2 - Parliamentary Democracy Period: 1948–62

Summary

“The aims and ideals of a country are, as a rule, the cumulative products of its history and culture”.

His Excellency U Kyin, Ambassador of the Union of Burma to the Court of St. James, U.K., 1956

A. Introduction

As noted by many scholars, there were two outstanding historical experiences during the colonial period (1826–1947) which had left a deep impression and a bitter taste on the leaders and people of post-war Myanmar.

One of them was the loss of land by native cultivators and landowners to non-native and non-resident Indian landlords during the colonial period. The fact that the governing body then was deaf and dumb to this situation of increasing misery for increasing numbers of landless native cultivators made the bitter pill of experience even harder to swallow. Nearly half of the total cultivated area eventually came to be owned by non-native absentee landlords. Moreover, the emergence of the plural society in administration, commerce, and industry with Europeans at the top, Indians and Chinese in the middle, and Myanmar people at the bottom rung also left a very unsavoury impression of the colonial period.

The other has to do with the experience of opening up the country to foreign trade. Free trade, as practised in England, was the order of the day and with the exception of some monopolies, market forces were given full play. As noted by Mali, “Laissezfaire and competitive enterprise, two adjuncts of Anglo-Saxon liberalism, were the basic principles of commercial policy of British rule in Burma” (Mali 1962, p. 13).

Thus, by the end of the colonial period Myanmar became a lopsided export economy much dependent on the production and export of just one commodity, namely paddy. While this development greatly benefited the foreigners and their companies, it relegated the Myanmar peasants to the position of landless agrarian labourers almost totally excluded from any role in the process of modernization. Hill and Jayasuriya quoted Sundrum and Hlaing at length to the effect that after a long period of intensive “development” of the country's resources under the most highly recommended free trade patterns, Burma has emerged as a typical “underdeveloped” country.