Which country colonized burma

Following the recent troubles in India, we have asked our contributor, Mr E. Blair, who lived in Burma for some years, has written the following interesting article for us[1], which shows the methods the British Empire uses to milk dry her Asian colonies. It is three times the size of England and Wales, with a population of about fourteen million, of whom roughly nine million are Burmese.

The rest is made up of countless Mongol tribes who have emigrated at various periods from the steppes of Central Asia, and Indians who have arrived since the English occupation.

To be able to talk in their own language to the people of such diverse origins living in Burma, you would need to know a hundred and twenty different languages and dialects. This country, the population of which is one-tenth as dense as that of England, is one of the richest in the world.

It abounds in natural resources which are only just beginning to be exploited. But the greatest source of wealth-and that which feeds between eighty and ninety per cent of the population-is the paddy fields. Rice is grown everywhere in the basin of the Irawaddy, which flows through Burma from north to south. In the south, in the huge delta where the Irawaddy brings down tons of alluvial mud every year, the soil is immensely fertile.

The harvests, which are remarkable in both quality and quantity, enable Burma to export rice to India, Europe, even to America. Thanks to abundant rainfall, especially in the south, drought is unknown, and the heat is never excessive.

The climate as a whole can thus be considered one of the healthiest to be found in the tropics. In they seized a vast expanse of territory. This operation was repeated in , and finally in the Union Jack flew over almost all the country.

In this article I do not seek to praise or blame this manifestation of British imperialism; let us simply note it is a logical result of any imperialist policy. It will be much more profitable to examine the good and bad sides of British administration in Burma from an economic and a political standpoint.

The government of all the Indian provinces under the control of the British Empire is of necessity despotic, because only the threat of force can subdue a population of several million subjects. In other words, supreme power remains with the British authorities, but the minor civil servants who have to carry out day-to-day administration and who must come into contact with the people in the course of their duties are recruited locally.

In Burma, for example, the lower grade magistrates, all policemen up to the rank of inspector, members of the postal service, government employees, village elders etc. Recently, to appease public opinion and put a stop to nationalist agitation which was beginning to cause concern, it was even decided to accept the candidature of educated natives for several important posts. Thirdly, it is to their own advantage to show their loyalty to a government which provides their livelihood.

And so peace is maintained by ensuring the close collaboration of the educated or semi-educated classes, where discontent might otherwise produce rebel leaders. Nevertheless the British control the country. Of course, Burma, like each of the Indian provinces, has a parliament-always the show of democracy-but in reality its parliament has very little power. Nothing of any consequence lies within its jurisdiction. Most of the members are puppets of the government, which is not above using them to nip in the bud any Bill which seems untimely.

In addition, each province has a Governor, appointed by the English, who has at his disposal a veto just as absolute as that of the President of the United States to oppose any proposal which displeases him. Yet although the British government is, as we have shown, essentially despotic, it is by no means unpopular. The British did, on occasion, work with the Sangha when it suited their needs, and Buddhists responded to these encounters in various ways depending on their region and social class.

However, the Sangha saw rapid decline and fragmentation during the colonial period, especially after , when the British neglected the traditional duty of the ruler of Myanmar to appoint a new leader of the Sangha thathanabain. On the other hand, ethnic minority communities benefited from British rule, and foreigners flooded the major cities in pursuit of opportunities under the Pax Britannica—a systematized, hegemonic international legal and maritime control system regulating trade across the empire.

The British also oversaw the immigration of thousands of predominantly Muslim Bengali Indians as cheap labor to support the expansion of the colonial economic infrastructure. Nationalism therefore developed in keeping with specific ethnic Burman vs. The economic competition between Burmans and Indians lent a class dimension to anti-Muslim and anti-Bengali narratives that continue to resonate today.

Christian missionaries also came to Burma throughout the colonial period. While conversion to Christianity was rare among Burmans for whom Buddhism was an intrinsic aspect of their identity, ethnic minorities such as the Chin and Kachin were receptive to British and American missionary efforts. Among the Kachin, missionary education helped to create a sense of shared identity across its various tribes, laying the groundwork for solidarity and armed resistance following independence. However, in order to prepare the new land for cultivation, farmers were forced to borrow money from Indian moneylenders called chettiars at high interest rates and were often foreclosed on and evicted losing land and livestock.

Most of the jobs also went to indentured Indian labourers, and whole villages became outlawed as they resorted to 'dacoity' armed robbery. While the Burmese economy grew, all the power and wealth remained in the hands of several British firms and migrants from India. The civil service was largely staffed by Anglo-Burmese and Indians, and Burmese were excluded almost entirely from military service, which was staffed primarily with Indians, Anglo-Burmese, Karens and other Burmese minority groups.

Though the country prospered, the Burmese people failed to reap the rewards. Burma was grafted onto India despite the incompatibility of India and the Burmese heartland, which lacked a "Burma lobby" to explain it in Britain.

Historians will add that we saw no harm in this, though we always resisted such a fate to the death when it threatened our own land. Certainly external strategic considerations, prompted by French expansionism in the region, played a part Certainly also there was a persistent commercial illusion of a practical trade route along which British goods might flow through Upper Burma to the imagined markets of Chinese Yunnan.

This excited the Chambers of Commerce and influenced the annexation. Here was one of the casualties of the nineteenth Century, knocked over by a momentum beyond its understanding.

By processes familiar to Imperial historians, static Burma and dynamic British India had become provocatively incompatible. When the irresistible force was applied, the object in its path was too fragile to survive. This dilemma has contributed to a national frame of mind well known today for its determined preference for non-involvement and a "Burmese Way" in politics.

It was not always so. In the eighteenth century it was not Burma's isolationism but her almost manic imperialism, ruthlessly asserted against her neighbours and in the end suicidally over-extended, that brought her up against the East India Company.

The three wars that ensued led by stages to the ultimate surrender in at Mandalay. Kipling's view of Burma was acquired in the aftermath of that surrender, and must be understood in the light of preceding historical events, today largely forgotten. Theebaw, deposed in , was the last of the Konbaungset dynasty of the Kingdom of Inwa, or Ava. The founder of the line, Alaungpaya, emerged in as a national resistance leader against the Mons to the south.

Within fifty years he and his successors had defeated and in many cases subjugated most of the adjacent peoples, creating in the process an expanded nation-state with frontiers resembling those of modern Burma but in the north-west more extensive.

It was an extraordinary explosion of military effort. The historian D. They had become a conquering race and feared no one on earth. For generations, British merchants, like their military and commercial rivals the French, had dealt with the Burmese; but this was peripheral trafficking by outsiders, only tolerated for their wares. Before the British colonisation the ruling Konbaung Dynasty practised a tightly centralised form of government.

The country had two codes of law, the Rajathat and Dammathat, and the Hluttaw, the center of government, was divided into three branches—fiscal, executive, and judicial. In theory the king was in charge of all of the Hluttaw but none of his orders got put into place until the Hluttaw approved them, thus checking his power. Further dividing the country, provinces were ruled by governors who were all appointed by the Hluttaw, and villages were ruled by hereditary headmen who were approved by the king.

The British controlled their new province through direct rule, making many changes to the previous governmental structure. The monarchy was abolished, King Thibaw sent into exile, and church and state separated. This was particularly harmful because the Buddhist monks were so dependent on the sponsorship of the monarchy. Another way in which the British controlled their new colony directly was through their implementation of a secular education system.

The colonial government of India, which was given control of the new colony, founded secular schools teaching in both English and Burmese, while also encouraging Christian missionaries to visit and found schools. In both of these types of schools, Buddhism and traditional Burmese culture were frowned upon in an attempt to rid the Burmese people of a cultural unity separate from the British.

Once these troublesome or unloyal Burmese were forced out, the British replaced them with strangers they approved of. If the British considered any Burmese to be criminals, they would act as both judge and jury, giving the Burmese no chance to a fair trial. Harvey wrote in his chapter on Burma in the Cambridge History of the British Empire: The real reason for imposing direct administration was that it was the fashion of the age, and modern standards of efficiency were the only standards intelligible to the men who entered Upper Burma.

Few of them spoke the language, and those who did, came with preconceptions gained in Lower Burma. Although Burma was the wealthiest country in Southeast Asia under British rule, as a colony it was seen very much as a backwater. Among its exports, the country produced 75 percent of the world's teak from up-country forests. When George Orwell arrived in Burma in , the Irrawaddy Delta was leading Burma's exports of over 3 million tons of rice - half the world's supply. The British ruthlessly exploited the countries resources and left little in return.

The country was very much shaken. The system in which the wealthy patronized the monasteries was broken. The British became the wealthy and elite class. Most Burmans provided labor for the Burmese export economy. The British also brought in lots of Indians to Burma to perform labor, serve as clerks and run businesses. Large Indian communities still remain in Yangon and Mandalay.

The traditional Burmese economy was one of redistribution with the prices of the most important commodities set by the state and supply and demand mostly unimportant. With the arrival of the British, the Burmese economy became tied to global market forces and was forced to become a part of the colonial export economy. The British immediately began exploiting the rich soil of the land around the Irawaddy delta and cleared away the dense mangrove forests.

Rice, which was in high demand in Europe, especially after the building of the Suez Canal in , was the main crop grown in and exported out of Myanmar. In order to increase the production of rice, many Burmese migrated from the northern heartland to the delta, shifting the population concentration, and changing the basis of wealth and power. Instead, the Indian moneylenders gave the mortgage loans out, but foreclosed them quickly as the rice prices and land costs soared.

At the same time, thousands of Indian labourers migrated to Burma and, because of their willingness to work for less money, quickly displaced the Burmese farmers, who instead began to take part in crime, giving themselves a bad reputation. With this quickly growing economy, came industrialisation to a certain degree, with a railway being built throughout the valley of the Irawaddy, and hundreds of steamboats travelling along it.

All of these mechanisms of transportation were owned by the British, however, and this meant that the Burmese had to pay higher rates to transport their goods to market. Thus, although the balance of trade was supposed to be in favour of Burma, the society was changed so fundamentally that many people did not gain from the rapidly growing economy.

When the British began their imperial take over of Burma, the colony was immediately thrown into a world of exportation in which they had not ever been exposed to before colonisation by the British. The peasant had grown factually poorer and unemployment had increased…. The collapse of the Burmese social system led to a decay of the social conscience which, in the circumstances of poverty and unemployment caused a great increase in crime.

Large numbers of Indians were brought in to work as civil servants, and Chinese were encouraged to immigrate and stimulate trade. The British built railways and ports, and many British companies grew wealthy trading in teak and rice.

Many Burmese were unhappy with the colonial status quo. A nationalist movement developed, and there were demonstrations, often led, in true Burmese fashion, by Buddhist monks. Two famous nationalist monks, U Ottama and U Wizaya, died in a British prison and are revered to this day.

Indian immigration to Burma was a nationwide phenomenon, not just restricted to Arakan—the region of Burma that bordered India. Historian Thant Myint-U writes: "At the beginning of the 20th century, Indians were arriving in Burma at the rate of no less than a quarter million per year.

The numbers rose steadily until the peak year of , immigration reached , people, with Rangoon exceeding New York City as the greatest immigration port in the world.

This was out of a total population of only 13 million; it was equivalent to the United Kingdom today taking 2 million people a year. The Burmese under the British rule felt helpless, and reacted with a "racism that combined feelings of superiority and fear. Under British rule, as a colony Burma was seen very much as a backwater. The image which the English people were meant to uphold in these communities was a huge burden and the majority of them carried expectations all the way from Britain with the intention of maintaining their customs and rule.

There were never really that many Britons in Burma. They were characterized by their English mother tongue, Christian religion, European lifestyle at home, Western clothes and employment in administration and service positions. The invention of the steam ship really opened up travel between Britain and Asia.

In his book Ornamentalism; How the British Saw Their Empire the historian David Cannadine said British empire had its roots in transplanting the British class system abroad not on racial pride and argues the whole thing was kind of as show.