The Wa people of the borderlands of Northeast Burma and Southwest China have a foundational myth that claims that all of humanity emerged from a hole in the ground in Wa country. In this story, all human history is a tale of migration from the Wa lands, the centre of world. As with other stories…
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,…
Anti-Islamic Abuse in Burma and Britain, the Colonial Past and Present
Last week it was the anniversary of the anti-Indian riots that broke out in colonial Rangoon in 1930. They were ignited when striking Indian dock workers came into conflict with the Burmese labourers recruited to replace them. This clash then spilled over into a broader wave of anti-Indian violence, leaving over one hundred Indians dead….
Plague and (Amateur) Photography in Colonial Burma
A few weeks ago I posted a blog about some official photographs taken of British measures to combat the plague in Burma taken during 1906. These images showed British doctors administering vaccinations and checking patients’ symptoms. What they omitted were the more coercive and invasive aspects of anti-plague measures, such as the dismantling and disinfecting…
Burmese Jugglers in Imperial Britain
Historians of empire have been increasingly interested in the movement of people around the globe. During the nineteenth century, this was much more than just Brits going off to distant parts. Colonized peoples visited other colonies, as well as Britain itself, occasionally settling, and individuals of diverse backgrounds traveled between, through, and across different empires….
Archives, Material Histories and Anxieties
At a recent conference on histories of material life in South Asia that I attended there were two excellent papers that touched on the physical creation of archives. The keynote lecture on pre-colonial records in Maharashta, delivered by Rosalind O’Hanlon, described the use of inscribed rocks and copper plates to document and preserve the rites held…
Remembering Empire in Bristol and Brussels
I was recently part of a small delegation of historians from the University of Bristol involved in a trip to the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels. The purpose of the visit was to consider the ways that imperialism and its legacies have been approached in the museum, and the difficulties of publicly engaging…
Plague and Photography in Colonial Burma
I recently stumbled across some fascinating photographs of colonial measures taken to arrest the spread of bubonic plague in Mandalay in 1906 through the online archive of medical history images available through the Wellcome Trust, London. These photographs show Burmese residents apparently willingly submitting themselves to British medicine. In the top photo a group are…
Burma’s Anti-Colonial Imperialist
No, not George Orwell. And no, (for those more familiar with Southeast Asian history) not John Furnivall. There was another more trenchant and less ambiguous critic of British imperialism in the interwar years: Bernard Houghton. Having served in the Burma branch of the Indian Civil Service from 1886 until his retirement in 1912, he began…
Teaching the F-Word (Foucault that is…)
Taught my favourite class this week: a fun-packed two hours introducing students to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish with the aid of the torture scene from Braveheart (sovereign power), the chilling footage of prison dance routines in the Philippines (docile bodies), and Bunny Colvin’s speech in The Wire about ‘brown paper bags’ (delinquency). Took me ages…
Aung San Suu Kyi’s Desert Island Discs Decoded
Listening to Aung San Suu Kyi on Desert Island Discs was, for me at least, a surreal experience. It wasn’t the song choices that produced this sense surreality, although I had been expecting more post-punk metallic hardcore and at least one Dr Dre track. Rather it was how Daw Suu Kyi presented herself. The show…
Is Burma ‘Going South’?
I recently read Jean and John Comaroff’s article ‘Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa’ in Anthropological Forum (for those of you who either don’t have access to the journal, or would just rather listen instead of read, you can watch a video of John Comaroff delivering a lecture on the…
Colonizing Animals 