I

The colonial administration's struggle to secure law and order in these decades is clearly evident in the figures for violent crime. Of course, care must be taken when using any crime figures. Perhaps most importantly here, an increase over time in the number of cases of, say, grievous hurt might be explained by improved police reporting, in other words, the increase was apparent and not real. In addition, account must be taken of increases in population, of the fact that more people, of itself, may well produce more crime. However, those considerations will not have had much impact in the present case, simply because the time period (the mid-1910s to the end of the 1930s) was too short for improved reporting and the increase in population to have contributed significantly to (as will be seen) a very marked increase in reported violent crime. The increase was real.

The Burma government's figures for four important categories of violent crime, from the mid-1910s to the end of the 1930s, are given in Table 1. It is generally accepted that official figures are more accurate for murder than for other forms of violent crime, principally because the presence of a body is difficult to ignore while the unexplained disappearance of a person creates suspicion and encourages enquiry. In the first column of the table, the exceptionally high murder count for 1931 and 1932 can, for present purposes, be ignored. The high figures for those two years are explained by the circumstances of a major rebellion, the Saya San Rebellion, which erupted in the final days of 1930, for the rebels killed considerable numbers of village headmen, isolated officials, Indian labourers, and those they suspected of being government spies, politically motivated killing that nevertheless the colonial administration chose to designate as ordinary crime, on a par with killings that occurred in the course of domestic arguments, drunken brawls, or disputes over land.

Table 1:

Murder, rape, grievous hurt, and dacoity in Burma, 1915–39

Notes: ‘Dacoity’ includes not only the offence itself but also ‘preparation and assembly for dacoity’; all figures are the ‘total of true cases’.

Source: constructed from the statistical appendices to the annual Report on the police administration of Burma. The last year before the war for which an annual report was published was 1939.

The figures that remain are still striking. At the end of the 1930s, the total of murders being committed in Burma each year was double the total in the mid-1910s.Footnote ¹³ The rise in the number of murders per year over those two and a half decades had been sustained, with few marked reverses and indeed with two major surges, through the mid-1920s and in the final years of the 1930s. In addition, according to an administrative calculation in the mid-1930s, the number of murders per million of the population had been thirty-six in 1914, rising with barely a break to sixty-nine per million in 1930.Footnote ¹⁴ It was further calculated that in 1928, Burma's murder rate (sixty-one per million of the population) had been twice that of the second most murderous province in British India, the Punjab (thirty-two per million), and three and a half times that of all Indian provinces excluding Burma (seventeen per million).

Moving to the second column in the table, there are strong reasons to argue that the incidence of rape in Burma in these years was seriously under-recorded in the official statistics. Jonathan Saha has found that British officials in Burma were in general dismissive or at least suspicious of accusations of rape, and that when dealing with an accusation would simply record that a serious assault had taken place and bring a charge of, for example, grievous hurt.Footnote ¹⁵ In a similar way, some incidents of violence against the person recorded as, for example, abduction, may also have involved rape: but that aspect of the crime would be left unrecorded. Finally, Saha points to numerous cases in the Burma delta in these years in which subordinate officials, notably policemen, township officers, and hospital assistants, used ‘their positions to sabotage or entirely suppress criminal accusations of rape’. With the near-certain prospect of official intransigence, it is therefore safe to assume that many rapes would not have been reported. Given these circumstances, perhaps all that can be said here is that over the period from the mid-1910s to the end of the 1930s, there was a marked increase in recorded rape.

In interpreting the figures for grievous hurt (column 3), it is important to note that the Indian Penal Code, the centre-piece of criminal law in colonial Burma, made provision for not only that offence (section 320) but also hurt (section 319) and attempt to murder (section 307). Each offence was defined in detail, of course. Thus, a hurt was designated as grievous if it involved, for example, the ‘permanent privation of the sight of either eye’ or the ‘fracture or dislocation of a bone or tooth’. Therefore, in dealing with a serious assault, the police and often the courts would need to decide under which section of the Indian Penal Code to charge and try the assailant. In other words, recording an assault as grievous hurt, rather than hurt or attempted murder, reflected the judgement of the police and courts in interpreting the provisions of the Penal Code. It is possible then that the considerable increase in the incidence of grievous hurt recorded between the mid-1910s and the end of the 1930s to a degree reflected changes in the attitudes and practices of the police (better trained and more experienced) and of the courts (under the pressure of public opinion) over that period. But in fact there appears to have been little such redistribution between the three offences, for the number of cases of attempted murder and in particular of hurt also increased markedly over these decades (the figures are not included in this table). In brief, the increase in cases – recorded cases of grievous hurt effectively doubled in these years – was real.

Dacoity was the colloquial Anglo-Indian term for banditry. It was defined in the Indian Penal Code (section 391) as ‘[w]hen five or more persons conjointly commit or attempt to commit a robbery’. But in practice, it was far more often violent robbery committed by an organized armed gang comprising many more than five. In column 4 of the table, the extraordinary figures for the rebellion years 1931 and 1932 can be ignored here: clearly the authorities were recording rebel attacks as dacoities, although the attacks were obviously political acts with perhaps no intention to rob. In the second half of the 1920s, there was a marked fall in dacoity, almost certainly the result of vigorous police action against dacoit gangs. That noted, comparing the second half of the 1930s to the second half of the 1910s, the number of recorded dacoities was substantially more than double. In the mid-1930s, the Burma administration calculated that there had been eleven cases of dacoity per million of the population in 1914 but thirty per million in 1930.Footnote ¹⁶

Poring over these figures, Burma's colonial officials saw before them an apparently inexorable rise in violent crime. At times, the official commentary, notably by the inspector-general of police in the annual report on police administration, despaired of the worsening crime situation. There was particular despair over the murder figures. In the 1927 police administration report, the inspector-general was blunt: ‘the number of murders in the province is appalling’.Footnote ¹⁷ In 1935, the murder rate was ‘little less than deplorable’.Footnote ¹⁸ And repeatedly through the final decades of British rule, the colonial administration declared Burma to be ‘the most criminal province in India’.Footnote ¹⁹

Turning to the rule of law, Burma's colonial administrators appear to have shown little interest in two structural failings that have drawn the attention of historians of empire in recent years. The first (noted earlier) is that in times of severe disorder, colonial governments would hasten to abandon the rule of law in a determination to restore law and order. The second is that while a central principle of the rule of law is the equality of individuals – all are equally subject to its strictures and all can equally claim its protection – ‘the most basic working principle of empire…was inequality – a necessary inequality of power between the British ruling class and the subject populations’.Footnote ²⁰ Europeans who committed violent crimes, even murder, could and did escape punishment, often entirely.Footnote ²¹

Rather, Burma's colonial administrators were concerned at failings in the day-to-day practices of the police and the courts that reduced the rule of law to tatters, in that they often allowed criminals to escape justice or left the innocent unprotected. The failings of the police and the courts filled page after page of the annual Report on the police administration of Burma (and other government publications) through the 1920s and 1930s. It was said that the investigation of serious crime was often poorly conducted by the police, the work being left to inefficient and frequently corrupt subordinates without direction from their superiors; that the police gathering and recording of evidence were often seriously flawed; and that the police were prone to send accused for trial with inadequately prepared papers, resulting in the collapse of the case.

The failings of the courts were more extensive still. The central criticism was that, in the words of Harold Fielding-Hall, for twenty years before the First World War a magistrate and judge in colonial Burma, ‘[t]he criminal courts are filled with perjury and false evidence’.Footnote ²² According to the colonial record, prosecution witnesses were commonly intimidated by the accused or his associates into retracting in court the evidence they had earlier given to the police, or they were simply bribed to change their story. In addition, it was common for the defence to hire false witnesses to provide fabricated testimony designed to destroy a prosecution case. It was repeatedly claimed in the annual police administration reports that, because many months would often pass between the time a crime was committed, police statements taken, and committal proceedings held, and the time the case came to trial, in court, prosecution witnesses would forget or misremember details of their evidence, or, more potently, under cross-examination by a tricky defence lawyer, become confused. Important here was the presence in and around the courts of self-constituted legal advisers, commonly retired subordinate officials or dismissed policemen or court clerks, who, for payment, set to work to confuse prosecution witnesses. A further failing of the courts, in official eyes, was the presence of Burmese assessors. Although appointed simply to advise the European judge on local custom and practice, apparently in murder trials they would frequently act as advocates for the accused, in the belief that in saving a man from being hanged they would earn religious merit. There was a final failing, again in official eyes. As noted earlier, the police complained repeatedly, in report after report, that the courts were demanding too high a standard of evidence before they would convict in murder cases, with the result that often the accused – undoubtedly guilty in the opinion not only of the police but also the local community – walked free. In those circumstances, argued the inspector-general of police in his report for 1919, it was not surprising that ‘the average Burman's confidence in our criminal law is gradually decreasing’.Footnote ²³

If failings in the day-to-day practices of the police and the courts inadvertently undermined the rule of law, there were three important pieces of legislation in force in the province in this period that, some senior officials charged, deliberately over-rode it. The first was section 110 of British India's Code of Criminal Procedure (1898). This stated that whenever a district magistrate received information that an individual within his jurisdiction was ‘by habit a robber, house-breaker, thief, or forger, or…habitually commits, or attempts to commit, or abets the commission of, the offence of kidnapping, abduction, extortion, cheating or mischief…or is so desperate and dangerous as to render his being at large without security hazardous to the community’, then the magistrate may require that individual ‘to show cause why he should not be ordered to execute a bond, with sureties, for his good behaviour for such period, not exceeding three years, as the Magistrate thinks fit to fix’. A subsequent section stated that when an individual had been ordered by the court to execute a bond to bind him to be of good behaviour, failed to do so, he was to be committed to prison. He had of course committed no offence, beyond failing to comply with the court order to give security. The intention of section 110 (and the following procedural sections) was to prevent crime being committed by those who, to judge by reports received, frequently hearsay, were said to have criminal intent.

The second piece of preventive legislation was the India-wide Criminal Tribes Act, 1911, that gave provincial governments the authority

And the third was the Burma Habitual Offenders Restriction Act, 1919, under which an habitual criminal, identified from police records, would be either confined to a designated village or area, or required to report in person at a stated place at stated times, or both.Footnote ²⁵ Misuse of the preventive sections by the authorities was common. In 1932, the commissioner in Sagaing Division recorded that, having fixed on a suspect, the police would frequently abandon any thought of proper investigation followed by a trial and, ‘adopting the line of least resistance’, use the preventive sections to send their suspect straight to prison.Footnote ²⁶ And in 1936, the commissioner in Irrawaddy Division noted the temptation for the police, when a suspect had been acquitted on a particular criminal charge, to use the preventive sections to put him in prison anyway.Footnote ²⁷ Two officials were (in retirement) damning. R. Grant Brown, who had been a magistrate and revenue officer in Burma for twenty-seven years, referred in his memoirs to the ‘injustice’ (and indeed stupidity) of the preventive sections of the criminal code.Footnote ²⁸ And writing in 1913, Fielding-Hall declared that each year the Burma administration was prosecuting under the preventive sections of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and either holding to heavy security or sending to jail with hard labour, ‘over two thousand persons who are not only not convicted of any offence, but are not accused of any offence…anything more unjust, more useless, more provocative of crime than this misuse of the [preventive] sections it is impossible to imagine’.Footnote ²⁹

To return to the central issue of this article: in what ways did British officials in late colonial Burma seek to navigate the disjuncture between the core imperial principles of securing law and order and embedding the rule of law, and a Burma reality – plain to see – in which the rates of violent crime soared and the rule of law was so frequently flouted?

II

British officials in late colonial Burma commonly responded to the divide by putting responsibility for the soaring murder rate and for the rampant perjury in the courts on the Burmese. At a basic level, this response drew on colonial-racial constructions of the Burmese character. For example, in 1918 the commissioner of Pegu Division declared that ‘the first cause of crime is to be found in the character of the people, the chief factor being lack of self-control’.Footnote ³⁰ In the 1921 police administration report, the district superintendent of police, Mandalay, took much the same line: ‘for so long as the natural traits of lack of self-restraint and uncontrollable passions predominate, it will be hopeless to expect any reduction in the deplorable number of murders committed’.Footnote ³¹

The Burmese were blamed on numerous other grounds as well. In almost every annual police administration report through the 1920s and 1930s, senior officers lamented the alleged failure of public opinion ‘to range itself on the side of law and order’.Footnote ³² The Burmese were repeatedly said to be reluctant to assist either the police or the courts. Indeed, cases were reported ‘of complete villages harbouring and feeding a dangerous criminal to save him from the clutches of the police’.Footnote ³³ Further blaming the Burmese for the soaring crime rate, British officials alleged a marked weakening in the moral influence of religion and in Burmese social cohesion, although they occasionally recognized, implicitly or explicitly, that colonial rule itself may have contributed to that decay. Crucial in weakening the moral influence of religion was a decline in the importance of monastery schools under British rule, schools which had provided children with religious instruction and moral training but apparently little practical knowledge, and the increasing popularity of lay schools, which taught the practical subjects, preparing children for the modern world, but little religion or morality.Footnote ³⁴

The weak social cohesion alleged by colonial officials arose principally, it could be said, from Burma's economic transformation under British rule. In the decades from the 1870s, the vast, sparsely populated Lower Burma delta had been cleared of forest, swamp, and tough undergrowth, and turned to the cultivation of rice for export. In the 1920s, Burma exported on average 2.68 million tons of rice and paddy each year – indeed, for some decades, Burma had been the single most important rice-exporting country in the world – and in that same decade, on average 9.25 million acres in Lower Burma were under paddy.Footnote ³⁵ The delta had been seized from nature and transformed into a vast rice plain by the labour of the Burmese, who had migrated into the delta districts in huge numbers from the more populated northern Burma. Crucially, however, the rice-cultivating population of the delta was unstable, both physically, as often the pioneer cultivator, having brought a tract into production would soon be driven from his holding by thugs, the destruction of his crop by pests, or by debt, and be forced, repeatedly, to clear a new tract on the rice frontier and start again, but also economically unstable, as he rose and fell through the ranks of landowner, tenant, and labourer. The social order in the delta was thus highly fragmented, transitory, untethered. And with cultivators and their families moving on every few years or indeed each year – dispossessed owner-cultivators seeking a new tract on the rice frontier, tenants escaping harsh terms, landless labourers looking for work – the social restraints on unlawful or indeed merely disruptive behaviour that might naturally evolve in long-established and stable communities were here largely absent. According to the British scholar-official, J. S. Furnivall, writing in the late 1940s, ‘it was impossible that any communal feeling should develop; often there was not even a monastery to serve as a nucleus of social life’.Footnote ³⁶

Many senior officials, in addition to Furnivall, clearly understood the harsh circumstances of the rural Burmese under British rule and saw in them the cause of Burma's soaring crime rate. The commissioner of Irrawaddy Division, writing in the mid-1920s, might be quoted at some length:

A deputy commissioner, Major Edward Butterfield, recorded in the police administration report for 1921, was comparably direct. The ‘Burman sinks into a subservient position in his own country’, he declared. ‘His lands pass into the hands of the foreigner; first, whose tenant he becomes; then his labourer…The foreigner accumulates fortunes, while he gets poorer in his own land…All this contributes to a sense of resentment and dissatisfaction…Naturally, he is driven more and more to crime.’Footnote ³⁸ The Resolution on that same police administration report offered a resigned perspective: ‘[t]he growth of crime is…perhaps part of the price which Burma has to pay for her rapid development’.Footnote ³⁹ Soaring crime was simply the downside of colonial progress.

To focus on Burmese weakness to explain rising crime rates – weakness in character, public spirit, religious-moral training, in social cohesion – was of course to focus on Burmese difference. The colonial-racial construction of Burmese difference was also evident in the charge of rampant perjury in the courts. This construction, ingrained in the British mind across colonial India, held that the land was ‘teeming with [forgers], professional witnesses, and a general population that could not distinguish fact from fiction’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In sharp contrast, the British in India constructed for themselves a ‘special cultural relationship to the truth’.Footnote ⁴¹ As Curzon, the viceroy, told Calcutta University graduates in 1905, ‘the highest ideal of truth is to a large extent a Western conception’.Footnote ⁴²

But there was also a quite different perspective on the rampant perjury said to plague colonial Burma's courts. Writing in 1913, Fielding-Hall declared: ‘A man who will tell you the truth as individual to individual will commit perjury before you in [the] Courts and think nothing of it…in the Courts you are not a man, you are an official.’Footnote ⁴³ For Fielding-Hall, in British-ruled Burma a trial was not an impartial search for truth and justice but a duel, and an unequal duel at that. On the one side, a clever prosecution lawyer who conducts a cross-examination as ‘a sort of forensic show-off…at the cost of the witness, and frequently at the cost of justice’, on the other, ‘a poor devil of a villager…who is ignorant [and] who if he can afford a pleader [advocate] at all can only afford a very indifferent one’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In that situation, when the accused or witnesses lied in court, they were simply seeking, in Fielding-Hall's view, ‘to counterbalance the injustice of the law by a little judicious weighting of the scales’.Footnote ⁴⁵ What the British saw as rampant perjury, the Burmese saw as justifiable resistance to an imposed and unjust judicial system.Footnote ⁴⁶

There is the further observation that while the British official saw the functions of the court as being ideally to determine the facts when a crime was alleged, to establish guilt (or innocence), and to impose punishment – the rule of law – the Burmese used the courts as an instrument to defeat rivals, settle scores, and for material gain. In his study of misconduct and corruption in the Burma delta around 1900, Saha reported that subordinate officials fabricated evidence, framed the innocent, and secured acquittals on false testimony in pursuit of those aims.Footnote ⁴⁷ In Ceylon under British rule, John D. Rogers argued, ‘the courts were treated as an amoral source of power which could be used by those skilful enough to manipulate them’.Footnote ⁴⁸ He explained: ‘One did not in court make statements which were true or false but ones which were either effective or ineffective.’Footnote ⁴⁹ And in the southern districts of Madras Presidency in the first half of the twentieth century, Radha Kumar found that the filing of police reports – and a substantial proportion of reports to the police were ultimately deemed to be fabricated – ‘provided a mechanism for villagers to insert the disputes that were part of everyday life into the state's legal apparatus’.Footnote ⁵⁰ With that purpose, false accusation and fabricated evidence were thus integral to the court's proceedings.

Rampant perjury clearly thwarted Burma's colonial government as it sought to embed the rule of law, to fulfil that core imperial principle. On reflection, however, British officials might argue that, despite being thwarted, the colonial judicial structure was surely some advance on the anarchy and arbitrary punishment that had marked the strife-torn pre-colonial state.Footnote ⁵¹ More importantly, curbing perjury – by reforming the Burmese character and behaviour, perhaps through education – could itself provide legitimation for the colonial presence. In this way, colonial perceptions of the prevalence of perjury ‘paradoxically served both to destabilize and to sustain faith in the rule of law as colonial justification’.Footnote ⁵²

But a number of colonial officials saw little prospect of securing the rule of law. ‘There is a general consensus of opinion’, stated the inspector-general of police in the mid-1920s, ‘that the judicial system in force in Burma is not suited to the country’.Footnote ⁵³ The report of a government enquiry, published in 1923, into the recent increase in violent crime in Burma was explicit:

This was an extreme form of the argument that responsibility for the perjury in colonial Burma's courts (and soaring violence across the province) lay with the Burmese. With ‘primitive standards’, the Burmese were incapable, at least as yet, of absorbing colonial modernity.

Blaming soaring crime and rampant perjury on the character of the Burmese – as a strategy to navigate the divide between imperial principles and Burma's reality – shaped the colonial administration in important ways. It would draw senior officials away from a more critical but constructive examination of the crises. More importantly, it discouraged the commitment of further government resources to confront them, for in truth there was only so much government could do – it was said. It is important to note here that following a substantial reduction in the civil police establishment at the beginning of the 1920s, from almost 16,000 in 1920–1 to just under 13,000 in 1925–6, police numbers were then held down at just over 13,000 through to the mid-1930s (except for two years early in the decade), despite the soaring murder rate.Footnote ⁵⁵ Why commit more resources to the police when violent crime resided deep in the character of the Burmese?

There were further ways in which senior British officials navigated the disjuncture between the two imperial principles of law and order and the rule of law, and late colonial Burma's reality. Each, differently, involved ignoring the issue, at least to some degree. The officials who were confronted most directly by the divide were, naturally, those immediately responsible for securing law and order and for administering justice, the police and judiciary, but also those with broad administration responsibilities, district officers, the division commissioners, and senior officials in the Rangoon secretariat, up to and including the governor. But most colonial officials in late British Burma had some other responsibility, for example, for the provision of modern education and health, the construction of public works, the management of forests, or for the land settlement. An official in, say, colonial Burma's education department had little need to concern himself with rising violent crime or Burma's malfunctioning courts. Far more importantly here, however, education itself was an important aspect of modernity, one that, for officials in the department, would itself justify the colonial presence. Moreover, officials across the administration would see the staggering transformation of Burma under British rule into the single most important rice-exporting country in the world, the turning of Rangoon from ‘a wilderness of mud and a labyrinth of hovels’ into a modern administrative and commercial capital, and, in time, the transfer of senior administrative and political positions to Burmese, the preparation for independence, each itself as a justification for the British presence.Footnote ⁵⁶ In brief: while to maintain law and order and to embed the rule of law were crucial in securing the legitimation of colonial rule in the eyes of the rulers, legitimacy rested on other foundations as well.

There were a few colonial officials – in British Burma, the imperial police officer Eric Blair is one example – who failed to navigate the disjuncture, who came to see that the contradiction between imperial claims to be advancing a liberal modernity and the reality of colonial rule was so severe as to destroy the justification for the empire, and who therefore resigned from the service. In his essay ‘Shooting an elephant’, published in 1936, Eric Blair, writing under the name George Orwell, declared: ‘at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better…I hated [the job] more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Others in colonial service, comparably disillusioned, remained in post, at least for some time. A striking example here is that of Michael Carritt, an élite ICS (Indian Civil Service) official, who rose in the mid-1930s to under secretary in the Bengal secretariat, responsible for reading the weekly secret reports by the Calcutta police commissioner on the movements of political suspects but who at the same time worked underground with the proscribed Communist Party of India.Footnote ⁵⁸

But there is evidence to suggest that the majority of colonial officials, whether by inclination or because of the pressure of routine work, simply did not closely ponder the legitimacy of their rule, did not struggle with the divide between imperial principles and colonial reality, although the reality in itself might often disturb them. In Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925, Peter Walsh, returning to London after years of service in India, reflects on that time: ‘journeys; rides; quarrels; adventures; bridge parties; love affairs; work; work, work!’Footnote ⁵⁹ There are echoes of these reflections in the published memoirs of A. J. S. White, who served in the Burma administration from 1922 to 1937, at times holding senior posts in the secretariat in Rangoon. Here too are journeys, touring, cricket, the Pegu Club, shooting snipe, one love affair (he married the lady). But White also had interesting reflections on work, work, work, and on colonial legitimacy.

The same point was made by the vastly experienced Burma official Sir John Clague in his unpublished autobiographical fragments: ‘The burden of much of what I have said about my life and work in Burma is in essence that routine engulfed me, and under the weight of so much routine I could not see the wood for the trees.’Footnote ⁶¹ It should be added that for countless officials across the empire, the job was dreary and mundane, ‘endless hours responding to trivial letters and officiously collecting information’. There was, argues Jeffrey Auerbach, ‘an underlying banality to the British imperial experience’.Footnote ⁶² These were not circumstances that would encourage reflection on higher principle or purpose.

There is a final point here. In his study of British rule in India, Jon Wilson concludes that ‘the idea of strong, consistent, effective British power in India was a…delusion…British rule as the source of peace, order and secure property rights was a fantasy, projected by anxious administrators to persuade themselves and their British public they were in the right’.Footnote ⁶³ Law and order and the rule of law may well have been the ideological foundations for British rule in India from the mid-nineteenth century but in their day-to-day work in the Burma districts and in the Rangoon secretariat in the twentieth, officials were forced to confront the limited reach of their authority, the fact that colonial administration was often chaotic, exercised only sporadically, and fragmented (Wilson adjectives), and thus forced to recognize that soaring crime and rampant perjury in the courts were essentially beyond their capacity to suppress. Faced with the practicalities of administration, the disjuncture between imperial principles and colonial realities and the implications of that disjuncture for colonial legitimacy had little purchase in an official's thinking. It could be put to one side.

III

Reading through those reminiscences of retired Burma officials written long after the end of British rule, it is striking that many, far from seeking to navigate the disjuncture between imperial principles and reality, openly questioned the purpose and legitimacy of the colonial presence. Robert Mole, who served in Burma between 1938 and 1947, titled the final chapter of his memoir, completed in 1963, ‘The reckoning’. He opened by declaring that any former colonial official ‘must ask himself certain fundamental questions…Did [colonial] administration…do more harm than good?’Footnote ⁶⁴ Despite cautioning that there was no simple answer to that question, still he was direct and damning, arguing that British rule in Burma had ‘undermined the highly complex social organisation of the Burmese…[and that] the breakdown of the traditional social [and religious] restraints had disastrous consequences…most clearly seen in the phenomenal increase in crimes of violence: murders, robberies and dacoities’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Writing in 1977, C. J. Richards, who had served in the Burma administration from 1921, wondered ‘whether all our toil and sweat, all our strivings for justice and fair government, were worth while…had I been a Burman myself…between 1930 and 1947…I might well have been a Nationalist’.Footnote ⁶⁶ And, as noted earlier, at the beginning of the 1990s, White could reflect that ‘we did not often stop to think about the worthwhileness to Burma of what we were doing. Perhaps we should have paused more often to take stock.’Footnote ⁶⁷

Mole, Richards, and White were of course writing not only long after the event but also when each had reached the stage of life at which an unrefracted judgement on lives led perhaps comes more easily. Nevertheless, there are grounds to suggest that for many colonial officials, still in post and loyal and conscientious in their service, that shift in perspective had been underway for some time, indeed from the final years of empire. There is evidence here in the papers of Sir John Clague, adviser to the secretary of state for Burma, dating from the early 1940s. As noted earlier, in his autobiographical fragments he condemned colonial Burma's criminal justice system for having ‘failed hopelessly for serious crime’.Footnote ⁶⁸ And writing in London during the war, he declared that on the evacuation of Burma in 1942 ahead of the Japanese advance, almost all Europeans, official and non-official, held that the political reforms that had been pursued by the colonial government in the 1920s and 1930s had been a failure. ‘Parliamentary democracy…seemed to have proved an unsuitable instrument…and it looked as though it were only a matter of time before there was a complete breakdown.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Faith in the colonial project – confidence in the colonial achievement – was significantly damaged. For colonial officials, the disjuncture between imperial principles and on-the-ground realities was now even more severe. I would suggest that three factors were important here.

Martin Thomas has argued that the interwar world depression marked a watershed in the breakdown of the European colonial order: it was a ‘hinge’ connecting a decade of rapid growth ‘to a more troubled decade of [economic] contraction,…nationalism and resurgent internal conflict’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Certainly the 1930s, the last full decade of British rule in Burma, saw the colonial administration face a number of the most serious social, economic, and political crises, as noted in the introduction. One of those crises, soaring violent crime, has been the focus of this article. While in the first half of the 1920s, on average around 650 true cases of murder were recorded each year, well over 900 were recorded for both 1938 and 1939 and it was estimated that in 1940 the total number of murders would probably exceed 1,500.Footnote ⁷¹ In mid-1941, the Burma Office in London, long concerned by the appalling murder figures being reported by Rangoon – ‘a lamentable state of affairs’ – recorded that the ‘Burma administration seems to be on the verge of losing its grip on the situation’.Footnote ⁷²

There were other serious crises. In the final days of 1930, a major rebellion erupted in Tharrawaddy District, north of Rangoon, and then swept rapidly through the delta, in time reaching as far as the Shan States in the north-east. Although the rebellion was broken by mid-1931 – the alleged leader, Saya San, was captured in the August and executed the following November – significant violence and disorder continued well into 1932. Local military forces were augmented by seven battalions sent from India.Footnote ⁷³ Late 1930 also saw a dramatic collapse in rice prices – the onset of the world depression – that caused large numbers of cultivators to default on their loans and lose their land to their creditors.Footnote ⁷⁴ By the mid-1930s, Burmese cultivators owned less than half the agricultural land in the Pegu and Irrawaddy Divisions, comprising ten of the principal rice-surplus districts of Lower Burma. The dispossession of Burma's rice-cultivators was strikingly described by Furnivall, writing in the late 1940s. The ‘epic of bravery and endurance’ that was the reclamation of the Burma delta from swamp and jungle by Burmese enterprise ‘ends with a picture of imposing Government offices and business houses in Rangoon, and gilded chettyar temples in Tanjore, while in the rice districts…a landless people can show little for their labour but their debts’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Further crises should be noted. In May 1930, there were violent clashes in Rangoon between Indian dock workers and Burmese labourers who had been brought in to break a strike on the docks, clashes that continued for two weeks and left, according to an official report, around one hundred dead and about a thousand injured, almost all Indians.Footnote ⁷⁶ There were further anti-Indian riots in 1938, again with substantial casualties. And then, through the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Burma's domestic politics were often in turmoil. In 1923, a dyarchy government structure had been brought in for Burma, in which the ministers for transferred subjects (agriculture, excise, health, public works, forestry, and education) were responsible to a largely elected legislative council. That structure was discarded under the 1935 Government of Burma Act, which came into effect in 1937, and replaced by a cabinet of nine Burmese ministers responsible to an elected House of Representatives. As securing and holding political office now brought much greater power, the rivalries between Burmese politicians, parties, and factions grew more intense, as might well have been anticipated. Every tactic, intrigue, and manoeuvre was employed both in the legislature and outside to bring down political opponents, while the vernacular press resorted to sensational misrepresentation to inflame popular anger and provoke violence.Footnote ⁷⁷ In December 1940, Burma's governor, Archibald Cochrane, deploring ‘the lawlessness’ of government in Burma in recent years, minuted: ‘we must expect that weak minded people [implying Burmese politicians] will try to model themselves on the gangsters of Germany and Italy’.Footnote ⁷⁸ John Clague's dismay over the state of Burmese politics at that time was noted earlier. And, the final crisis, from late December 1941, Japanese forces rapidly drove the British from Burma. The colonial state failed in its prime responsibility, to defend the realm. Each of the failures of the British administration in Burma in the 1930s – to bring down violent crime, to secure order and prosperity in the rice districts, to avoid communal rioting, to achieve a transfer of power to a stable Burmese political élite, to defend the realm – sharply eroded the confidence of those who ruled in the purpose and legitimacy of their presence.

The confidence of colonial officials was further eroded by a second factor. David Potter has established that from the mid-1910s through to the 1940s there was a recurrent crisis in European recruitment into the Indian Civil Service, the ‘steel frame’ of the British administration of India. And although more Indians were recruited into the ICS during that period, the number was held in check to prevent the administration from being ‘swamped’. Consequently, its overall size contracted and thus, Potter argues, ‘critical control points in the colonial structure meant for the I.C.S. were gradually…abandoned’.Footnote ⁷⁹ The recruitment crisis was sufficiently serious to suggest ‘the distinct possibility’ that the British had to withdraw from India after the war because they now had insufficient ‘personnel on whom they could rely to continue their rule’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Moreover, the recruitment of Indians to the ICS in significant numbers from the 1920s (in Burma, the recruitment of Burmese) and the introduction of ministerial government left European officials with a sense of declining importance as well as the conviction that standards of government service had been compromised. By the 1920s, it was apparent, argues one historian, that ‘British politicians were more interested in placating [the] nationalists than [in] maintaining the morale of the services’ and therefore let ICS ‘pay and power wither away’.Footnote ⁸¹ In April 1939, James de Vine, a senior police officer in Burma from 1921, took premature retirement, ‘unable to serve with peace of mind and give of his best’ under the conditions created by the new constitutional structures introduced in 1937.Footnote ⁸² There were almost certainly others who left in similar circumstances around this time.

The third factor to cause the shift in the perspective of colonial officials on their presence and purpose was the imminence of the end of empire. This argument has been advanced by Benjamin Zachariah: ‘the Second World War…brought home to all concerned that the British departure from India…was a matter of a few years…[and as] this became evident, constructing a retrospective view of the achievements and significance of empire became for many [British officials] a way of coming to terms with it’.Footnote ⁸³ Zachariah explores that retrospective construction through the writings and correspondence of Penderel Moon, a senior ICS official, in the 1940s. Moon's main theme was ‘the failure of British imperialism to live up to its promise’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The construction involved both a statement of British imperial ideals (the promise) and a recognition that as rulers the British had failed to secure those ideals, that they had sought, for example, to embed the rule of law – bringing in law codes, rules of evidence, and modern judicial structures – but that the result was a legal process awash with perjury. A character in Penderel Moon's Strangers in India, published in 1944, was notably concise when recognizing colonial failure while at the same time restating the well-intended imperial principle: ‘whatever the defects of our [legal] system, we have at any rate introduced into India the conception of the rule of law’.Footnote ⁸⁵

The imminence of the end of empire shifted fundamentally the colonial official's perspective on his presence and purpose. He had long sought to navigate the divide between imperial principles and colonial reality, in an attempt to secure legitimation for his rule in his own eyes. In British-ruled Burma, for example, he had navigated the divergence from the imperial principles of law and order and the rule of law by placing responsibility for the province's soaring violence and failure of judicial processes firmly on the Burmese. Through Burma's social, economic, and political crises of the 1930s the divide between the ideological foundations of British rule and colonial realities had widened, thus making navigation more difficult. But then, in the early 1940s, with the close prospect of the end of British rule, the legitimation of the colonial presence was now of less pressing importance. The failure of colonial administration to live up to its ideological rhetoric could now be more openly faced.