Armed Rural Folkit is in this fleeting glimpse of local conflict in rural Burma that we are
provided with an opportunity to move beyond the mental frameworks
of the indigenous court and European documentation and, perhaps, to
know a pre-colonial mainland Southeast Asian battlefield for the first
time.
Asserting, as the present chapter indeed does, that local, rural warfare
after the fall of the court provides a significant window through which to
view earlier and local-level warfare raises an immediate question. Would
this then mean that Burmese warfare did not change on the basis of the
lessons learned from the previous three wars with the British (including
the short three-week war of November 1885 that preceded the British
pacification efforts)? This is where the image of a royal Burmese army
falls apart under analysis. We do see real adaptation in the royal army
and at the level of the royal court – the huge river bastions built by Italian
engineers and the fact that the Burmese court had more river steamboats
than the British expeditionary force in 1885 and deployed amongst
other things river mines, as well as the more modern firearms supplied
to royal troops. All of these aspects of the Burmese military indicate
that the court had been sincere in upgrading its military hardware in the
1860s, 1870s, and early 1880s. But what was changing was too small of
a sliver, and one tied very closely to the royal centre, to have too much
of an effect on the warrior culture of the average Burman. Masses of
Burmese warriors might be mustered for war, but the state was reticent
or unable to arm, train, or transform most of the combatants fighting on
its behalf. The Burmese army remained to the end a small royal standing
army in a sea of armed rural folk.
Author’s NoteThe author would like to thank the Institute for Advanced Studies of
Asia, The University of Tokyo, the KITLV, and EUROSEAS for afford-
ing the opportunity to present earlier drafts of this paper, and the numer-
ous people who have kindly made useful suggestions and comments.
The author also thanks the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at SOAS
University of London and its Dean, Professor Gurharpal Singh for af-
fording me the research leave that allowed me to prepare this chapter.