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Law and Economic Development: The Cautionary Tale of Colonial Burma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2014

Thomas H. STANTON
Thomas H. STANTON*
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University
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Abstract

Burmese colonial history suggests that a legal system cannot operate independently from the felt needs of the people who are supposed to obey the law. Despite a monopoly of force for many decades, the British failed to create a sustainable legal system in Burma. Colonial status shifted Burma’s economic role from subsistence agriculture to the generation of large-scale exports. By undermining the traditional Burmese legal system and substituting Western international standards of property rights, enforceability of contracts, and an independent judiciary—all attributes of what some consider to be the “Rule of Law”—the legal system amplified and channelled destructive economic and social forces rather than containing them. This paper examines traditional Burmese law, the administration of law in British Burma, and the consequences of the new legal system for the country and its own stability. The paper concludes by suggesting lessons for Myanmar today, and for the study of the “Rule of Law.”

Keywords

“Rule of Law,”colonial lawlaw and customlaw and developmentcolonial administrationBurma
Type
Legal Profession and Social Change in East Asian Countries
Information
Asian Journal of Law and Society , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , May 2014 , pp. 165 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and KoGuan Law School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University 

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Footnotes

*

Thomas H. Stanton served as a graduate teaching assistant in Southeast Asian history for Professor Harry J. Benda at Yale University and then studied law at Harvard. He is a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and a Fellow of the (US) National Academy of Public Administration. Mr Stanton’s most recent book is Why Some Firms Thrive While Others Fail: Governance and Management Lessons from the Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2012), which he discussed in a paper presented at the Third East Asian Law and Society Conference at the KoGuan Law School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in March 2013. Mr Stanton holds a BA from the University of California at Davis, an MA from Yale University, and a JD from the Harvard Law School. He is fluent in German and has conducted research in several countries. The author wishes to acknowledge the help and encouragement of many people in the preparation of this paper, including law professors Jerome Cohen, David Trubek, Henry Steiner, and Harold Berman, Professor David Steinberg, Walter Cohn, and especially his mentor and teacher, Professor of Southeast Asian history Harry J. Benda. Thanks also to anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft. All responsibility for the research and analysis of this paper rests solely with the author.

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