Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast AsiaConclusionThis chapter has attempted to make several contributions to the litera-
ture and to our perspectives on pre-colonial Southeast Asian warfare.
First, it has made the case for looking beyond royal chronicles and mu-
rals for evidence of how most warriors in the larger polities engaged with
war. This is not an easy point to make because royal sources (sometimes
called state or central sources in other literature) monopolize so much
of the historian’s available documentation for the pre-colonial period.
Second, this examination has attempted to show how several kinds of
sources, often conventionally viewed as colonial, can, in fact, provide
insights into what warfare looked like to Southeast Asian rural folk.
Third, the present study has attempted to draw out from this effort
certain features, including the goals, conduct, and results of local, rural
warfare, often misrepresented in Burma through a cloak of illegality as
“dacoity”. The village “feuds” fought amongst and between the Kachin
and Shan in the mid-1910s, such as the fighting between the villages
of Lasaw and Hwekum, similarly indicate the continuity of pre-colonial
patterns of village warfare seen throughout Burma – lowland and high-
land – rather than as evidence, as promoted by the colonial government,
of the unsavory consequences of indirect rule under the sawbwas in the
highlands (or the lack of colonial control in unadministered tracts).^50
As this examination has demonstrated, there are sources available to
reconstruct local, rural warfare in pre-colonial Burma. The pre-colonial
and earlier colonial rural settlement is far from lost to the historian.
Subaltern studies and other sub-fields have left us extensive methodolo-
gies with which to work. Evidence for elements of pre-colonial warfare
in Burma can be drawn from traveller accounts, correspondence, local
headman accounts, and even, as has been examined here, from illustra-
tive depictions of fighting during the 1886–1889 period that help us to
see something else other than warfare as viewed from the perspective
of former royal courts. We see here not just local, rural conflict, but
also much of what real warfare at least in this corner of Southeast Asia
looked like in the pre-colonial period at what today might be viewed
as the platoon level in the context of larger campaigns. In other words,
- Government of Burma, Report on the Administration of the Shan and Karenni States
for the Year ended the 30th June 1915 (Rangoon: Superintendent of Government
Printing, Burma, 1915): 128.