When was burma colonized

Nevertheless, in the absence of many ethnic leaders as well as common agreement, the constitution ended up riddled with anomalies on ethnic rights. The Shan, Kachin, and Karenni were awarded the voluntary right of secession after a year period while the Mon and Arakanese ended up without a state of their own.

A much-promised Karen State also remained undemarcated. Six months before reaching independence, on July 19, , General Aung San and eight of his cabinet ministers were assassinated by a gang of armed paramilitaries while holding a meeting of the Executive Council.

Tragically, the assassination and the rapid British exit from Burma meant that the issues between different ethnic groups were never fully resolved. He was widely trusted and respected due to his direct and honest character and many people believe that Burma would be very different today if General Aung San had lived.

U Nu introduced a parliamentary federal union system as the basis of the system of government. Burma gained independence at the auspicious time of 4. Much of the ethnic hostility that erupted can be attributed to the war years. The country rapidly spiraled into increasing intercultural violence between the national Burmese army and ethnic opposition armies. This was the beginning of the longest running civil war in the world. While the situation in Burma improved somewhat in the late s, underlying ethnic tensions remained and the situation quickly deteriorated when ethnic nationality leaders realised that the Burmese government would not respect the promises they had made at independence.

Panglong Agreement was not honoured and furthermore, Buddhism was declared a state religion much to the resentment of ethnic nationalities, whose populations had largely been converted to Christianity during the colonial times. In , General Ne Win ceased power in a military coup and the multi-party federal union was transformed into a single party state where the Burma Socialist Programme Party BSPP was the sole legal political entity allowed to operate in the country.

Speaking out against the regime became punishable and freedom of association, press, and assembly were severely repressed. For the next 12 years until , the country was ruled under Martial law. General Ne Win dominated the government from to , first as a military ruler and then as a self-appointed president.

Popular unrest drove the people of Burma repeatedly on to the streets, including student led protests in , , and In , workers throughout the nation participated in a strike, to which the government responded by shooting an estimated workers and students on June 6, National Democratic Front NDF , a political party comprising of nine ethnic organisation members was founded on May 10, Many ethnic nationalities were largely in control of their traditional areas along the outlying Thai borderlands until when a brutal Burmese offensive near the Thai border drove 10, refugees to flee into Thailand.

This event marked the beginning of the ongoing refugee outflow from Burma into Thailand. View of Mae La refugee camp that has been located at the Thailand-Burma border since and is now home to about 45, Burmese refugees. Photo: Ariana Zarleen. In , the government, without warning, demonetised all bank notes that were not divisible by nine, presumably because Ne Win was told that number nine was his lucky number.

In , students began protesting against the government, demanding that the BSPP step aside in favour of a democratically elected civilian government. Authorities responded by closing universities for several months, leading to even more civil unrest. In what came to be known as the uprising on August 8, , hundreds of thousands of students, monks, and people from all ethnicities and walks of life poured on to the streets and demonstrated against the regime.

The military and the police ceased the protests by attacking the people with tear gas, guns and tanks, firing directly into the crowds and killing thousands of people. The leaders of the student movement were imprisoned and tortured, and countless of others were arrested and harassed for taking part in or observing the demonstrations. On August 28, , the students formed an umbrella organisation comprising of all the student unions. Following the growing unrest Ne Win resigned and was replaced by a civilian lawyer Dr.

Maung Maung. The SLORC insisted that they merely wanted to restore order and promised to organise multiparty elections as soon as possible. It was widely believed however, that Ne Win orchestrated the coup from behind the scenes.

While she originally returned to attend to her sick mother, on August 26, , Daw Aung San Suu Kyi addressed half a million people at a mass rally in front of the Shwedagon Pagoda, calling for a democratic government.

A month later, she helped found the National League for Democracy NLD which quickly emerged as the leading opposition party. Daw Suu Kyi began campaigning all over the country, gathering significant crowds where ever she travelled. In the SLORC became tired of her popularity, put her under house arrest on July 20, and disqualified her from participating in the elections.

Unsatisfied with the election outcome, the government ignored the result and refused to hand over power.

Over of the elected members of parliament were arrested or forced to renounce politics while another 20 members of parliament, along with thousands of students and democracy activists, escaped into exile or into territory controlled by the CPB or KNU.

In the s, the student army ABSDF had about 10, members and waged a guerrilla war against the Burmese army from the mountains of the Karen state. The period witnessed some of the heaviest fighting in Burma since independence. In SLORC began offering selective ceasefires to a number of ethnic nationality armies while simultaneously sending over 80, troops into action against KNU and various Mon, Kachin and Karenni armed insurgency groups. Prior to the arrival of the British, education took place within the Sangha and most young men passed through monasteries as novice monks.

In addition to providing an education and a religious vocation, the Sangha garnered respect for the monastic community. The arrival of British colonial policy in Burma fundamentally undermined this system, and is at the heart of contemporary intercommunal and interreligious violence. By undercutting Burmese political and religious authority, the British marginalized the Burman community while granting ethnic minorities access to power.

The British introduced a radically different educational system from the traditional Sangha, basing the new system on secular modernity. Most of the graduates of the new system joined the ranks of civil servants in the colonial administration. The Sangha resisted this Western education, maintaining that secular knowledge contradicted a Buddhist worldview. The British did, on occasion, work with the Sangha when it suited their needs, and Buddhists responded to these encounters in various ways depending on their region and social class.

However, the Sangha saw rapid decline and fragmentation during the colonial period, especially after , when the British neglected the traditional duty of the ruler of Myanmar to appoint a new leader of the Sangha thathanabain. The annexed territories were designated the minor province a Chief Commissionership , British Burma, of British India in The last monarch, the cruel king Thibaw and his queen, were exiled to India: carried out of Mandalay in an oxcart.

The following year, the province of Burma in British India was created, becoming a major province a Lieutenant-Governorship in This arrangement lasted until , when Burma began to be administered separately by the Burma Office under the Secretary of State for India and Burma. Burma achieved independence from British rule on 4 January Burma is sometimes referred to as the Scottish Colony, due to the heavy role played by Scotsmen in colonising and running the country — one of the most notable being Sir James George Scott, and the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company.

They were administered separately by the British, and were united with Burma proper to form Myanmar's geographic composition today. Britain made Burma a province of India in with the capital at Rangoon and ushered in a new period of economic growth. Traditional Burmese society was drastically altered by the demise of the monarchy and the separation of religion and state. Though war officially ended after only a couple of weeks, resistance continued in northern Burma until , with the British finally resorting to a systematic destruction of villages and appointment of new officials to finally halt all guerrilla activity.

Intermarriage between Europeans and Burmese gave birth to an indigenous Eurasian community known as the Anglo-Burmese who would come to dominate the colonial society, hovering above the Burmese but below the British.

After Britain took over Burma, they maintained the sending of tribute to China, putting themselves in a lower status than in their previous relations. It was agreed in the Burmah convention in , that China would recognise Britain's occupation of Upper Burmah while Britain continued the Burmese payment of tribute every ten years to Beijing.

The economic nature of society also changed dramatically. After the opening of the Suez Canal, the demand for Burmese rice grew and vast tracts of land were opened up for cultivation. However, in order to prepare the new land for cultivation, farmers were forced to borrow money from Indian moneylenders called chettiars at high interest rates and were often foreclosed on and evicted losing land and livestock.

Most of the jobs also went to indentured Indian labourers, and whole villages became outlawed as they resorted to 'dacoity' armed robbery. While the Burmese economy grew, all the power and wealth remained in the hands of several British firms and migrants from India. The civil service was largely staffed by Anglo-Burmese and Indians, and Burmese were excluded almost entirely from military service, which was staffed primarily with Indians, Anglo-Burmese, Karens and other Burmese minority groups.

Though the country prospered, the Burmese people failed to reap the rewards. Burma was grafted onto India despite the incompatibility of India and the Burmese heartland, which lacked a "Burma lobby" to explain it in Britain.

Historians will add that we saw no harm in this, though we always resisted such a fate to the death when it threatened our own land. Certainly external strategic considerations, prompted by French expansionism in the region, played a part Certainly also there was a persistent commercial illusion of a practical trade route along which British goods might flow through Upper Burma to the imagined markets of Chinese Yunnan.

This excited the Chambers of Commerce and influenced the annexation. Here was one of the casualties of the nineteenth Century, knocked over by a momentum beyond its understanding. By processes familiar to Imperial historians, static Burma and dynamic British India had become provocatively incompatible. When the irresistible force was applied, the object in its path was too fragile to survive.

This dilemma has contributed to a national frame of mind well known today for its determined preference for non-involvement and a "Burmese Way" in politics. It was not always so. In the eighteenth century it was not Burma's isolationism but her almost manic imperialism, ruthlessly asserted against her neighbours and in the end suicidally over-extended, that brought her up against the East India Company. The three wars that ensued led by stages to the ultimate surrender in at Mandalay.

Kipling's view of Burma was acquired in the aftermath of that surrender, and must be understood in the light of preceding historical events, today largely forgotten.

Theebaw, deposed in , was the last of the Konbaungset dynasty of the Kingdom of Inwa, or Ava. The founder of the line, Alaungpaya, emerged in as a national resistance leader against the Mons to the south. Within fifty years he and his successors had defeated and in many cases subjugated most of the adjacent peoples, creating in the process an expanded nation-state with frontiers resembling those of modern Burma but in the north-west more extensive.

It was an extraordinary explosion of military effort. The historian D. They had become a conquering race and feared no one on earth. For generations, British merchants, like their military and commercial rivals the French, had dealt with the Burmese; but this was peripheral trafficking by outsiders, only tolerated for their wares.

Before the British colonisation the ruling Konbaung Dynasty practised a tightly centralised form of government. The country had two codes of law, the Rajathat and Dammathat, and the Hluttaw, the center of government, was divided into three branches—fiscal, executive, and judicial. In theory the king was in charge of all of the Hluttaw but none of his orders got put into place until the Hluttaw approved them, thus checking his power.

Further dividing the country, provinces were ruled by governors who were all appointed by the Hluttaw, and villages were ruled by hereditary headmen who were approved by the king. The British controlled their new province through direct rule, making many changes to the previous governmental structure. The monarchy was abolished, King Thibaw sent into exile, and church and state separated. This was particularly harmful because the Buddhist monks were so dependent on the sponsorship of the monarchy.

Another way in which the British controlled their new colony directly was through their implementation of a secular education system. The colonial government of India, which was given control of the new colony, founded secular schools teaching in both English and Burmese, while also encouraging Christian missionaries to visit and found schools. In both of these types of schools, Buddhism and traditional Burmese culture were frowned upon in an attempt to rid the Burmese people of a cultural unity separate from the British.

Once these troublesome or unloyal Burmese were forced out, the British replaced them with strangers they approved of. If the British considered any Burmese to be criminals, they would act as both judge and jury, giving the Burmese no chance to a fair trial.

Harvey wrote in his chapter on Burma in the Cambridge History of the British Empire: The real reason for imposing direct administration was that it was the fashion of the age, and modern standards of efficiency were the only standards intelligible to the men who entered Upper Burma. Few of them spoke the language, and those who did, came with preconceptions gained in Lower Burma. Although Burma was the wealthiest country in Southeast Asia under British rule, as a colony it was seen very much as a backwater.

Among its exports, the country produced 75 percent of the world's teak from up-country forests. When George Orwell arrived in Burma in , the Irrawaddy Delta was leading Burma's exports of over 3 million tons of rice - half the world's supply. The British ruthlessly exploited the countries resources and left little in return.

The country was very much shaken. The system in which the wealthy patronized the monasteries was broken. The British became the wealthy and elite class. Most Burmans provided labor for the Burmese export economy. The British also brought in lots of Indians to Burma to perform labor, serve as clerks and run businesses. Large Indian communities still remain in Yangon and Mandalay. The traditional Burmese economy was one of redistribution with the prices of the most important commodities set by the state and supply and demand mostly unimportant.

With the arrival of the British, the Burmese economy became tied to global market forces and was forced to become a part of the colonial export economy. The British immediately began exploiting the rich soil of the land around the Irawaddy delta and cleared away the dense mangrove forests. Rice, which was in high demand in Europe, especially after the building of the Suez Canal in , was the main crop grown in and exported out of Myanmar.

In order to increase the production of rice, many Burmese migrated from the northern heartland to the delta, shifting the population concentration, and changing the basis of wealth and power. Instead, the Indian moneylenders gave the mortgage loans out, but foreclosed them quickly as the rice prices and land costs soared. At the same time, thousands of Indian labourers migrated to Burma and, because of their willingness to work for less money, quickly displaced the Burmese farmers, who instead began to take part in crime, giving themselves a bad reputation.

With this quickly growing economy, came industrialisation to a certain degree, with a railway being built throughout the valley of the Irawaddy, and hundreds of steamboats travelling along it.

All of these mechanisms of transportation were owned by the British, however, and this meant that the Burmese had to pay higher rates to transport their goods to market. Thus, although the balance of trade was supposed to be in favour of Burma, the society was changed so fundamentally that many people did not gain from the rapidly growing economy.

When the British began their imperial take over of Burma, the colony was immediately thrown into a world of exportation in which they had not ever been exposed to before colonisation by the British.

The peasant had grown factually poorer and unemployment had increased…. The collapse of the Burmese social system led to a decay of the social conscience which, in the circumstances of poverty and unemployment caused a great increase in crime. Large numbers of Indians were brought in to work as civil servants, and Chinese were encouraged to immigrate and stimulate trade.