State, Market and Peasant in Colonial South and Southeast Asia by Michael Adas

Author:Michael Adas [Adas, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9780429866302
Google: AMV1DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-29T04:48:47+00:00

Source: Based upon H. Yule’s Narrative ... (1858).

A comparison of the Fitzroy Map and travel accounts from the Konbaung era demonstrates that Lower Burma was more developed prior to 1852 than the general statements of most writers would lead one to assume. Unfortunately, there is no record of how extensively each of these tracts was cultivated, nor are there estimates of how much land was occupied in Lower Burma as a whole. If one assumes, however, that the area worked in the first years of British rule was roughly equal to that cropped in the decades before 1852, the extent of cultivation in the late Konbaung period can be estimated. The most reliable district figures of the area occupied in the first years of British control were those compiled in 1856–7. In that year over 662,000 acres of land in the Irrawaddy-Sittang delta region were listed as cultivated of which 616,000 acres were planted in rice.56 If corrections are made for undercounting by indigenous officials,57 land not yet reoccupied following the 1852 warfare and land newly abandoned due to local resistance to British rule, the total area under rice cultivation would have been at least 700,000 to 800,000 acres.

This amount of cultivated area was small compared to that occupied in later decades. By 1872, 1,146,000 acres were cropped in Lower Burma, and by the mid-1930’s when the area occupied reached its greatest extent, over 8,700,000 acres were under cultivation.58 Vast tracts of fertile land on the Henzada-Tharrawaddy plain, in the Pegu-Sittang river valley and in the lower Irrawaddy delta remained uncultivated in Konbaung times. Areas that were to be highly productive in the British period were covered with kaing grass, scrub or swamp and dense forests of mangrove and kanazo. Owing to the absence of embankments much of Lower Burma, especially the lower delta, was flooded during the monsoon season and unfit for habitation for several months of the year.59

Most historians, reflecting the attitudes of travellers like Father Sangermano and John Crawfurd,60 have asserted that Burman misrule was responsible for the underdeveloped state of Lower Burma prior to 1852. G.E. Harvey established this belief when he wrote in 1925, that it was an “indelible stain” on the Burman administration that the fertile region “should have been found by the English to be mainly an uncultivated waste .. .”61 This explanation not only ignores evidence of Burman efforts to develop Lower Burma, it also obscures the fundamental reasons for the area’s limited productivity. During his first visit, Michael Symes praised Bodawpaya’s measures to conciliate the Möns, while a number of sources indicate that considerable numbers of Burmans moved into Lower Burma prior to 1852 and brought new lands under cultivation.62 In the Sittans, local officers reported their attempts to develop tracts in the Pegu area and stated that they had been ordered to do so by high-ranking Burman officials.63

It can be argued that these positive measures were more than nullified by the frequent wars waged by Burman monarchs and by the Burmans’ measures to suppress Mon resistance to their rule.

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