British Burma in the New Century, 1895–1918

Stephen L Keck

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137364333
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

British Burma in the New Century draws upon neglected but talented colonial authors to portray Burma between 1895 and 1918, which was the apogee of British governance. These writers, most of them 'Burmaphiles' wrote against widespread misperceptions about Burma.

1

Introduction

Given its place in the Indian Ocean and in the history of the empire, the need for the recovery of British Burma is surprising. This subject has not really been studied systematically or comprehensively by either students devoted to the study of modern Burmese history or those whose focus is the British empire.¹ In fact, what studies do exist are scattered, and in recent years the literature on the subject appears to have been dominated by regional and country specialists.² Evidence of British presence in Myanmar abounds, even if some scholars would prefer not to see it.³ Nonetheless, it has been regional and national scholars who have laboured to make Burma’s key historical trajectories comprehensible. Yet they have almost exclusively done so without more than a passing reference to ways in which the country’s history fit into the broader themes of British and imperial history. It might be noted that the tendency of regional specialists to ignore the broader themes of imperial history is not confined to students of Southeast Asia or the British empire.⁴

British rule in Burma played a decisive role in the development of the modern Myanmar nation. Because the history of 20^th century Myanmar is defined partly as an effort to escape from under the many features of British colonialism, this legacy may be grudgingly conceded by some scholars, who prefer to credit local actors with greater agency. Nevertheless, it would be under colonial governance that so many features of contemporary Myanmar would become visible, and this inheritance remains relevant for the subsequent development of the country, making British Burma at least a critical feature in the prehistory of contemporary Myanmar. Furthermore, despite the fact that many regional and national historians have eschewed the study of colonial texts, the reality is that the richness and complexity of British thought about Burma has been underestimated. By focusing on the vibrant intellectual life of the British in Burma, this study aims to introduce students of empire, and scholars interested in the issues associated with postcolonialism, to a completely neglected subject.

British Burma in the New Century draws upon the work of both regional and national specialists and those who have studied the empire. This study defines its subject as ‘British Burma’ which requires some explanation: the term had once been used to refer to those parts of the country which had come after the First Anglo-Burmese (1824–1826) and Second Anglo-Burmese Wars (1852) respectively. However, it is deployed here more self-consciously as all of Burma (today Myanmar) which after the Third Anglo-Burmese War (1885) was completely under colonial rule. British Burma was a place of many peoples, cultures and languages, but its governing culture was that of the British, with most of the sources in English. Hence, this study focuses on the Burma which is available through those sources, while the use of the term ‘British Burma’ begins with the acknowledgement that many voices were simply not heard by colonial authorities. In other words, Britain’s Burma was not necessarily or fairly ‘Burma’. Nonetheless, to tell Myanmar’s story without recognizing the crucial period of history defined by British rule, is probably unsound and unwise. The goal is to make a contribution to the growing literature about both Myanmar and the study of empire itself. Ideally, scholars interested in the history of South and Southeast Asia (including Myanmar) will benefit from the broader contextualization of the country’s history; at the same time, it should be possible for students of British imperialism to benefit from a study which is grounded in the work of regional and national specialists.

This study presents a portrait of colonial Burma between 1895 and 1918 in order to help stimulate academic exploration of this subject in the detail that it deserves. Admittedly, these dates may appear to be arbitrary, as neither would be regarded as a significant date for Burma by itself. Instead, they have been chosen in order to focus on what takes place between them.⁵ Burma witnessed the consolidation of its borders, the expansion of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, substantial immigration from India, growing pressure (applied by Burmese and many colonial officials) to disconnect Burma from India, and after 1905 the presence of bubonic plague. Michael W. Charney observed that the period of British rule from the Third Anglo-Burmese War to independence ‘was remarkably short’ but if ‘the colonial period was somewhat of a “temporary success” it proved to be “severe in its consequences”’.⁶ New century Burma was when some of the key realities of colonization became fully manifest. More important, this veritable generation proved to be a discrete period in Burmese history because it was the epitome of ‘high colonialism’ throughout Burma during which the deployment of colonial institutions became fully established, while the groundwork was developed for much of the resistance that followed.

With British power neatly configured after the completion of the ‘pacification,’ the cultural challenges associated with colonial rule became evident. Ni Ni Myint, one of Myanmar’s most distinguished historians, has argued that it was a challenging moment for Burman society because it experienced the impact of many forms of Western ideas creating a ‘cultural clash’ in which ‘traditional Myanma’ society was simply overtaken by events.⁷ The year 1895 appears to be the date at which the Burmans began to create the ‘education, religious and socio-political associations’ which would prepare the way for the establishment of the YMBA (Young Men’s Buddhist Association) in 1906. The year 1895 was the beginning of this ‘renaissance’ which would lay the ground work for the emergence of Burmese nationalism.⁸ U Ottama (1879–1939), an important early nationalist who traveled extensively in Asia during the first two decades of the 20^th century, returned to Burma in 1918. More conveniently, 1918 witnessed the end of the First World War and with it the beginning of a new set of challenges for both Burma and the British empire. Furthermore, events subsequent to the cessation of hostilities in other parts of the world were accompanied by an increase in challenges to colonial governance in Burma. The ‘shoe controversy’ and the student strike at Rangoon University the following year quickly showed that British rule would be repeatedly challenged.⁹ These protests (and others) took place after 1918, but their roots almost certainly lay in the patterns of British rule that became manifest over all of Burma after 1885.

In essence, this study aims to highlight and introduce ‘British Burma’ as a subject of academic investigation during the high-water mark or apogee of British colonialism. Investigating Burma in this 20-odd-year period also has the advantage of focusing on the country both after the pacification was deemed to be complete, and prior to the increasingly robust anti-colonial nationalism which was fully evident in the 1920s. British Burma in the New Century is the first to delineate this moment as a relatively discrete historical entity. Obviously, the period between the completion of the pacification and the end of ‘the European War’ as Taw Sein Ko, arguably colonial Burma’s preeminent intellectual, called it, had many continuities with both the earlier periods of British rule and subsequent historical experience. Yet it was in new century Burma that colonial rule reached its most developed expression and, possibly as a consequence, it would be almost immediately after that a new generation of Burmese would rise up to decisively confront it.

By the beginning of the 20th century—if not before—Burma had become an important province of the Indian empire. To anticipate, Burma played an important, possibly vital role in the Indian Ocean economy, producing rice, oil, teak and minerals, while helping to support the eastern flank of the Indian empire. Although the scholarly exploration of new century Burma will be hardly be exhausted by a single monograph or longer study, this project highlights the writings of a number of Britons who lived in and traveled to Burma in order to introduce the subject. Ideally, it will be something of a beginning as it aims to open the study of British Burma to more sustained research.

Sources

Surviving sources are the key to depicting British Burma. The vast collection of materials housed in the India Office of the British Library provide archival support to the analysis of colonial authors and secondary sources. This study draws upon these materials and the writings of many British men and women who tried to make sense of the country. British writing about Burma is more extensive than has been realized; an intellectual history of the subject alone might well require three volumes. For our purposes here, the writers who engaged Burma are interesting not only for what they had to say about the country, but also for the presuppositions and biases which they brought to the subject. Accordingly, they are more than suitable ‘postcolonial’ subjects, because their knowledge and understanding of what they wrote about was often purchased by years of experience in the country. Like the materials in the India Office, the works published by these authors bore the stamp of colonial knowledge-making. It is certainly possible to quarrel with the veracity of the information which was often produced by colonial authorities. This study relies upon the British translations of Burmese terms and places (e.g., ‘Rangoon’ will be used rather than ‘Yangon’). Burmese terms are retained where their deployment will not keep the reader from understanding the discussion.

Recontextualizing ‘colonial knowledge’: the Victorian inheritance

It might be remembered that the production of knowledge was itself aggressively and successfully attacked in Victorian Britain. Thomas Carlyle had his doubts, Charles Dickens satirized it, and John Ruskin challenged the very production of 19^th century discourses. In addition, British intellectuals not only were critical of the changes that dominated their society (i.e., industrialism and modernity), but also looked askance at the acceptance and affirmation with which the vast number of Britons seemed to engage societal transformation. These writers challenged not only many of the tenets of modernization, but the discourses associated with it. The critique of colonial knowledge, then, actually builds upon one of the intellectual preoccupations of Victorian Britain.

However, it bears noting that it would be the British colonizers who would be the first to compile significant information—however imperfectly—about Burma and its peoples. The precedents for many of these enterprises were set first in Britain, where a sustained fascination existed regarding the living conditions of the country’s population. If Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley (and many other writers—including Benjamin Disraeli) portrayed the impact of social change on society in fiction, then it must be added that the efforts to describe these transformations in non-fictive terms may have been as significant. Writers such as Henry Mayhew (1812–1887) in his London Labour and the London Poor (1861), the work of the Sadler Report (1831–1832) and Charles Booth (1840–1916) with his monumental study Life and Labour of the People in London (1891–1903) all reported on social conditions in great detail.

British thought in the 19^th century can boast many achievements—libertarian thought, conceptions of evolution, scientific developments and social criticism to name a few areas—but for our purposes it is useful to highlight the importance of the ways in which the value and practice of description provided a foundation for so many of these efforts. The ‘descriptive world’ (probably because it is disliked by scholars whose habits and interests reflect the development of subsequent information regimes) is an underestimated series of achievements, but in the 19^th century, these discursive acts were a fundamental means to collect and disseminate information. The range of subjects was expansive, including landscapes, natural phenomena, daily life, industrial conditions, the appearances of men and women, city scenes and virtually every imaginable kind of human or natural subject. As a consequence of the realities of this ‘description regime’ the attempts to understand Burma followed this pattern. To anticipate, the habit of mind which accompanied the description regime involved not only learning to describe or record what had been seen, but also the importance of making it visible in itself. In other words, to the Victorians the appearances mattered.

Another trend worthy of note concerns the reliance upon producing evidence. The collection of information was a stereotype of many facets of official Victorianism. The rise of a kind ‘evidentiary positivism’, in which a deep faith in factual information was the basis for knowing about the natural world, human history, science and virtually every other subject, was a frequent target not only for Dickens but for Ruskin as well. These Victorians were well aware that the information collected in search for policy-making was flawed, but it could not be said that it was rejected out of hand. It might be added that the connections between the acquisition of factual knowledge and governance had proven to be durable. As Mary Poovey has observed, by the 18^th century the practices of liberal government ‘encouraged private citizens and voluntary societies to initiate all kinds of knowledge-making projects’ and the type of knowledge which these efforts produced was regarded as supporting the state.¹⁰ Not surprisingly, then, the habits of mind associated with collecting, describing, counting, classifying and evaluating ensured that the commitment to empiricism was quite healthy in 19^th century Britain. With respect to Burma, it meant that the colonial state, particularly in the wake of the three Anglo-Burmese Wars, was relatively quick to take inventory of its new possessions.¹¹

In addition to the basic organization of mind which characterized the 19^th century, the British men and women who engaged Burma did so with a number of habits or concerns. That is, their engagement with Burma, however well intentioned, was subject to many biases, not least of which were priorities associated with the Victorian age. These included domesticity, individualism, character, productivity, social class and religious belief. Many of these concerns were formulated in Britain, but they carried with them hierarchies (such as race and gender) associated with imperialism. It might be well to point out that industrial expansion, the rapid growth of population, new modalities of mobility and many other changes had all helped to produce a society whose actors were increasingly proficient at sorting. British writing about Burma (and other parts of the empire) was shaped by these habits of mind. The variability of British knowledge about Burma is one of the key facets of this body of work.

British writing about Burma

British Burma in the New Century draws upon a number of key imperial authors who sought to explain the country to both colonial and metropolitan audiences. These figures were hardly hostile to British colonialism, but they challenged many of the discourses which accompanied it. Above all, British writing about Burma certainly contained a number of discursive structures which could be associated with ‘orientalism’ or ‘imperialism’, but it was not homogenous. Furthermore, when these authors laboured, other parts of Asia—particularly India, China and Japan—were much better known to Western and possibly even Asian audiences than was Burma (and other countries in Southeast Asia).¹² That said, all of these writers shared an insistence upon the importance of seeing and understanding a ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ Burma.

Seeing the ‘real Burma’: the structured gaze

In Colonial Policy and Practice John Furnivall discussed the plural society which he believed characterized much of colonial Southeast Asia. Furnivall asserted that Europeans in these areas lived a kind of dual life:

the incompleteness of individual life and social life is most readily apparent . . . The European works in the tropics, but does not live there. His life in the tropics centres around his business, and he looks at social problems, political...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Locating Burma
• 3 Governing Burma
• 4 Interpreting the End of Traditional Burma
• 5 Translating Buddhism
• 6 The City and the Country
• 7 Engaging Ethnicity
• 8 Dacoits and Dissent
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index