Myanmar

B

The Toungoo Dynasty

In the second quarter of the 16th century, a new Burmese dynasty emerged from the sleepy principality of Toungoo in central Burma. With the aid of Portuguese adventurers, the Toungoo dynasty established what became under its third king, Bayinnaung (reigned 1551-1581), a reunified and precariously prosperous state. After his death, succession squabbles and encroachment by the Portuguese along the coast, by the Thais on the east, and by Manipuri horsemen from the west brought on the decline of the dynasty, although the system itself endured until the mid-18th century. Its survival was made possible by a stable administrative and legal system at the central and local levels. The dynasty was finally toppled by a Mon rebellion in 1752.

C

The Konbaung Dynasty and the Anglo-Burmese Wars

Increasing European commercial and political pressure set the context for the rise and demise of the last Burmese dynasty. During the 1600s and early 1700s competing British, Dutch, and French interests had established commercial ventures at Syriam, near present-day Rangoon, and elsewhere on the coast. In 1752 Alaungpaya founded the Konbaung dynasty by restoring Burmese rule first at Ava and later in the delta. He moved against the British at the Negrais trading post and then initiated another attack on the Thais, whose capital at Ayutthaya was later destroyed by his son King Hsinbyushin (reigned 1763-1776). Another son, Bodawpaya, lost control of Siam but captured the Arakan region.

By the early 19th century, political friction over an Arakanese independence movement based in Bengal was compounded by the military successes of the Burmese general Maha Bandula in Assam. The British responded by sea in the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-1826). The ensuing Treaty of Yandabo left the British in control of Arakan to the west and Tenasserim to the east of the Irrawaddy delta. The production of rice and timber flourished in these two areas under the British, while their relative political stability induced large-scale population growth, a general pattern that was repeated after the remainder of the delta was annexed in the Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852). Commercial ambition and political pretext, heightened by Anglo-French regional rivalry, precipitated the final annexation, when Mandalay fell after a brief battle in 1885. These extensions of British rule were progressively less popular with the resident population, and each in turn required a period of pacification. In the long run, British rule brought widespread administrative and social modernization to a land that, except for the benign efforts of King Mindon, the builder of Mandalay, had been swamped in reclusive policies and wracked by court intrigues.

D

British Rule

Burmese culture, now submerged under a colonial overlay, had three aspects: the language, with accretions from Mon and Pali; Theravada Buddhism, which had come from Ceylon and mixed with local nat (“animist”) rituals; and the society of rice-growing peasant villages. Under colonial rule the linkage of government and religion was lost, the monastic orders fell into disarray, and the monastic schools, which had given Burma a higher rate of male literacy than England at that time, declined as English became the language of social advancement. The indigenous culture nevertheless persisted in the magical world of the pwe (theatre), in the practice of Buddhism and nat worship, and in the language of the peasantry.

The British moved the capital from royal Mandalay to the port city of Rangoon in 1886, developing it as a sub-station of the British Empire in India. This led to large-scale Indian immigration. Rangoon thus became the hub of a “steel frame” of administration spreading out into the hinterland, where district officers maintained law and order, collected revenue, and administered justice. As the country was opened up to the world market, it became the world’s major exporter of rice—from 500,000 tonnes annually before the fall of Mandalay, to 2 million at the turn of the century, and 3 million before World War II began in 1939. British rule and economic penetration gradually engendered social disintegration and provoked a nationalist movement. This movement used modern institutions, such as the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, student strikes, and political participation in partial self-government to agitate for immediate reforms, including separation from India, and later for independence. In the countryside, the unrelated anti-modern Saya San Rebellion of 1930-1932 drew widespread support, but was crushed.

The political leaders who eventually linked capital and countryside into a truly independent Burma had their start as student leaders who flaunted the title Thakin (master), a term that had previously been applied to the British. The Thakin movement, led by U Aung San and U Nu, formed a Burma Independence Army (BIA), which supported the successful Japanese invasion of Burma in 1942, during World War II. This political movement later took advantage of the strains of wartime occupation and the weakness of the Japanese-installed government near the war’s end to resist Japanese rule under the name of the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL).

E

The Modern Nation

After the war, the returning British discovered that the AFPFL, led by Aung San, had nearly monopolized indigenous political power. The AFPFL negotiated with Britain to gain Burma’s independence by 1948. It also compelled the inclusion into a “federal” republic of such peripheral groups as the Shan and Karen, thought to have had special British protection. In elections held in April 1947, Aung San’s AFPFL won an overwhelming majority of seats in the constitutional assembly. In July 1947 U Saw, a nationalist political rival of Aung San, had him and six ministers of the new government assassinated, reportedly with the connivance of British former-officials angered by Aung San’s wartime collaborationism. U Nu, former Foreign Minister in the wartime puppet government of Ba Maw, was asked to head the AFPFL and the government.

E

1

Constitutional Democracy

The country became independent as the Union of Burma on January 4, 1948. Burma’s new independence confronted the AFPFL government of U Nu with a series of political and ethnic insurrections, which continued over the next three decades. During the 1950s a major threat created by the Karen revolt was blunted, and Communist insurgents were forced to retreat into the hills. Burma then established a rigorously non-aligned foreign policy. Economic reconstruction was begun and some new growth undertaken with multilateral foreign aid. AFPFL rule was validated in national elections in 1951-1952 and 1956. By 1958, however, a party split required the constitutional intervention of a caretaker army government for 18 months. The government of General Ne Win tightened administrative discipline to promote modernization and curbed separatist tendencies in the Shan states, where some traditional leaders wanted to exercise the secession right built into the 1947 constitution. The 1960 election gave a resounding victory to U Nu’s faction, based largely on respect for his personal piety. U Nu’s return to power was short-lived, however. His promotion of Buddhism as the state religion and his tolerance for ethnic separatism precipitated a bloodless coup that re-established military rule under Ne Win in March 1962.