Blood, dreams and gold

Myanmar (Burma) is an unknown country. Virtually isolated from most of the world for two generations, and governed by one of the world's most oppressive regimes, it only began to open up in 2011 and just recently installed an elected government of sorts. Richard Cockett gives us a remarkable tour of this hidden society. Part political history and part travelogue, this is an outstanding introduction to the country for those unfamiliar with Burmese issues and a serviceable summary for south-east Asia specialists. Cockett shows how British colonialism, Burmese nationalism and ‘the struggle for autonomy’ of various minorities in peripheral areas have both clashed with and shaped modern Myanmar (p. xii). He asserts that Myanmar will not find a workable future until it can reconcile these three forces, and is likely to become yet another south-east Asian society blending elements of democracy and authoritarianism. Cockett uses the metropolis of Yangon (formerly Rangoon) to illustrate this colonial legacy. The British conquered Myanmar in a series of nineteenth-century wars, and the restive territory had to be folded into British India in order to be controlled. Yangon developed as a commercial and administrative centre, and many Indians, Jews, Persians, Armenians, Chinese and others settled there, making it a ‘plural society’ (p. 24). Burmese felt outnumbered in their own country, and much anger was directed at Indians and Chinese for being ‘middlemen’ between locals and the British (p. 34). The Burmese independence struggle thus began as a dual anti-colonial and nativist effort. The plural society was destroyed by two key events: the Japanese invasion during the Second World War and the advent of military rule in 1962. The alliance of Burmese nationalists and Japanese drove the British and many of the Indians out, and Prime Minister Ne Win's military government forced 400,000 Indians and 100,000 Chinese to leave; by the 1980s the foreign population of Yangon had fallen to seven per cent. Those remaining helped maintain an aura of tolerance in the city

Authoritarianism · Autonomy · Burmese · Colonialism · Democracy · Economic history · Ethnology · Face (sociological concept · Independence (probability theory · Nationalism · Plural · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History · Law