Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast AsiaNovember 1888, and Mandalay on 1 March 1889.^20 This was very
disruptive to the local economy; labour was procured by force through
demands on local, rural headmen and an area that had not been a very
troubled place when the kingdom collapsed in November 1885, became
so within a year. Violence became endemic, but so too did property theft,
including the theft of cattle from rural residents by “dacoits”.
Economic disruption that came with regime collapse and change clearly
triggered the outbreak of violence in this part of Burma. Nevertheless, both
colonial and indigenous historiographical treatments of this campaign
attributed to rural fighters instead grander political goals. Rebels in the
campaign are generally depicted as dacoits or princes in the European ac-
counts and either as denizens of the court in pre-1920s Burmese accounts
or as nationalists by Burmese historians of the late colonial period and after.
Such interpretations also obscured the continuing legacy of rural warrior
culture in Burma. Ranajit Guha has pointed to the conflation of banditry
and resistance into one picture of endemic rural violence that necessitated
colonial rule in India, while Nick Cheesman has argued that this was not
so much confusion as strategic misrepresentation. In Cheesman’s view,
colonial administrators made “deliberate misuse of the two concepts”
of bandit and rebel, for by viewing armed rural malcontents as bandits
the colonial government could legitimately ignore any grievances that
would otherwise explain their resort to violence.^21 Also at work was the
fundamental imprint on Burma of “martial race” ideology imported from
the subcontinent.^22 The depiction of ethnic minorities (mainly the Chin,
Kachin, Karen, and Shan) in highland Burma as members of martial races
meant that viewing ethnic Burmans throughout rural Burma as examples
- J. George Scott, Burma: Handbook of Practical Information (London: Alexander
Moring, 1911): 311; Government of India, Administration Report on the Railways
in India for 1889–90 (London: HMSO, 1890): 25. - Nick Cheesman, Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make Law and
Order, with a foreword by James Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2015), 194–195; Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of the Peasant Insurgency in
Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999): 106. - On “martial races” in British India, see Gavin Rand, “Martial Races and Imperial
Subjects: Violence and Governance in Colonial India 1857–1914”, European
Review of History /Revue européenne d’Histoire 13.1 (March 2006): 1–20. On
“martial races” as an imperial concept, see Heather Streets, Martial Races: The
Military, Race, and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2010).