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,…
Tag: Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation
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…
Translating Titles
During the colonial period a series of white men published books about elephants based on their experiences of working with them in Burma. By independence in 1948, there was a clear canon of texts about elephants. Authors cited certain writers who were deemed to be ‘authorities’ in the subject: Mitchell, Pfaff, Hepburn, Ferrier, Evans, Sanderson…
Learning About Elephants in Empire
The primary reason for my recent research trip to the London Metropolitan Archive was to learn about the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation’s employment of elephants. The largest file that I went through dealt with attempts to improve the health of these animal workers during the inter-war years. These were collaborative efforts between the colonial state…
Rebellion in Burma, Indian Nationalism and the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation Ltd.
This week I visited the London Metropolitan Archives to consult the records of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, Ltd. From the late-nineteenth century, this company was the biggest and most influential timber company operating out of Burma. Throughout the colonial period and into the mid-twentieth century, Burma was widely recognised as the world’s principal source…
Colonizing Animals 