Blindness which we mistake for sight’

Prompted by the recent completion of a study of the economic – and, to a degree, social and political – strategies used by Burma's rice cultivator to mitigate the potentially devastating impact of the economic crisis of the early 1930s on his material circumstances, this article explores some of the major methodological issues faced by the historian seeking an understanding of the economic behaviour of the cultivator in Burma under colonial rule. One set of issues concerns the need to locate that economic behaviour in a distinctive cultural context. A second rises from the fact that since almost the sole source for the Burma research is the surviving records of the colonial administration, the historian is forced to peer into the economic world of the Burmese rice cultivator through the eyes of British officials, whose sight of that world was far from complete and commonly distorted by cultural preconceptions. Here the article pays attention to the historian's use of colonial statistical data and impressionistic reports

Archaeology · Blindness · Burmese · Colonial rule · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Mistake · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sight · Sociology · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Cambodian History and Society · History · Law

• Whiter than White

  Open Access•Jonathan Saha•Law, Disorder and the Colonial…•2013

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• Identifying the ‘agriculturists’ in the Burma Delta in the colonial period

  Open Access•Asuka Mizuno•Journal of Southeast Asian Studies•2011

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