In the 1870s there was some discussion in British newspapers and medical journals about Georgious Constantine, or ‘the Tattooed Man from Burmah’, who had appeared in Vienna much to the interest of Europe’s anthropologists. He was covered head-to-toe with elaborate tattoos. Constantine claimed to have been of Greek descent and to have been a pirate…
Category: Research
Researching Colonial Burma on the Internet
I recently wrote a blog on my experiences using the National Archive of Myanmar for Exeter University’s Global and Imperial History blog. It got me thinking about how much of my research I now conduct online via digitized archives. So, on this post I’m going to flag up some useful places on the internet for…
Shape-shifters in Colonial Burma
I’m currently reading a novel by a British judge called Arthur Edgar titled The Hatanee: A Tale of Burman Superstition published in 1906. According to Edgar, the Hatanee is a terrifying, shape-shifting, half-tiger-half-human creature that hunts people when they are alone in the jungle. The novel was inspired by the apparently ‘real life’ murder of…
Do Elephants Dream of Bulldozers?
I have just finished reading the brilliant The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton. If you haven’t read it, the book argues persuasively that despite the widespread celebration of new technologies, old technologies have become increasingly important in the twentieth century. Edgerton provides many, occasionally surprising, examples demonstrating this. They range from the continued…
Picturing Convicts’ Bodies in Colonial Burma
The end of the teaching term last year coincided with the British Library releasing over one million images on their Flickr account. Making the most of this, I immediately began trawling through them to see what images of Burma I could find. Among the many I came across were two contrasting images of convicts. This…
The Wild Wild West of Burma
Last week I attended a fantastic conference that celebrated the career of Prof. Ian Brown, my PhD. supervisor, who has recently retired. In Ian’s closing paper, he made an important reassessment of some assumptions that underpin the history of colonial Burma. He argued that John Furnivall’s influential argument that Burma experienced a uniquely dramatic increase…
Burma’s Climate and ‘Masculine Nerves’
The other day I was going through the massive pile of scrappy bits of paper that are my old PhD research notes looking for something I could distinctly remember having, but was inevitably unable to find, when I came across a poem. Written in 1911, it succinctly summed up a major theme in my research….
A Dog’s Life in Colonial Burma
I have just finished reading a traveller’s account of Burma published in 1909 and purportedly written by a dog. The dog, called ‘John’, travelled the northern-most reaches of the colony with his master, ‘the Colonel’, the Colonel’s wife, the ‘Mem Sahib’, their female friend, referred to only as ‘Missy Sahib’, and their entourage of Indian…
Imperial Book Club
Whilst I was slowly wading my way through Viceroy Curzon’s correspondence this summer, I came a across a letter sent in 1901 from the Secretary of State for India, George Hamilton, in which he recommended a novel. Well, sort of. I have been reading a clever but disgusting book named Anna Lombard; it deals with…
Baden-Powell in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum
Sherlock Hare was a British barrister working in colonial Rangoon until he was diagnosed as a criminal lunatic in 1891. He was then deported to England where, after briefly escaping, he was confined in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum for the remainder of his life. I have written about him in more detail in an article,…
Stomaching the Truth
I’ve recently been doing some research for an article I’m writing about the career of a judge in the Indian Civil Service at the end of the nineteenth century called Aubray Percival Pennell. He was dramatically kicked out of the Service in 1901 after a career of publicly criticizing the Government of India in his judgments…
Can an Elephant Commit Murder?
I recently gave a paper about elephants in colonial Burma at a fantastic conference on ‘Animals and Empire’ here in Bristol. Throughout the day the question of whether animals had ‘agency’ in history was raised and much debated. Of course, there is one species of animal that historians have had little issue granting agency to,…
Colonizing Animals 