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Tracing Burma's Economic Failure to Its Colonial Inheritance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2012

Ian Brown
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Abstract

The extent to which the inheritance of British rule in Burma, including Burmese perceptions of that inheritance, might explain Burma's economic failure since independence is explored. Several factors came into play. One was the ferocious rejection of the economic structures of colonial rule by the Burmese. Another was the failure of Burmese entrepreneurs– who had been in a position to achieve little beyond dominance over the rice field–to emerge during the colonial period. Finally, there were the implications for independent Burma's economic options of the withdrawal of Indian capital, enterprise, and commercial experience, which had been a dominant factor in the colonial economy, at the point when Burma regained its political freedom.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 85 , Issue 4 , Winter 2011 , pp. 725 - 747
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2011

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References

I wish to thank Anne Booth, Robert Taylor, Sean Turnell, and the three anonymous referees appointed by Business History Review for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am responsible for the remaining errors.

1 On the first point, note, for example, the argument that Burma's colonial “prosperity lay only in the national statistics and the country's trade and other economic relationships with exploiting imperialists,” reported by Taylor, Robert H., “Disaster or Release? J. S. Furnivall and the Bankruptcy of Burma,” Modern Asian Studies 29, no. 1 (1995): 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 This clarification is important as the contrast between an apparently prosperous colonial economy and an impoverished Myanmar–the official name of the country in foreign languages since the late 1980s–is often made or implied. And the contrast can easily evolve into the simple argument or implication that Burma's generals have ruined a once prosperous country. See, for example, the opening two sentences of Sean Turnell's fine study: “At the dawn of the twentieth century Burma was the richest country in Southeast Asia. At the dawn of the twenty-first century it was the poorest.” Turnell, Sean, Fiery Dragons: Banks, Money-lenders and Microfinance in Burma (Copenhagen, 2009), 1Google Scholar.

3 A conclusion made still more unpalatable by the fact that “[t]he colonial period is …. cited [by the military itself] as the root cause of most of the problems facing the state.” Steinberg, David I., Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York, 2010), 38Google Scholar.

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37 In addition to the serious damage suffered by Chettiar business as Burmese cultivators defaulted on their loans at the beginning of the decade, Indian labor faced strong competition from Burmese as economic conditions worsened in the depression. The tension between the two erupted into serious communal rioting in Rangoon in mid-1930.

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61 As noted earlier, British rule had failed to create a substantial core of Burmese with the training and experience essential to the running of a modern economy and society. But in addition, following the coup of March 1962, the military purged the bureaucracy of its elite, older Burma Civil Service personnel, reducing still further the state's inadequate managerial resources. Steinberg, , Burma/Myanmar, 66Google Scholar.

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71 Even communist Vietnam came to embrace a “socialist-oriented market economy” and re-establish relations with the capitalist world economy.

72 Calculated from Ghee, Lim Teck, Peasants and their Agricultural Economy in Colonial Malaya, 1874–1941 (Kuala Lumpur, 1977), 245Google Scholar.

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76 Of course they did, not only for the reasons outlined immediately above but also because of the dispossession of the Burmese rice cultivator by the Chettiars in the 1930s. Anti-Indian riots in 1930 and 1938 were a major measure of Burmese feeling.

77 Here it might be noted that, through the 1950s, Kuomintang forces, defeated in China's civil war, occupied a major part of Burma's Shan State. They were supported not only by Taiwan “but surreptitiously by the United States through the Central Intelligence Agency.” Steinberg, , Burma/Myanmar, 45–46Google Scholar.

78 There had been racial riots in Rangoon in 1930 and 1938. See Cady, , A History of Modern Burma, 303–7, 393–95Google Scholar. For the cultivator's default, foreclosure, and the Chettiars during the depression, see Brown, A Colonial Economy in Crisis, ch. 3.

79 The Burma census of 1953 reported the number of persons of Indian origin in urban areas at around 287,000–including 140,000 in Rangoon. There was no figure for rural areas. In the 1931 census, the Indian population–for Burma as a whole–was reported as 1,017,825. Chakravarti, Nalini Ranjan, The Indian Minority in Burma: The Rise and Decline of an Immigrant Community (London, 1971), 186, 15Google Scholar.

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81 Ibid., 59.

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83 Tinker, , The Union of Burma, 389–400Google Scholar. In considering the low number of business entries, allowance might have to be made for the possibility that Tinker was more interested in politics and administration.

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