Conclusion: Change and Continuity in the Social Economy of Rural Myanmar

Abstract

This chapter summarises the contents of the book. This book described the socio-economic history of Myanmar over a period of 33 years, beginning in 1986, at the end of the Burmese-style socialist regime, when I started my village studies; continuing through the period of military rule from 1988 to 2011; and ending in 2019, when democratisation and liberalisation since 2011 had made some progress. To add depth to this 33-year rural socioeconomic survey, I also examined Myanmar’s earlier history of agriculture and rural political economy since the country’s independence, and analysed the country’s macroeconomy. The first part of the book detailed the changes in agriculture and the transformation of rural society, with “de-agrarianisation” as the key concept. The second part, by contrast, discussed the rural community’s core—its unchanged socio-economic characteristics—and developed the theory of the “absence of village collective”.