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Law and Order, the Rule of Law, and the Legitimation of the Colonial Presence in Late British Burma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2021

Ian Brown Open the ORCID record for Ian Brown [Opens in a new window]
Ian Brown*
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Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK
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Abstract

In Britain's empire across Asia and Africa from the mid-nineteenth century, two political-legal principles were central to colonial modernity, law and order, and the rule of law. These two principles secured the legitimation of colonial rule, in the eyes of those who ruled. It is striking then to see that in late colonial Burma, in the 1920s and 1930s, the colonial government struggled to maintain law and order and to embed the rule of law. Violent crime soared while the criminal justice system failed hopelessly for serious offences. This article seeks to explore the ways in which senior British officials in Burma navigated the disjuncture between the imperial principles that were central to colonial justification and Burma's reality. Perhaps most notably, they did so by putting blame for the soaring crime rates and the failures of the criminal justice system firmly on the Burmese. In the early 1940s, however, with the end of colonial rule clearly imminent, the legitimation of the colonial presence became of less pressing importance, and the failure of colonial practice to live up to its ideological rhetoric could now be more openly faced.

Type
Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , September 2022 , pp. 1081 - 1101
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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References

1 Wiener, Martin J., An empire on trial: race, murder, and justice under British rule, 1870–1935 (Cambridge, 2009), p. 1Google Scholar. It is important to acknowledge here that the rule of law ‘is an exceedingly elusive notion’. For the present context: ‘to live under the rule of law is not to be subject to the unpredictable vagaries of other individuals – whether monarchs, judges, government officials, or fellow citizens. It is to be shielded from the familiar human weaknesses of bias, passion, prejudice, error, ignorance, cupidity, or whim.’ Brian Z. Tamanaha, On the rule of law: history, politics, theory (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 3, 122.

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3 George Orwell, Burmese days (London, 2009; orig. edn New York, NY, 1934), p. 250.

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5 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 39, 199.

6 That judgement of the criminal justice system was made by John Clague, a vastly experienced British official. He had been first appointed to the Burma administration in 1906 and he ended his career as adviser to the secretary of state for Burma in London between 1937 and 1942. Papers of Sir John Clague, Autobiographical fragments, p. 15, IOR Mss Eur E252/72.

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12 Perpetual anxiety on the part of officials that practice often fell far short of the principles they claimed to represent was evident too in colonial administration of the opium monopolies: Kim, Diana S., Empires of vice: the rise of opium prohibition across Southeast Asia (Princeton, NJ, 2020), pp. 16–17Google Scholar.

13 And apparently was to rise sharply in the following year. In late 1940, the secretary in the Home Department of the Government of Burma estimated that the total number of murders in that year would probably exceed 1,500: ‘Extract from home secretary's letter for 1st half of December 1940, dated 23 December 1940’, IOR M/3/419.

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18 RPAB 1935, p. 28.

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33 RPAB 1926, p. 64.

34 For example, RPAB 1912, p. 19.

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37 RPAB 1926, p. 26.

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40 Kolsky, Colonial justice in British India, p. 24. For a fine study of perjury in the courts of British India in the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, and of government attempts to curb it, see Schneider, Engines of truth, ch. 3.

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42 Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p. 188.

43 Fielding-Hall, The passing of empire, p. 91.

44 Ibid., pp. 269, 86. Fielding-Hall's language here reflected an age-old resentment on the part of the colonial official towards the silver-tongued lawyer who, it was felt, stood in the way of the truth, justice, and order they sought to secure.

45 Ibid., p. 91.

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52 Schneider, Engines of truth, p. 106. Much the same argument was made by McBride, Mr. Mothercountry, p. 18: ‘If the rule of law failed to prevent criminality by the native population, it demonstrated the lawlessness inherent in the indigenous culture, [thereby] underscoring the need for outsiders to import the principle.’

53 RPAB 1924, p. 13.

54 Report of the Crime Enquiry Committee, 1923 (Maymyo, 1923), p. 16.

55 Figures from the annual Report on the administration of Burma, various years from 1920–1. See also Lalita Hingkanonta Hanwong, Policing in colonial Burma (Chiang Mai, 2015), p. 19.

56 The description of Rangoon at the beginning of the 1850s, as it came under British rule following the second Anglo-Burmese war, is from a speech by Edward, prince of Wales, on a visit to Burma in 1922, cited in Donald M. Seekins, State and society in modern Rangoon (London, 2011), p. 28.

57 Reprinted in Peter Davison, ed., Orwell and politics (London, 2001), p. 18.

58 Michael Carritt, A mole in the crown: memoires of a British official in India who worked with the communist underground in the 1930s (Hove, 1985).

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65 Ibid., pp. 283, 284.

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73 Major studies of the rebellion include James C. Scott, The moral economy of the peasant: rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT, 1976); Michael Adas, Prophets of rebellion: millenarian protest movements against the European colonial order (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979); and Maitrii Aung-Thwin, The return of the Galon king: history, law, and rebellion in colonial Burma (Athens, OH, 2011).

74 Ian Brown, A colonial economy in crisis: Burma's rice cultivators and the world depression of the 1930s (Abingdon, 2005).

75 Furnivall, Colonial policy and practice, p. 116. The Chettyar (or Chettiar) is a Tamil caste, heavily involved in moneylending. Native in Tamil Nadu, India, they had a major presence in colonial Burma.

76 Cady, A history of modern Burma, p. 305.

77 Ibid., pp. 387–8.

78 ‘Minute dated the 14th December 1940 by his excellency the governor’, IOR M/3/419.

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85 Penderel Moon, Strangers in India (London, 1944), p. 62.