Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast AsiaIn the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the political centre
in Burma weakened on several occasions and during these periods of
weakness, or interregnums in which complete political collapse had
occurred, local conflicts became accessible for scrutiny. Not all of these
periods yield much data on the actual fighting, although they provide
extensive evidence of inter-settlement conflict in such cases of royal de-
cline. In late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century Arakan,
Burma’s western littoral, the decline of the regional Mrauk-U court first
saw endemic violence in the countryside with gangs of “country people”
fighting each other so that no one was able to move freely about,^16 fol-
lowed by years of war between local competing “chieftains” (bo-hmu in
Burmese) who fought each other in the rural areas for local supremacy.^17
In the 1730s, again in Arakan, the headmen of twelve villages (rwa)
joined together to defeat and unseat Nga Mei, the headman of Kantain
village, whom they killed in the process. All of this was without the
consent of the royal court, although the court subsequently went after
these men and put them to death.^18 Perhaps, we might see in these men
the same kind of rural leader as Alaunghpaya (r. 1752–1760), before his
rise to power, when he was merely the headman of a settlement and a
rural strongman at the head of a body of his kith and kin. Nevertheless,
although we find evidence of what appears to be local, rural conflict,
we lack the clear descriptions by the participants themselves or direct
observers that would make this a convincing argument for what was
going on.
The several years’ long “Pacification Campaign”, as it was formerly
known (pacification would later become the generic term for the ac-
tivity today known as counter-insurgency) that followed the Third
Anglo-Burmese War in November 1885 offers such a moment of historio-
graphical clarity. The Third Anglo–Burmese War was itself a three-week
campaign in which the British steamer fleet sailed upriver, the Burmese
royal army essentially fled from Italian-built fortifications further upriver,
and the king was arrested and deported to India and Burma was annexed
- Nga Mi, “Rakhine Razawin”, 61a.
- See the general condition of the countryside due to these “rebellions” in Monk of
Ra-naun-myin, “Kya Khwetsa”, in Htoon Chan, “A Synopsis of Kya Khwetsa (Tiger
Killing Poem)”, Journal of the Burma Research Society 8 (1918): 153, 158. - Nga Mi, “Rakhine Razawin”, 220b.