SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Joint South and East Asia History Seminarheast India

Jonathan Saha (University of Bristol)

Corruption and the Making of the Colonial State in Burma, 1890-1910

Corruption has often been conceptualised as a symptom of a malfunctioning state. This dated characterisation is unhelpful and misleading, and has an imperial heritage. For the British in Burma, the misconduct prevalent in the lower branches of the colonial administration was explained as an unfortunate hang-over from the pre-colonial state: the inherited problems of building a bureaucracy in an 'Oriental' society. Corrupt acts were thus depicted as aberrations caused by the imperfect implementation of a modern bureaucratic order.

However, the pervasive corruption and misconduct amongst subordinate officials in colonial Burma should not simply be dismissed as the epiphenomena of state formation. Instead, studied from an everyday perspective, we are able to see that it was often through corruption that the colonial state was made and experienced. This 'everyday state' was duplicitous, personal, despotic and gendered. In this paper I will explore how the colonial state was made through corruption in the delta of the Irrawaddy River at the turn of the twentieth century.

Willem van Schendel (University of Amsterdam and International Institute of Social History)

Defragmenting Asian Studies: The View from Northeast India

The area we now call ‘Northeast India’ provides a fascinating case study for historians of space. It had no meaning before 1947, when British India was partitioned. Since then, Partition has formed the iron frame of spatial imaginations of Northeast India. Partition is now a mindset, passed on from one generation of historians/social scientists to the next, just as it is passed down the generations of state officials/politicians. This has made it almost impossible to look across borders to note historical processes in China, Burma, Bhutan and Bangladesh that are very similar - and to provide explanations that go beyond ‘local’ or ‘Indian’ factors. The paper looks at four dimensions of Northeast India’s spatiality: a new space, a space whose boundaries are contested, a vertical space and a disintegrating space. Can we defragment, or re-unify, the study of this wider Asian region?