TW: Descriptions of violence and death There are many connections that can be drawn between how the military are attempting to repress the Civil Disobendience Movement in Myanmar and how the British colonial regime sought to suppress anti-colonial movements. A quick comparison with British counter-insurgency strategies during the Hsaya San rebellion reveals these connections, particularly…
Category: Ramblings
Histories for the Burmese Revolution
I delivered this as a talk to a public history event run by the History Department at the University of Durham and the Gala Theatre on 15 June 2021. It is tentative, unfinished, and I post it here, not as a definitive statement, but to share my current reflections. There are some events that are…
The Military Coup: What Can You Do?
This blog has been sadly neglected over the last couple of years – but it still gets regular traffic from people interested in Myanmar. So, here are some resources for learning more about the resistance to the military coup and for what you can do. Reading One way of being better placed to support the…
The 1941 Yangon Sawmill Workers’ Strike: Part 4
How are strikes won or lost? And how do we—either as historians or as trade unionists—make this judgement? When we left the striking sawmill workers three weeks ago, they had the momentum. The strike had spread from the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation’s Dunneedaw sawmill, to the Corporation’s nearby sawmill at Dallah. In the following week,…
The 1941 Yangon Sawmill Workers’ Strike: Part 3
In my last post, we left the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation’s Dunneedaw Sawmill after a week of strike action. By this time the mill was under the control of the newly formed trade union, with red flags flying from the entrance. By 22 March, a week later, the mill’s manager still had no positive news…
The 1941 Yangon Sawmill Workers’ Strike: Part 2
Management were caught out. They were confident that they could break the strike on its first day. An Indian student activist called B.K. Dey, who had drafted the newly-formed union’s resolution outlining the workers’ demands, was arrested as an “agitator” on the day that the strike had begun, 8 March. Soldiers and police were sent…
The 1941 Yangon Sawmill Workers’ Strike: Part 1
In early March, 1941, a Tamil labourer called Madaya was told by the European manager of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation’s Sawmill at Dunneedaw on the Yangon docks, that he had to change his job to a more physically demanding role. Madaya, with a confidence that had grown among workers in the city since the…
Safe Spaces for Colonial Apologists
I’ve just returned to university following a period of parental leave. Although I was careful not to get drawn into work during my time off, I could not help but notice the controversy around Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar’s “Ethics and Empire” project. I also read about Universities Minister Jo Johnson’s attack on “safe space culture”….
The Nation and its Threats
It’s been a few weeks since I last posted here, a longer gap than usual. Events on the Myanmar-Bangladesh border have created a fraught context for writing on the country’s past; it has become imperative for historical work to address the bleak humanitarian crisis facing the Rohingya. Returning to my research with the escalating exodus…
The Limits to History
Public discussions around Rohingya people currently fleeing violence in Rakhine state, Myanmar, have often involved arguments about history. While critical historical analysis is useful in offering insights into conflicts, History—if treated as a single, knowable past—is not. This is especially true when dealing with ethnicity. Whatever the past was, no amount of historical research can…
Podcast
A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by Luke Corbin for his “Myanmar Musings” podcast. We talked about some of my recent work on the history of animals, particularly elephants and cattle. Luke is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University researching the history and anthropology of beer in Myanmar. During his trip…
What’s the Difference?
I’ve recently been thinking about “difference”. While animal historians often write about the changing understandings of the difference between humans and animals over time, I don’t think that they have fully unpacked what they mean by “difference” itself. Was the difference between human and nonhuman animal species and same as the difference between colonizer and…
Colonizing Animals 