The History of Burma under British Rule

Burma was the British colony that the British never really understood. The three Anglo-Burmese Wars (1824–26, 1852–53, and 1885) extended British rule over a country that the British thought they could govern from Calcutta and which, in the end, governed them. The result was a colony of 18 million people governed in the interests of a small British official class, an Indian commercial class, and a Burmese military elite that had been recruited to keep the peace. When the British left in 1948, the country was, as the historian Thant Myint-U has written in The Hidden History of Burma (2019), “a country that had been forced into a frame it did not fit.” The collapse that followed — military rule from 1962, the 8888 uprising of 1988, the slow ethnic wars that have killed perhaps 200,000 people — has its origins in the British period.

The First Anglo-Burmese War

The first Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826) was the first major British military intervention in Burma. The war was triggered by Burmese incursions into British territory in India, including the Arakan and Assam, and by the British desire to protect their commercial interests. The British Indian Army, under the command of Sir Archibald Campbell, advanced up the Irrawaddy and captured Rangoon. The Treaty of Yandabo (1826) ceded the Arakan and Tenasserim coast to the British and required the Burmese to pay a large indemnity. The war was a costly one for the British, but it opened the way for further British expansion in the region.

The war was also the first of a series of decisions that the British made about Burma on the basis of incomplete information. The British, as the historian John F. Cady showed in his classic A History of Modern Burma (1958), consistently underestimated the Burmese court and overestimated the degree to which a small Indian Army could keep the peace. The first war, as the Indian commentator H. H. Wilson observed at the time, was “a war which we did not want, conducted in a way which we could not afford, and ending in a result which we did not understand.”

The Second Anglo-Burmese War

The second Anglo-Burmese War (1852–1853) was triggered by a dispute over the treatment of British merchants in Rangoon. The British governor-general Lord Dalhousie used the incident as a pretext for the annexation of Lower Burma, including the port of Rangoon and the rich rice-growing region of the Irrawaddy delta. The war was relatively short, and the British quickly secured control of the new territories. The annexation of Lower Burma transformed the British position in Southeast Asia and opened a long-running conflict with the Burmese monarchy.

The Third Anglo-Burmese War

The third Anglo-Burmese War (1885) was triggered by the British desire to remove King Thibaw Min, whose policies were seen as threatening British commercial interests. The British Indian Army, under the command of General Harry Prendergast, advanced up the Irrawaddy and captured Mandalay. King Thibaw was deposed and exiled to India, and Upper Burma was incorporated into British India. The annexation of Upper Burma completed the British conquest of the country, and Burma became a single province of British India in 1886. The conquest was accompanied by a long-running guerrilla war, the “pacification” campaigns, which lasted for several years after the formal annexation.

Burma as Part of British India

The British administration of Burma was characterised by attempts to integrate the Burmese economy with that of India, the introduction of Indian labour, and the exploitation of Burma’s teak, rice, and mineral resources. The Indian labour migration to Burma, which brought hundreds of thousands of Indian workers to the country, transformed the demographic composition of the principal cities. The Burmese nationalist movement, which emerged in the early twentieth century, was in part a response to the perceived economic and demographic dominance of the Indians. The 1930 revolt, led by the monk Saya San, was the most serious internal disturbance, and it was suppressed by the British Indian Army with considerable loss of life.

The economic pattern of the colony was, as the historian Mya Than showed in his economic history of Burma, “extractive” in a way that was unusual even by the standards of British India. The rice of Lower Burma, the teak of Upper Burma, and the oil of Yenangyaung were exported to the world market; the proceeds were returned to the colonial government and the Indian commercial class. The Burmans, as the British and the Indians called the Burmese, were left with a marginal place in the economy of their own country.

The Separation of Burma

Burma was separated from British India in 1937 and governed as a distinct colony. The separation was partly a response to Burmese demands for greater autonomy, and partly a recognition of the very different political and cultural traditions of Burma. The constitution of 1937 provided for a parliamentary system of government, with Ba Maw as the first prime minister. The new government was, however, unable to resolve the ethnic tensions or to negotiate a satisfactory relationship with the British, and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 led to the resignation of the Burmese government.

The Japanese Occupation and Aung San

The Japanese invasion of Burma in 1942 was a major disaster for the British. The British withdrawal from Burma was completed in May 1942, and the Japanese occupation lasted until 1945. Aung San, who had initially cooperated with the Japanese and served as the head of the Japanese-sponsored Burmese government, switched to the Allied side in 1945 and helped to lead the resistance. The Panglong Agreement of February 1947, signed by Aung San and the leaders of the Shan, Kachin, and Chin peoples, established the framework for the post-independence union of Burma. Aung San was assassinated in July 1947, six months before independence. His death, with several of his cabinet colleagues, in a hail of bullets in the Council Chamber in Rangoon was a catastrophe from which the Burmese republic has never quite recovered.

Independence and Its Aftermath

Burma became independent on 4 January 1948, just six months after Aung San’s assassination. The new state faced major challenges, including ethnic tensions, communist insurgencies, and economic difficulties. The 1962 military coup, led by General Ne Win, marked the beginning of a long period of military rule, and the 1988 uprising and the 2007 “Saffron Revolution” demonstrated the continuing political tensions. The 2010 elections and the 2015 election of Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of the independence leader, as State Counsellor raised hopes for a transition to democracy, although the 2017 Rohingya crisis led to international condemnation and the 2021 military coup returned the country to direct military rule. The legacy of the British period continues to be a contested part of Burmese political life.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of British Burma is divided between the Burmese nationalist accounts — embodied in the writing of the post-independence Burmese historians and, more recently, in the work of Aung San Suu Kyi — and the British colonial histories of J. S. Furnivall, John F. Cady, and D. G. E. Hall. The revisionist literature, led by Thant Myint-U’s The Hidden History of Burma (2019) and the more recent work of Maitrii Aung-Thwin and Michael Charney, has produced a more critical picture, in which the British period is read as a system of extraction rather than a period of modernisation. The current debate, exemplified in the writing of the contributors to A History of Myanmar Since Ancient Times (2017), is over how far the Burmese political crisis of the 2010s and 2020s can be attributed to the colonial period and how far it should be treated as a product of the post-independence period.

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