British rule in Burma


British colonial rule in Burma lasted from 1824 to 1948, from the successive three Anglo-Burmese Wars through the creation of Burma as a province of British India to the establishment of an independently administered colony separate from British colonial India, and finally independence. The region under British control was known as British Burma, and officially known as Burma from 1886.
Some portions of Burmese territories, including Arakan and Tenasserim, were annexed by the British after their victory in the First Anglo-Burmese War; Lower Burma was annexed in 1852 after the Second Anglo-Burmese War. These territories were designated as a chief commissioner's province known as British Burma in 1862.
After the Third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885, Upper Burma was annexed, and the following year, the province of Burma in British ruled India was created, becoming a major province in 1897. This arrangement lasted until 1937, when Burma was separated from English ruled India and made a separate Crown Colony administered by the Burma Office under the Secretary of State for India and Burma. British rule was disrupted during the Japanese occupation of much of the country during World War II. Burma achieved independence from British rule on 4 January 1948.
Burma is sometimes referred to as "the Scottish Colony" owing to the outsized role played by Scotsmen in colonising and running the country, one of the most notable being Sir James Scott. It was also known for the important role played by Indian immigrants in managing and administering the colony, especially while it was still a part of the British Raj; some historians have called this a case of co-colonialism.

Before the British conquest

Because of its location, trade routes of Southeast Asia passed through the country, keeping Burma wealthy through trade, although self-sufficient agriculture was still the basis of the economy. Indian merchants travelled along the coasts and rivers throughout the regions where the majority of Burmese lived, resulting in the assimilation of many Indians into the Bamar population. As Burma had been one of the first Southeast Asian countries to adopt Buddhism on a large scale, it continued under the British as the officially patronised religion of most of the population.
The ruling Konbaung dynasty practised a tightly centralised form of government. The king was the chief executive with the final say on all matters, but he could not make new laws and could only issue administrative edicts. The country had two codes of law, the Dhammathat and the Hluttaw, the centre 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 appointed by the Hluttaw, and villages were ruled by hereditary headmen approved by the king.

Arrival of the British

Conflict began between Burma and the British when the Konbaung dynasty decided to expand into Arakan in the state of Assam, close to British-held Chittagong in India. This led to the First Anglo-Burmese War. The British dispatched a large seaborne expedition that took Rangoon without a fight in 1824. In Danuphyu, at the Ayeyarwaddy Delta, Burmese General Maha Bandula was killed and his armies routed. Burma was forced to cede Assam and other northern provinces. The 1826 Treaty of Yandabo formally ended the First Anglo-Burmese War, the longest and the most expensive war in the history of British India. Fifteen thousand European and Indian soldiers died, together with an unknown number of Burmese army and civilian casualties. The campaign cost the British between 5 and 13 million pounds sterling which led to an economic crisis in British India in 1833.
In 1852, the Second Anglo-Burmese War was provoked by the British, who sought the teak forests in Lower Burma as well as a port between Calcutta and Singapore. After 25 years of peace, British and Burmese fighting started afresh and continued until the British occupied all of Lower Burma. The British were victorious in this war and as a result obtained access to the teak, oil, and rubies of their newly conquered territories.
In Upper Burma, the still unoccupied part of the country, King Mindon had tried to adjust to the thrust of imperialism. He enacted administrative reforms and made Burma more receptive to foreign interests. But the British initiated the Third Anglo-Burmese War, which lasted less than two weeks during November 1885. The British government justified their actions by claiming that the last independent king of Burma, Thibaw Min, was a tyrant and that he was conspiring to give France more influence in the country. British troops entered Mandalay on 28 November 1885. Thus, after three wars gaining various parts of the country, the British occupied all the area of present-day Myanmar, making the territory a province of British India on 1 January 1886.

Early British rule

, and the British commander had to coerce the High Court of Justice to continue to function. Though war officially ended after only a couple of weeks, resistance to colonial conquest continued in northern Burma until 1890, with the British choosing to systematically destroy villages and appoint new officials to quash the liberation movement.
Traditional Burmese society was drastically altered by the demise of the monarchy and the separation of religion and state. Intermarriage between Europeans and Burmese gave birth to an indigenous Eurasian community known as the Anglo-Burmese who would come to dominate the colonial society, hovering above the Burmese but below the British.
After Britain took over all of Burma, they continued to send tribute to Chinese officials to avoid offending them, but this unknowingly lowered the status they held in Chinese minds. It was agreed at the Burma convention in 1886 that China would recognise Britain's occupation of Upper Burma, while the British government continued the Burmese payment of tribute every ten years to Peking.

Administration

The British controlled their new province through direct rule in the Burmese heartland, making many changes to the previous governmental structure. For example, Burmans lived under a British-style legal code and were governed by a British-style civil service. Areas outside the central plains were governed indirectly through their traditional structures. In this way, ethnic differences between the majority Burmans of the central plain and the ethnic minorities in the hills were exacerbated. This was part of the British colonial practice of "divide and rule". The monarchy was abolished, King Thibaw sent into exile, and religion and state separated. This was particularly harmful, because the Buddhist monks, collectively known as the Sangha, were strongly dependent on the sponsorship of the monarchy. At the same time, the monarchy was given legitimacy by the Sangha, and monks as representatives of Buddhism gave the public the opportunity to understand national politics to a greater degree.
The British Raj also implemented a secular education system. The colonial Government of British 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 was frowned upon.
The Christian missionaries had success in converting some of the minority ethnic groups to Christianity, particularly the Chin, Kachin, Karen and Karenni. Furthermore, missionaries built hospitals and schools which, in the minority ethnic areas, spurred the development of writing systems for their languages, which allowed for the promotion of social progress, education and culture.
The British abolished chattel slavery in Burma. This was however a gradual process. In the report of slavery in Burma and India to the Temporary Slavery Commission in the 1920s, the British India Office stated that the slaves in Assam Bawi in Lushai Hills were now secured the right to buy their freedom; that chattel slavery still existed in parts of Assam with weak British control; that the British negotiated with Hukawng Valley in Upper Burma to end slavery there, where the British provided loans for slaves to buy their freedom; that all slave trade had been banned, and that slavery in Upper Burma was expected to be effectively phased out by 1926.

Administrative divisions

The province of Burma after 1885 was administered as follows:
  1. Ministerial Burma
  2. Tenasserim Division
  3. Arakan Division
  4. Pegu Division
  5. Irrawaddy Division
  6. Scheduled Areas
  7. Shan States
  8. Chun tracts
  9. Kachin tracts
The "Frontier Areas", also known as the "Excluded Areas" or the "Scheduled Areas", compose the majority of states within Burma today. They were administered separately by the British with a Burma Frontier Service and later united with Burma proper to form Myanmar's geographic composition today. The Frontier Areas were inhabited by ethnic minorities such as the Chin, the Shan, the Kachin and the Karenni.
By 1931, Burma had 8 divisions, split into a number of districts.
  1. Arakan Division
  2. Magwe Division
  3. Mandalay Division
  4. Tenasserim Division
  5. Pegu Division
  6. Irrawaddy Division
  7. Sagaing Division
  8. Federated Shan States

    Economy

The traditional Burmese economy was one of redistribution with the prices of the most important commodities set by the state. For the majority of the population, trade was not as important as self-sufficient agriculture, but the country's position on major trade routes from India to China meant that it did gain a significant amount of money from facilitating foreign trade. 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.
File:Burma024.jpg|thumb|An image of deforestation in Burma taken by a Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation official.
Burma's annexation ushered in a new period of economic growth. The economic nature of society also changed dramatically. The British began exploiting the rich soil of the land around the Irrawaddy 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 1869, was the main export. 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.
To prepare the new land for cultivation, farmers borrowed money from Indian Tamil moneylenders called Chettiars at high interest rates, as British banks would not grant mortgages. The Indian moneylenders offered mortgage loans but foreclosed on them quickly if the borrowers defaulted.
At the same time, thousands of Indian labourers migrated to Burma and, because of their willingness to work for less money, quickly displaced Burmese farmers. As the Encyclopædia Britannica states: "Burmese villagers, unemployed and lost in a disintegrating society, sometimes took to petty theft and robbery and were soon characterized by the British as lazy and undisciplined. The level of dysfunction in Burmese society was revealed by the dramatic rise in homicides."
With this quickly growing economy came industrialisation to a certain degree, with a railway being built throughout the valley of the Irrawaddy, and hundreds of steamboats travelled along the river. All of these modes of transportation were owned by the British. Thus, although the balance of trade was in favour of British Burma, the society was changed so fundamentally that many people did not gain from the rapidly growing economy.
The civil service was largely staffed by Anglo-Burmese and Indians, and the ethnic Burmese were excluded almost entirely from military service, which was staffed primarily with Indians, Anglo-Burmese, Karens and other Burmese minority groups. A British General Hospital Burmah was set up in Rangoon in 1887. Though the country prospered, the Burmese people largely failed to reap the rewards. An account by a British official describing the conditions of the Burmese people's livelihoods in 1941 describes the Burmese hardships:
“Foreign landlordism and the operations of foreign moneylenders had led to increasing exportation of a considerable proportion of the country’s resources and to the progressive impoverishment of the agriculturist and of the country as a whole…. 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.”