After the first Anglo-Burmese war in 1826 two former provinces of the Burmese Empire, Arakan and Tenasserim, were governed by British commissioners. The two provinces developed distinctly different forms of government. In Arakan colonial policy paid little deference to traditional Arakanese or Burmese institutions; rather, it reflected more strongly the influence of neighboring Bengal. In Tenasserim the British built on existing forms of government, using indigenous leadership and codifying local law. In 1862 Arakan and Tenasserim were united with the rest of Lower Burma to form the province of British Burma. The administrative layout in theory conformed to the Indian model, but in practice tended to conform to Burmese traditional methods. The mode of government used by the British during this period was not unlike the Dutch system in Java, in which indirect rule prevailed.

In Upper Burma, which remained under Burmese rule until the third Anglo-Burmese war of 1885, the economy became dangerously dependent on the export of mainly cotton and teak. In the teak industry elaborate contracts and concessions were developed over time and honored to such a degree as to warrant substantial investments on the part of British-Indian trading houses. At the same time, in other fields royal monopolies often excluded independent merchants. Rice however had to be imported in ever-larger quantities, which drained Upper Burma of cash. The world depression of the 1870s led to a dramatic decline in prices and plunged the Burmese state into economic hardship and fiscal collapse.

Under British rule Lower Burma developed into an export-oriented economy depending almost totally on rice production. Lower Burma’s rice exports helped make up for food shortages in other parts of the empire. In this sense the colonial state in Burma developed within the context of a larger set of imperial, economic, political, and strategic interests.

Immediately at the end of the third Anglo-Burmese war, with the last Burmese king in exile, several important decisions were taken by the colonial power, which would dramatically change the way Burma was governed. A first attempt to govern through the old royal council, the Hlutdaw, failed. The reforms the British subsequently introduced meant nothing less than a complete dismantling of existing institutions of political authority. They resulted in the undermining of many established structures of social organization. In contrast to India the British decided that Burma would be governed directly, without making use of local elites. The monarchy, the nobility, and the army all disappeared. In the countryside local ruling families lost their positions. The existing political framework vanished. Only in outlying areas like the Shan states did the British use local intermediaries in government. In the heartland of the old Burmese empire, the Irrawaddy Valley, the colonial rulers imposed bureaucratic control right down to the village level. A wholly new framework of government rapidly supplanted existing institutions.

From the late nineteenth century onward village headmen were frequent targets of peasant uprisings, indicating how much they were perceived as tools of the colonial administration. At the same time the colonial power failed to adopt the symbols and roles that had legitimized precolonial rulers. The precolonial state had relied for the maintenance of order and security on its intimate involvement with the symbolic and spiritual life of society. The colonial state viewed its role very differently. The British administrators were not only foreigners, their idea of government presumed a marked distinction between the public and private spheres of life. British rule in effect destroyed the Burmese cosmological order and signified for the Burmese the end of a Buddhist World Age. This produced armed resistance in which Buddhist monks played a significant part. Burmese monks fanned rural rebellion, notably during the economic depression of the 1930s. The main causes of rural unrest and rebellions in the 1930s were taxes, usury, and depressed rice prices.

At the end of World War II, Burma was equipped with social and political institutions established only at the beginning of the twentieth century and without roots in local society. Apart from Buddhism, it would be difficult to define a supra-local institution that survived from precolonial times. As for the colonial administration, it had been shattered by the Japanese during the war years. Burma thus faced at independence in 1948 a weak institutional legacy, a vacuum that would be soon filled by the army.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Desai, Walter Sadgun. History of the British Residency in Burma. London: Gregg International, 1968. Harvey, Godfrey. British Rule in Burma 1824–1942. London: Ams Pr., 1992.

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From the end of the eighteenth century the Burmese king Bodawpaya (r. 1782–1817), steadily expanded his realm westward. At the same time the British gained territorial control over Bengal and elsewhere in India. In 1784 Bodawpaya attacked and annexed the kingdom of Arakan on the coast of the Bay of Bengal and brought his frontier to what would become British India. Arakanese rebels operating from within British territory created a tense situation on the Anglo-Burmese border, resulting in frequent border clashes. The Burmese threatened invasion if the British failed to stop rebel incursions from their territory.

From the late eighteenth century the kingdom of Assam to the North of British Bengal was in decline. The kingdom covered the Brahmaputra valley from the Himalayas to the entry of the river into the plains of Bengal. Rival groups at the Assamese court turned both to the British and the Burmese for assistance, leading to a British expedition in 1792. In 1817 turmoil at the Assamese court led to another request for assistance and this time Bodawpaya sent an invading army. The Assamese were defeated and a pro-Burmese premier was installed.

Two decades earlier Bodawpaya had invaded Manipur, a kingdom set in a small valley to the west of the Chindwin River, and installed a puppet prince. In 1819 the Manipur Prince asserted his autonomy from the Burmese court by not attending the coronation of Bagyidaw, Bodawpaya’s successor. The Burmese invaded again and stationed a permanent garrison in Manipur. Manipur would now form a base from which further Burmese military expeditions into Assam would be conducted. In 1821, following years of local unrest, Bagyidaw sent general Mahabanula with a 20,000-person-strong army across the mountains to consolidate Burmese rule in Assam. In 1823, with Assamese resistance largely broken, Mahabandula set up his base at Rangpur and began his attacks on Cachar and Jaintia. The British in turn declared Cachar and Jaintia a protectorate. British Bengal was now hemmed in on its northern and eastern borders by the Burmese Empire.

In January 1824 Mahabandula assumed command in Arakan and started on a campaign against Chittagong with the ultimate goal to capture Bengal. In response, on March 5, 1824, the British declared war on Burma from their headquarters at Fort William in Calcutta. The British plan was to draw away Mahabandula’s forces from the Bengal frontier by performing a large-scale sea-borne invasion of Lower Burma. The attack on Rangoon, lead by Sir Archibald Campbell, completely surprised the Burmese and the city was taken on May 10, 1824 without any loss to the invaders. The news of the fall of Rangoon forced Mahabandula to a quick retreat. The British force in Rangoon had meanwhile been unable to proceed upcountry because it did not have adequate river transports. After having been resupplied after the monsoon Campbell continued the operations and in 1825 at the battle of Danubyu Mahabandula was killed and the same year Arakan, Lower Burma, and Tenasserim were conquered.

After a second battle the way to the Burmese capital, Amarapura, lay wide open. Campbell now possessed adequate river transport and rapid progress was made up the Irrawaddy. British peace terms were so staggering that not until the British army arrived at Yandabo, a few days’ march from the Burmese capital, did the Burmese accept the terms. After the peace of Yandabo the Burmese had ceded to the British Arakan, Tenasserim, Assam, and Manipur. An indemnity in rupees, equal to 1 million pound sterling, was paid to guarantee removal of British troops from Lower Burma.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Hall, D.G.E. A History of South-east Asia, 4th rev. ed. London: Macmillan, 1981. Pollak, Oliver B. Empires in Collision: Anglo-Burmese Relations in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979. Wilson, Horace Hayman. Narrative of the Burmese War, in 1824- 25. London: W.H. Allen and Co., 1852.


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