Statecraft in Myanmar, previously referred to as Burma, has a
lineage going back ten centuries or more. While the state today is
expected to provide many other services for a vastly larger
population than were its pre-modern predecessors, its basic
functions of maintaining order, controlling economic distribution,
and ensuring the perpetuation of itself and its elite managers,
remain much the same. The tools available now to do so may be
different, and the challenges it faces may have grown, but the
issues it addresses would be familiar to the predecessors of the
modern rulers of Myanmar. Myanmar, with its estimated population of
about 55 million, the 24th largest country in the world, is larger
than England. With a territory as big as Texas, it is wedged
between the two of the oldest civilizations and now dynamic
economies on the globe, India and China. Having been influenced by
both India and China for centuries, Myanmar has developed its own
cultural distinctiveness in contrast with its near neighbors in
Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
Once governed as a British Indian province, Myanmar emerged from
the colonial era and the Second World War an economically
devastated but strongly nationalistic socialist state. Riven since
independence by armed ethnic and ideological conflicts that lasted
most of the years between 1948 and the 1990s, when ceasefire
agreements were reached with multiple insurgent armies, Myanmar's
little-studied politics contain elements common to many countries.
However, in few have the complexity of forces, historical and
contemporary, religious and secular, foreign and indigenous, come
together in one place to create so many little understood, and
seemingly irresolvable, political issues. The State in Myanmar
attempts to draw the complex history of state-making and state
perpetuation in Myanmar in one volume. The social and economic
forces, as well as international and domestic issues, which have
made Myanmar one of the poorest and least understood Asian
countries, are discussed. The efforts of Myanmar's kings, British
colonial officials, nationalist politicians, socialist ideologues,
and army generals to preserve the state in Myanmar is a history
worth attempting to understand on its own terms.
General
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