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SALT AND SOVEREIGNTY IN COLONIAL BURMA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2020

JAGJEET LALLY Open the ORCID record for JAGJEET LALLY [Opens in a new window]
JAGJEET LALLY*
Affiliation:
University College London
*
Department of History, University College London, Gower Street, London, wc1e 6btjagjeet.lally@ucl.ac.uk
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Abstract

Across monsoon Asia, salt is of such vital necessity that controlling its production or supply has historically been connected to the establishment and expression of political authority. On the one hand, rulers maintained the allegiance of their subjects by ensuring their access to salt of suitable price and sufficient quantity. On the other hand, denying rebels their salt was a strategy of conquest and pacification, while the necessity of salt meant it could reliably be taxed to raise state finances. This article first sets out this connection of salt and sovereignty, then examining it in the context of colonial Burma, a province of British India from its annexation until its ‘divorce’ in 1935 (effected in 1937), and thus subject to the Government of India's salt monopoly. Focusing on salt brings into view two aspects of the state (while also permitting analysis of ‘Upper Burma’, which remains rather marginal in the scholarly literature). First, the everyday state and quotidian practices constitutive of its sovereignty, which was negotiated and contested where indigenes were able to exploit the chinks in the state's administrative capacity and its knowledge deficits. Second, in turn, the lumpy topography of state power. The state not only failed to restrict salt production to the extent it desired (with the intention that indigenes would rely on imported salt, whose supply was easier to control and thus tax), but conceded to a highly complex fiscal administration, the variegations in which reflected the uneven distribution in state power – thicker in the delta and thinnest in the uplands.

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The Historical Journal , Volume 64 , Issue 3 , June 2021 , pp. 650 - 673
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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References

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26 This article does not describe the nature of Burma's salt industry, its technologies, and so forth, in any detail, a forensic account and census of which in the various districts can be found in IOR/V/27/324/24: Thurley, R. M., Note on the salt boiling industry in Burma (Rangoon, 1908)Google Scholar.

27 Saha, Law, disorder and the colonial state, p. 4.

28 IOR/V/24/3934: Report on the administration of salt revenue in Burma for the year 1897 (Rangoon, 1898), p. 1.

29 Note that citations from sources from the National Archives of Myanmar (NAM) take the following format: government department, year, file number, accession number, page number. In the case of IOR materials, the full shelfmark precedes a short description of the item.

30 Saha, ‘Is it in India?’.

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33 Agha, ‘Trans-Indus salt’, especially pp. 25–38. On the trade networks plied by Afghans in north India and central Eurasia, see Lally, Jagjeet, India and the Silk Roads (London, 2020)Google Scholar, ch. 4.

34 Kolsky, ‘Colonial rule of law’, here pp. 1224–5.

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37 Reflexively, efforts to control the country contributed to knowledge about it, including its trade. J. G. Scott, then superintendent of the Northern Shan States, authored ‘The pacification of the West Mang Lün with notes on the Wild Wa Country’ in June 1893 while at Lashio, within which he notes the routine barter of opium, walnuts, and other wares obtained by the Möng Maü people for the rice and salt available in the valley settlements. The report is published in Reports on Wa State by British officers during the colonial period – II (Rangoon?: Archives Dept, 1980?), of which pp. 19–20 for the above details. Note: the Wa States were also known as the Gold Tracts, as Wa Pet Hken and Mong Lem, or else as the northern cis-Salween States of Hsi Paw and North and South Hsenwi.

38 Crosthwaite, Pacification of Burma, passim.

39 NAM, Upper Burma, Forest Department, 1886, 558, 2228, p. 2.

40 NAM, Foreign Department, Political, 1886, No. 66, 1856, citations pp. 3 and 4, respectively.

41 Yet, despite its importance, the tour of the Government of India's salt inspector did not extend to Burma, his report relaying only second-hand information from that province: IOR/V/27/324/3: Report on the system of weighing salt in Bengal, Madras, Bombay, Sindh, Northern India, and Burmah (Calcutta, 1890), here p. 24.

42 NAM, Upper Burma, Forest Department, 1886, 558, 2228, citation p. 4 and notice of repeal of the prohibition on p. 9.

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44 Carrapiett, Kachin tribes, p. 9 and citation pp. 88–9.

45 Ibid., p. 89.

46 IOR/V/27/824/26: The Burma salt manual (Rangoon, 1910).

47 Ibid., citation on p. 2, and p. 13.

48 NAM, Office of the Commissioner Irrawaddy Division, Finance Department, Excise, 1888, 17E4, 8486, p. 8.

49 Ibid., pp. 10–11, 45, 59–60.

50 Ibid., pp. 62–3.

51 Ibid., p. 64.

52 Ibid., pp. 70–1.

53 Ibid., pp. 56–7, 75, 87–8. The financial commissioner later suggested that locally manufactured salt was held in higher esteem than imported salt, although it is not clear whether this included European salt or accounted for regional variations in preferences: NAM, Office of the Commissioner Irrawaddy Division, Revenue Department, 1891, 7SL, 13081, p. 2. Most of the European salt was from Liverpool at first, before being superseded by German salt, as discussed below.

54 This was revised in 1894, when a duty of 6 annas per maund of imported salted fish was levied; Report on the administration of salt revenue…1897, p. 2.

55 For the strict rules by which salt subject to direct duty was to be stored, weighed, and so forth, see Burma salt manual, pp. 42–4.

56 Ibid., pp. 5 and 17–18.

57 Report on the administration of salt revenue…1897, pp. 1–2.

58 Burma salt manual, p. 40.

59 Ibid., p. 41.

60 IOR/V/24/3934: Report on the administration of salt revenue in Burma for the year 1901 (Rangoon, 1902), p. 1.

61 Burma salt manual, p. 24.

62 Willem Van Schendel, ‘Origins of the Burma rice boom, 1850–1880’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 17 (1987), pp. 456–72.

63 Saha, Law, disorder and the colonial state; Wright, Opium and empire.

64 NAM, Office of the Commissioner Irrawaddy Division, Revenue Department, 1891, 7SL, 13081, p. 15.

65 Myint-U, Burma, p. 142.

66 NAM, Office of the Commissioner Irrawaddy Division, Revenue Department, 1891, 7SL, 13081, p. 2.

67 Note: the extent of contraband operations is discussed in each of the annual reports on the administration of salt revenue examined and discussed here.

68 Burma salt manual, p. 37.

69 IOR/V/24/3934: Report on the administration of salt revenue in Burma for the year 1900 (Rangoon, 1901), p. i.

70 Burma salt manual, p. 37.

71 Ibid., p. 38.

72 Ibid., p. 38, for the list of districts.

73 For discussion of the effects of this policy in Burma, including the feeling – and resultant efforts – of the state to detect where individuals were ‘abusing’ the new policy: IOR/V/24/3935: Report on the administration of salt revenue in Burma during the year 1934–35 (Rangoon, 1936), p. 11.

74 Report on the administration of salt revenue…1897, pp. 2–3.

75 IOR/V/24/3934: Report on the administration of salt revenue in Burma for the year 1898 (Rangoon, 1899), p. 2.

76 On production in Shwebo and Sagaing, in addition to details in Figure 2 above, see: NAM, Office of the Commissioner Irrawaddy Division, Revenue Department, 1891, 7SL, 13081, p. 2; IOR/V/24/3934: Report on the administration of salt revenue in Burma for the year 1899 (Rangoon, 1900), p. 2. The composition rates were higher than elsewhere, probably indicative of larger pots or cauldrons as necessary for larger-scale production (i.e. for sale in proximate markets): Burma salt manual, pp. 18–19. Other reports indicate that Bhamo's import of Shwebo salt for onward trade was quite modest, contributing only 110 maunds of a total of 36,210 maunds – for purchase by Shan and Kachin tribes as well as onward trade – in 1900: Report on the administration of salt revenue…1899, p. 5.

77 IOR/V/24/3934: Report on the administration of salt revenue in Burma during the year 1909 (Rangoon, 1910), p. 3.

78 For a statement of the perception that Burmese had steadily been switching to imported salt over the final three decades of the century: Report on the administration of salt revenue…1897, p. 3.

79 IOR/V/24/4256: Note on the transfrontier trade of Burma, 1906–07 (Rangoon, 1907), p. 1, where it is also recorded that the colonial state had no idea whether or how much duty was levied.

80 Report on the administration of salt revenue…1899, p. 13.

81 Report on the administration of salt revenue…1909, p. 6; IOR/V/24/3935: Report on the administration of salt revenue in Burma during the year 1922–23 (Rangoon, 1923). In turn, these changes subtly transformed trade across the frontier, which is the subject of forthcoming work by the author.

82 For a general history, see Bayly, Christopher and Harper, Tim, Forgotten armies: Britain's Asian empire and the war with Japan (London, 2005)Google Scholar.

83 IOR/M/3/1421: ‘Rehabilitation of the Burma salt industry’, F. D. Odell (secretary for agriculture and rural economy), 27 Dec. 1944.

84 IOR/M/3/1421: ‘Memorandum’, 9 June 1944.

85 IOR/M/3/1421: F. D. Odell, the secretary for agriculture and rural economy, to his excellency the governor of Burma, Colonel Sir Reginald Hugh Dorman-Smith, 27 Dec. 1944.

86 Chibber, H. L., ‘The salt industry of Amherst district’, Journal of the Burma Research Society, 19 (1929), pp. 47–56Google Scholar, of which the analysis on p. 52 and plates II–III demonstrate Amherst's significance as well as the impact of the Great War years on dramatically – albeit temporarily – enlarging output, and p. 54 for discussion of the reliance on moneylenders and its (negative) impact on profits in turn that the author of this article has not seen discussed elsewhere.

87 De, Rohit, A people's constitution: the everyday life of law in the Indian Republic (Princeton, NJ, 2018)Google Scholar, is but one brilliant recent example of an emerging wave of scholarship that similarly understands the state and sovereignty not as abstracts to be understood through the study of political and legal thought (and their instantiations), but as practices whose content and character was fleshed out in the quotidian – often, material or commercial – realm through everyday encounters.

88 Burton, Antoinette and Mawani, Renisa, eds., Animalia: an anti-imperial bestiary for our times (Durham, NC, 2020)Google Scholar, for a wide range of scholarly perspectives from across the British empire.

89 Bello, David A., ‘To go where no Han could go for long: malaria and the Qing construction of ethnic administrative space in frontier Yunnan’, Modern China, 31 (2005), pp. 283–317CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

90 Mukherjee, Erica, ‘The impermanent settlement: Bengal's riparian landscape, 1793–1846’, South Asian Studies, 36 (2020), pp. 20–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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92 Around the same time as Thompson, the idea of ‘moral economy’ was used to explain anti-colonial protest in Burma in a now classic work: Scott, Moral economy.

93 De, A people's constitution, p. 52 for citation.

94 See, above, n. 31.

95 Hopkins, Benjamin D., Ruling the savage periphery: frontier governance and the making of the modern state (Cambridge, MA, 2020), pp. 2–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar and passim.

96 See, above, n. 25.

97 Hopkins, Ruling the savage periphery, p. 5.

98 Ibid., p. 7.

99 Ibid., pp. 56–7.