Armed Rural FolkBurmans^47 which assumed roles as musketeers and cavalry as well, allow-
ing the standing army twelve regiments each of cavalry and musketeers.^48
Such specialized units became the core of the royal army, but although
they might be dispatched as the only force sent against one or another
rebellion within the kingdom, the larger royal campaigns against other
states continued to be formed of a majority of rural warriors.^49
A key feature of the institutional emergence of the pre-colonial South-
east Asian army was a very late and incomplete bifurcation of the royal
court’s military resources into (1) those represented by the continuity of
rural warfare brought to the campaign, forming what in the West would be
characterised as irregular forces, and (2) the trained, well-organized, and
well-equipped force of military specialists, which, in European military
parlance, would have been the standing army or regulars. Nevertheless,
it was the irregulars and not the regulars who left a legacy that would be
maintained by rural fighters during the colonial period. It might be sug-
gested that the kind of warfare that pervaded rural Burma, the kind that
was possible without the resources of the royal court, was the only kind
of warfare that could be maintained in the early colonial period, after the
fall of most of the pre-colonial royal courts, during which rural folk were
similarly on their own. On the other hand, what was remembered of the
pre-colonial army by colonial and postcolonial Western scholars and
indigenous historians alike has been the tier of royal armies that did not
survive: that second force of military specialists, who came to symbolize
the greater glories of pre-colonial royal armies.
- There are detailed lists of the villages from which Burmans were recruited for
some regiments. See Ù Maung Maung Tin, Shwei-nàn-thoùn Wa-ha-ya Abhidan
(Rangoon: Buddha Sasana Ahpwe Press, 1975): 209–21. - For some references to the formal cavalry regiments, see Dutiya Maha-ya-zawin-gyì
(Mandalay: n.p., 1919): 354; Skinner (trans.), “The Interrogation of Zeya Suriya
Kyaw”, 61, 62; Tin, Myan-ma-mìn Ok-chok-pon sa-dàn, 4. 265–71. - Of the fifty-five thousand men that Hsinpyushin brought to invade Manipur in
1765, only twelve thousand, or about twenty-three percent, were from the stand-
ing royal regiments. See William J. Koenig, The Burmese Polity, 1752–1819: Politics,
Administration, and Social Organization in the Early Konbaung Period (Ann Arbor,
Michigan: University of Michigan Center for South & Southeast Asian Studies,
1990): 116.