Abstract
Cecil Champain Lowis, the British judge whose novels chronicled official life in colonial Burma, was well aware of the tedium of paperwork.
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Notes
Cecil Champain Lowis, Fascination (London: John Lane, 1913), 64–65.
Jeffrey A. Auerbach, ‘Imperial Boredom’, Common Knowledge, 11, 2 (2005), 283–305.
For more on race and gender in Lowis’s novels, see: Jonathan Saha, Law, Disorder, and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c.1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 125.
Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York: MIT Press, 2012).
See: Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia (Oxford: Berg, 2004);
Radhika Singha, ‘Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in Colonial India’, Studies in History, 16, 2 (2000), 151–98.
For the former approach see: Anand A. Yang, ed., Crime and Criminality in British India (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985);
Sandria B. Freitag, ‘Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India’, Modern Asian Studies, 25, 2 (1991), 227–61;
for an attempt to negotiate both approaches see: Kim A. Wagner, ‘The Deconstructed Stranglers: A Reassessment of Thuggee’, Modern Asian Studies, 38, 04 (2004), 931–63;
and for the latter approach, see: Parama Roy, ‘Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 9, 1 (1996), 121–45;
Tom Lloyd, ‘Thuggee, Marginality and the State Effect in Colonial India, circa 1770–1840’, Indian Economic Social History Review, 45, 2 (2008), 201–37;
Daniel J. R. Grey, ‘Creating the “Problem Hindu”: Sati, Thuggee and Female Infanticide in India, 1800–60’, Gender & History, 25, 3 (2013), 498–510.
For how the demand for written evidence could result in criminal actions, see: Anupama Rao, ‘Problems of Violence, States of Terror: Torture in Colonial India’, Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 3, 2 (July 2001), 186–205.
Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007);
Bhavani Raman, ‘The Duplicity of Paper: Counterfeit, Discretion, and Bureaucratic Authority in Early Colonial Madras’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 54, 02 (2012), 229–50.
Anxieties over information have been discussed in other contexts in India, see: C. A Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
D. K. Lahiri Choudhury, ‘Sinews of Panic and the Nerves of Empire: The Imagined State’s Entanglement with Information Panic, India c.1880–1912’, Modern Asian Studies, 38, 04 (2004), 965–1002;
Kim A. Wagner, ‘“Treading Upon Fires”: The “Mutiny”-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’, Past & Present, 218, 1 (2013), 159–97.
For some calls for a more skeptical approach that acknowledges the limits of colonial records in Burma, see: Ian Brown: Ian Brown, ‘“Blindness Which We Mistake for Sight”: British Officials and the Economic World of the Cultivator in Colonial Burma’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 33, 2 (2005), 181–93;
Kumar M. Satish, ‘The Census and Women’s Work in Rangoon, 1872–1931’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32, 2 (2006), 377–97.
Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,’ in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 1–42;
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives’, History and Theory, 24, 3 (1985), 247–72;
Nicholas B Dirks, ‘Colonial Histories and Native Informants: Biography of an Archive’, in Peter van der Veer and Carol Appadurai Breckenridge (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 279–312;
Ann Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,’ Archival Science, 2, 1 (2002), 87–109;
Anjali Arondekar, ‘Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14, 1/2 (2005), 10–27;
Anupama Rao, ‘Affect, Memory, and Materiality: A Review Essay on Archival Mediation’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50, 2 (2008), 559–67.
Durba Ghosh, ‘Another Set of Imperial Turns?’ The American Historical Review, 117, 3 (2012), 772–93.
Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Commonsense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Ann Laura Stoler, ‘“In Cold Blood”: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives’, Representations 37 (1992), 151–89.
In other publications I have examined the duplicity of legal records and medical records, see: Jonathan Saha, ‘A Mockery of Justice? Colonial Law, the Everyday State and Village Politics in the Burma Delta c.1900’, Past & Present, 217 (2012), 187–212;
Jonathan Saha, ‘Colonization, Criminalization and Complicity: Policing Gambling in Burma c 1880–1920’, South East Asia Research, 21, 4 (2013), 655–72;
Jonathan Saha, ‘“Uncivilized Practitioners”: Medical Subordinates, Medico-Legal Evidence and Misconduct in Colonial Burma 1875–1907’, South East Asia Research, 20, 3 (2012), 423–43.
See for details, and different explanations for its rise and weaknesses: Michael Adas, The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice Frontier, 1852–1941 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974);
Ian Brown, A Colonial Economy in Crisis: Burma’s Rice Delta and Theworld Depression of the 1930s, Routledge Curzon Studies in the Modern History of Asia 28 (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005);
of course, we should remain aware that there were important pre-colonial continuities, see: Michael Adas: Michael Adas, ‘Imperialist Rhetoric and Modern Historiography: The Case of Lower Burma before and after Conquest’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 3, 2 (1972), 175–92;
Peter A. Coclanis, ‘Southeast Asia’s Incorporation into the World Rice Market: A Revisionist View’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 24, 2 (1993), 251–67.
Ian Brown, Economic Change in South-East Asia, C.1830–1980 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1997).
See: Robert H Taylor, The State in Myanmar, New ed. (London: C. Hurst, 2008);
Mary P Callahan, Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003);
for more on the chronology of this process, see: Neil A Englehart, ‘Liberal Leviathan or Imperial Outpost? J. S. Furnivall on Colonial Rule in Burma’, Modern Asian Studies, 45, 04 (2011) 759–90; we should also be aware of pre-colonial bureaucratic development designed to improve taxation and revenue collection
see: Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
A. P. Pennell, Report on the Settlement Operations in the Amherst District, Season 1891–92 (Rangoon: British Burma Press, 1893); a decade later Pennell’s propensity to publicly criticize the Government of India, this time for exposing the corruption and violence of British police officers, would result in his removal from the Indian Civil Service, see: Great Britain.
India Office, East India (case of Mr. A.P. Pennell): Correspondence Relating to the Removal of Mr. A.P. Pennell from the Indian Civil Service. (London: printed for HMSO by Darling & Son, 1902).
Ashley Wright, ‘Opium in British Burma, 1826–1881’, Contemporary Drug Problems, 35 (2008), 611–46.
Ashley Wright, Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating Consumption in British Burma (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 95–100;
it should also be noted that opium policies differed in the ‘Scheduled Areas’ of Burma’s borderworlds: Robert Maule, ‘British Policy Discussions on the Opium Question in the Federated Shan States, 1937–1948’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 33, 2 (2002), 203–24.
Eric Tagliacozzo, ‘Ambiguous Commodities, Unstable Frontiers: The Case of Burma, Siam, and Imperial Britain, 1800–1900’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46, 2 (2004), 354–77.
Raymond L Bryant, The Political Ecology of Forestry in Burma, 1824–1994 (London: Hurst, 1997), 43–51.
For how the BBTC influenced public opinion and imperial policy in the lead up to the annexation of Upper Burma in 1885, see: Anthony Webster, ‘Business and Empire: A Reassessment of the British Conquest of Burma in 1885,’ The Historical Journal, 43, 4 (2000), 1003–25.
Bryant, Political Ecology of Forestry, 43–126; although, there were some attempts at collaboration in forest management, with mixed results, see: Raymond L. Bryant, ‘Shifting the Cultivator: The Politics of Teak Regeneration in Colonial Burma,’ Modern Asian Studies, 28, 2 (1994), 225–50.
Timothy Mitchell, ‘Society, Economy, and the State Effect’, in Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (eds), Anthropology of the State: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 169–86.
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 14–34.
This draws from anthropological understandings of the relationship between law and corruption, see: Monique Nuitjen and Gerhard Anders, ‘Corruption and the Secret of Law: An Introduction’, in Monique Nuijten and Gerhard Anders (eds), Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2007), 9–12.
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Saha, J. (2015). Devious Documents: Corruption and Paperwork in Colonial Burma, c. 1900. In: Jackson, W., Manktelow, E.J. (eds) Subverting Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465870_9
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