Exception and emergency – British imperial governance in Asian frontier tracts
This historical project studies an economically and politically key region in Asia under the pressures of global empires and colonial governance which conditioned the roots to the modern states. The study targets the small polities in the strategic frontier areas of British India’s North-eastern Frontier, the kingdom of Burma and Qing China’s Yunnan province in the 19th century. It investigates their encounters with imperial forces and their responses to the governing measures enforced upon them. There were simultaneously moving imperial frontiers of conquest, and a practice of the small polities turning into permanent frontier tracts under administrative exceptions. The project aims at establishing the British imperial pragmatic and provisional mode of operation, which depended on circumstance and place rather than on imperial principles or legal statutes.
The project combines and synthesises into a monograph the results of two major research projects. It thereby contributes the necessary revision of imperial history by integrating the Northeast India–to–Yunnan region for the purpose of investigating governance under exceptional conditions. This is a major spatial revision of the analytical field since it crosses the dominant Area Studies separations of South, Southeast and East Asia. It is an empirically rich study that includes work a wide range of historical archives.
The project combines and synthesises into a monograph the results of two major research projects. It thereby contributes the necessary revision of imperial history by integrating the Northeast India–to–Yunnan region for the purpose of investigating governance under exceptional conditions. This is a major spatial revision of the analytical field since it crosses the dominant Area Studies separations of South, Southeast and East Asia. It is an empirically rich study that includes work a wide range of historical archives.
Final report
This project has targeted the formation of governance under British colonial rule in a large hill tract on the borderlands of the kingdom of Burma and Yunnan under the Qing state. Three empires, the Chinese, the British and the French, clashed in this region in the late 19th century, competing for natural resources and the control of commercial markets and flows. This period of time comprised the most extensive expansions of the British Empire and was a watershed for political transformations in the region. The Shan-Dai region comprised more than 30 small and interrelated polities, most of them under Shan (in Burmese) Dai (in Dai language) rulers. Until a series of wars in the mid- to late 18th century, Chinese bureaucracy from the Ming dynasty onwards incorporated most of the Dai rulers under China’s state administration by contributions of tributes and various acts of loyalty. This region was the imperial frontiers on Burma and southern Asia and, therefore, sensitive to disturbances which the imperial centre in Beijing read as a threat. In the late 1880s, encroachments into the Shan-Dai territories by the British (now in control of Burma) and the French (advancing from French Indo-China) changed the equation.
The project focused on the means by which British operations worked to establish control over the western part of the Shan-Dai polities. Claiming sovereign right to form suzerain governance as the successor to the king of Burma, British government established control of forest and mineral resources, as well as of the commercial routes into Yunnan. The project’s hypothesis has been that realities on the ground forced British decisions and acts at the time of conquest to be pragmatic and provisional rather than deriving from a universal idea of government in conquered territories or a general policy of administration. Their mode of operation depended on circumstance and place rather than on imperial principles or legal statutes.
This project developed from two earlier projects, one centring on the region from the Brahmaputra to the Indo-Burma Range, i.e. British India’s North-Eastern Frontier (1780-1840), and the other from a collaboration between five scholars, working in different regions within the span of the Brahmaputra to the Mekong and the eastern Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. (‘Boundaries, Polities, and the Making of a Citizen’ (VR 2010-14) and ‘The India-China Corridor’ (VR 2016-20), P.I. Gunnel Cederlöf) Both projects arrived at the conclusion that this large region needs to be understood and analysed as interconnected and interdependent. This is particularly important for our understanding of the formation of modern South and Southeast Asia. Results from these two projects have shown that the influential historiography of ‘British India’, based on a wealth of excellent historical research on subcontinental India, is insufficient for understanding the mode of conquering land in the region from the Brahmaputra to the Mekong. The present project revises the imperial history of this region by combining environmental and legal history, and crossing the Area Studies boundaries between South, Southeast and East Asia that still dominates research.
Unexpectedly, the present project has also benefited from the start of a new project and, especially, collaboration with the project team’s Chinese members (‘Trans-Himalayan Flows, Governance and Spaces of Encounter’ (VR 2022 ongoing) P.I. Gunnel Cederlöf). The RJ Sabbatical project was premised on work in the large archive collections held primarily in British Library, the archives of Cambridge University library, and Indian state archives. Present collaboration has given access to the Qing State’s archives and local historical sources such as family genealogies and temple inscriptions in the Dai region. This work is assisted by research and translations from classical Chinese into English by one of the team members. It means, in fact, that events reported in documents collected and kept by British administrators can be compared to documentation from the part of the Shan-Dai territories which was under China’s control. Such collaborative work has never been carried out earlier. Thereby, the work expanded, and the analysis deepened from the richness of sources. This has, of course, delayed the publication while deepened the analysis by influencing not only our understanding of British conquest of Burma but also of British imperial intentions and interests, which span British India’s North-Eastern Frontier, Burma, and western Yunnan. It has shown in empirical detail, British intentions to rule South and Southeast Asia while controlling China’s markets via territorial connections from India.
Parallel to the imperial level analysis, the project has provided empirically rich analyses of effects and strategies from within the Shan-Dai polities, as they were affected by multiple imperial encroachments. These compare to similar events, though slightly earlier, on India’s North-Eastern Frontier (Cederlöf, Oxford University Press 2014). Together, they show a British practice of establishing control of territory and people, which relied on the capacity to adopt and adjust to regionally specific conditions.
Most prominently, the project has established a British imperial practice of combining armed and bureaucratic violence as a means to secure governance over the conquered territories, which in different ways also applied to the large lands from the Brahmaputra to the borders of China. Such practice referred specifically to the annexation of polities that were autonomous entities or held semi-autonomous relations to stronger powers such as the Mughal, Burmese, or Chinese empires.
The RJ Sabbatical provided the necessary and undisturbed time to analyse such a large volume of historical sources. It has strongly contributed to more extensive collaboration with scholars working within the larger region, employed in China, India, Europe, and South Africa. My several stays in Cambridge as affiliated to Cambridge University Centre for South Asian Studies has opened up avenues for younger colleagues in Sweden to find their way into the quite complex and partly uncatalogued 19th century collections, and to the academic environment at the Centre.
The project focused on the means by which British operations worked to establish control over the western part of the Shan-Dai polities. Claiming sovereign right to form suzerain governance as the successor to the king of Burma, British government established control of forest and mineral resources, as well as of the commercial routes into Yunnan. The project’s hypothesis has been that realities on the ground forced British decisions and acts at the time of conquest to be pragmatic and provisional rather than deriving from a universal idea of government in conquered territories or a general policy of administration. Their mode of operation depended on circumstance and place rather than on imperial principles or legal statutes.
This project developed from two earlier projects, one centring on the region from the Brahmaputra to the Indo-Burma Range, i.e. British India’s North-Eastern Frontier (1780-1840), and the other from a collaboration between five scholars, working in different regions within the span of the Brahmaputra to the Mekong and the eastern Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. (‘Boundaries, Polities, and the Making of a Citizen’ (VR 2010-14) and ‘The India-China Corridor’ (VR 2016-20), P.I. Gunnel Cederlöf) Both projects arrived at the conclusion that this large region needs to be understood and analysed as interconnected and interdependent. This is particularly important for our understanding of the formation of modern South and Southeast Asia. Results from these two projects have shown that the influential historiography of ‘British India’, based on a wealth of excellent historical research on subcontinental India, is insufficient for understanding the mode of conquering land in the region from the Brahmaputra to the Mekong. The present project revises the imperial history of this region by combining environmental and legal history, and crossing the Area Studies boundaries between South, Southeast and East Asia that still dominates research.
Unexpectedly, the present project has also benefited from the start of a new project and, especially, collaboration with the project team’s Chinese members (‘Trans-Himalayan Flows, Governance and Spaces of Encounter’ (VR 2022 ongoing) P.I. Gunnel Cederlöf). The RJ Sabbatical project was premised on work in the large archive collections held primarily in British Library, the archives of Cambridge University library, and Indian state archives. Present collaboration has given access to the Qing State’s archives and local historical sources such as family genealogies and temple inscriptions in the Dai region. This work is assisted by research and translations from classical Chinese into English by one of the team members. It means, in fact, that events reported in documents collected and kept by British administrators can be compared to documentation from the part of the Shan-Dai territories which was under China’s control. Such collaborative work has never been carried out earlier. Thereby, the work expanded, and the analysis deepened from the richness of sources. This has, of course, delayed the publication while deepened the analysis by influencing not only our understanding of British conquest of Burma but also of British imperial intentions and interests, which span British India’s North-Eastern Frontier, Burma, and western Yunnan. It has shown in empirical detail, British intentions to rule South and Southeast Asia while controlling China’s markets via territorial connections from India.
Parallel to the imperial level analysis, the project has provided empirically rich analyses of effects and strategies from within the Shan-Dai polities, as they were affected by multiple imperial encroachments. These compare to similar events, though slightly earlier, on India’s North-Eastern Frontier (Cederlöf, Oxford University Press 2014). Together, they show a British practice of establishing control of territory and people, which relied on the capacity to adopt and adjust to regionally specific conditions.
Most prominently, the project has established a British imperial practice of combining armed and bureaucratic violence as a means to secure governance over the conquered territories, which in different ways also applied to the large lands from the Brahmaputra to the borders of China. Such practice referred specifically to the annexation of polities that were autonomous entities or held semi-autonomous relations to stronger powers such as the Mughal, Burmese, or Chinese empires.
The RJ Sabbatical provided the necessary and undisturbed time to analyse such a large volume of historical sources. It has strongly contributed to more extensive collaboration with scholars working within the larger region, employed in China, India, Europe, and South Africa. My several stays in Cambridge as affiliated to Cambridge University Centre for South Asian Studies has opened up avenues for younger colleagues in Sweden to find their way into the quite complex and partly uncatalogued 19th century collections, and to the academic environment at the Centre.