Abstract
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
Keywords
Colonial State British Rule Indian Empire British Writing European Landscape
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Notes
- 1.To provide one recent example: a wide ranging and highly significant study of the British Empire mentions Burma just once in 798 pages. See John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System 1830–1970 (Cambridge, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- and Michael Aung-Thwin and Maitrii Aung Thwin, A History of Myanmar Since Ancient Times: Traditions and Transformations (London, 2012).Google Scholar
- 2.For a different perception see: Michael W. Charney, A History of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p.1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 4.See the observations by historians of the Ottoman empire: Jane Hathaway, The Arab Lands Under Ottoman Rule (Harlow, England, 2008), pp. 244–7;Google Scholar
- Suraiya Faroqui, Subjects of the Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 37–40.Google Scholar
- 7.Guy Lubeigt attributes this passage to Ni Ni Myint: Guy Lubeigt, “Introduction of Western Culture in Myanmar in the 19th century: from Civilian Acceptance to Religious Resistance” in Essays in Commemoration of the Golden Jubilee of The Myanmar Historical Commission (Yangon: Myanmar Historical Commission, 2005), p. 381.Google Scholar
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- 25.Scholarly attention might be well served by collecting polemics directed against ‘globetrotting’ because it might prove to be its own unique strand of travel writing. Anti-globetrotting meant more than ‘going off the beaten path’ because it implied a level of expertise about a place, which might be informed not only by direct experience, but by related reading and study. See James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism and the Ways to ‘Culture’ 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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- Maitrii Aung-Thwin, The Return of the Galon King: History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma (Athens, Ohio and Singapore: Ohio University Press and NUS Press, 2011);Google Scholar
- Chie Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011);Google Scholar
- Jonathan Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c.1900 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013);CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Ashley Wright, Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating Consumption in British Burma (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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© Stephen L. Keck 2015