 1981).Google Scholar The same views are expressed in his forthcoming dissertation “Lanzin: Ideology and Organization in Revolutionary Burma”, Cornell University, to which I owe virtually everything on the Ne Win regime.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Aung-Thwin, Michael, “Divinity, Spirit, and Human: Conceptions of Burmese Kingship”, in Centers, Symbols, and Hierarchies: Essays on the Classical States of Southeast Asia, ed. Gesick, Lorraine, Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, Monograph Series no. 26 (New Haven, Conn., 1983), pp. 45–86.Google Scholar

35 Wiant, loc. cit.

36 Wiant, loc. cit.

37 Incidentally, the Buddha of the future, Metteya, is the fifth and last Buddha of this kappa.

38 Aung-Thwin, Michael, “Hierarchy and Order in Pre-Colonial Burma”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies XV, no. 2 (1984): 224–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 TaylorM, Robert H., “Perceptions of Ethnicity in the Politics of Burma”, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 10, no. 1 (1982): 7–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Lieberman, Victor, “Ethnic Politics in Eighteenth-Century Burma”, Modern Asian Studies 12, no. 3 (1978): 455–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The original article which stimulated all of this is probably Lehman, F. K., “Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of Social Systems”, in Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities and Nations, ed. Kunstader, Peter, vol. I (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 93–124.Google Scholar

41 Aung-Thwin, Michael, “The Role of Sasana Reform in Burmese History: Economic Dimensions of a Religious Purification”, Journal of Asian Studies 38, no. 4 (1979): 671–88.Google Scholar