Chronological Index:

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 Introduction

Though trading along Burmese coasts from the early 17th century, the British drastically expanded their political influence over Burma throughout the 19th century. Three successful Anglo-Burmese wars (1824-26, 1852-53 and 1885) gradually incorporated the Burmese territories into the British Indian colonial enterprise. The last king of the Konbaung dynasty, Thibaw (1878-1885), was deposed and exiled to western India in January 1886, marking the complete annexation of the Burmese province by the British crown, from then on directly ruled by India’s Vice-Roy administration (Blackburn, 2000). The first ten years of British colonization (1886-1896) were marked by brutal campaigns of «pacification» launched by colonial troops, both in Burma’s central plains dominated by the Burman ethnic group and in the remote northern tribal areas where Kachin, Shan and Wa minorities offered fierce resistance to British expansion (Aung-Thwin, 1985). Once pacified, Burma witnessed relative stability, benefiting from the economic boom borne out of the early 20th century colonial exploitation.

 British Colonial Repression

Following the Great War and the Montagu-Chelmsford political reforms implemented in British India in 1919, social and nationalist agitation broke out in the left-out Burmese province. The creation of the University of Rangoon in 1920 sparked a broad anti-colonial movement led by Burmese students, largely guided by Gandhian and Buddhist non-violent principles. Two Burmese monks, U Ottama and U Wizara, inspired a Burmese nationalism that promoted non-violence to fulfil its objectives until U Wizara died in 1929 after a five month-long hunger strike. From then on, with the effects of the Great Depression spread across the British Empire throughout the 1930s, Burmese nationalist agitation took a harder line, opting for popular rural uprisings, urban riots and violent political disturbances. New waves of mass repression were then orchestrated by the British authorities and their colonial military and police forces made-up of ethnic minorities (Karens, Chins…) and Indian sepoys .

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