Warring Societies of Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia_ Local Cultures of Conflict Within a Regional Context

Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asia

in the pre-colonial period between the court and the monastic order and
formal, institutionalized Buddhism. In this view, the rebels were fighting
to restore that unity.^27
But we can find evidence in other kinds of sources that contradict this
creative interpretation of the Burmese warriors involved in the 1886–
1889 conflict. This campaign in particular affords a unique opportunity
for understanding pre-colonial, indigenous warfare. The period of British
pacification efforts is special because it is perhaps the only campaign in
mainland Southeast Asia in which there is a moment when we have indig-
enous warfare, but no indigenous court. Thus, there was no royal court
to control indigenous depictions of history or to figure at the centre of
anyone else’s depictions of it. Leaving aside the conscious or unconscious
confusion of the terms rebel and bandit in the later decades of colonial
rule in Burma discussed above, it would have been difficult for the British
of the time to view the Burmese warriors as anything but bandits in the
context of Burma’s inclusion within the British Raj. Without a royal court
to formalize Burmese fighters’ status as warriors, those who fought after
annexation were necessarily, in British eyes, merely criminals. Had the
Burmese won, one or another rural leader would have established a new
indigenous court, like Alaunghpaya in 1752. None did and it would take
the emergence of nationalist historiography decades later to reinvent the
Burmese participants into Burmese nationalists or as Buddhist warriors,
contravening colonial historiography.
Read in their own context, the rebels could be said to have represent-
ed both the last stand of indigenous warfare as well as an intermediary
group in the transition from more traditional forms of warfare and what
we might view as modern asymmetrical warfare. There are five chief
kinds of sources that help give us a better idea about the rebels, why they
were fighting, and the means by which they fought. The first kind of
sources includes reports from the engineers, usually civil engineers who
were drawn from Rangoon and spoke Burmese. Their main concerns

27. There is also a well-researched analysis of British colonial documents and travel ac-
    counts that argues on the basis of quotes in the British sources by pretender princes
    that they wished to restore order to the religion. See Jordan Carlyle Winfield,
    “Buddhism and Insurrection in Burma, 1886–1890”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic
    Society (Series 3) 20.3 (2010): 345–67. The present author suggests instead that
    in doing so, such leaders were merely mimicking the official proclamations of the
    court before it fell.