A few days ago the great grandson of Percival Marshall—an employee of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation during the interwar years—made contact with me to share his relavtive’s photographs of working in colonial Burma’s forests. The images document the labour that went into felling trees and transporting them across the country for export. They show…
Tag: Photography
Capturing Burma’s Ethnic Diversity
The UK National Archives have released an album on Flickr of 121 images taken in Burma in 1903. They were originally held in the Colonial Office photographic archive. Much like the imperial ethnographers who worked in the country, these photographers were attempting to capture the differences between ethnic groups – especially those in the ‘remote’…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Colonizing Animals 