Here’s the video of the lecture I gave to the Royal Historical Society in September last year. I’ve realised there are a few videos of me giving talks out there on the internet, so I’m going to try to embed them into some blog posts. Hopefully, it’ll be a good nudge to start up blogging…
Historicizing Counter-Insurgency
TW: Descriptions of violence and death There are many connections that can be drawn between how the military are attempting to repress the Civil Disobendience Movement in Myanmar and how the British colonial regime sought to suppress anti-colonial movements. A quick comparison with British counter-insurgency strategies during the Hsaya San rebellion reveals these connections, particularly…
Histories for the Burmese Revolution
I delivered this as a talk to a public history event run by the History Department at the University of Durham and the Gala Theatre on 15 June 2021. It is tentative, unfinished, and I post it here, not as a definitive statement, but to share my current reflections. There are some events that are…
The Military Coup: What Can You Do?
This blog has been sadly neglected over the last couple of years – but it still gets regular traffic from people interested in Myanmar. So, here are some resources for learning more about the resistance to the military coup and for what you can do. Reading One way of being better placed to support the…
Reporting Reports
Histories of colonial medical institutions are often heavily reliant upon government reports. My own work on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum in the nineteenth century uses them extensively to tease out the colonial state’s priorities in treating “insanity”. But in conducting this analysis, I did not conceptualize the audience for the reports beyond the ranks of…
Race, Racism and Some Rhinos
I have badly neglected this blog over the last few months, but it’s been for a good reason: I am one of the co-authors of the Royal Historical Society’s Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change. The findings of the Report are damning. Academic staff in history departments in…
King Thibaw’s Elephants
It’s been a nearly two months since my last post. Childcare, trade union activism, departmental admin and a lovely holiday have kept me away. To catch up with my research I spent today looking at a collection of fifty Anglo-Burmese paintings held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, who have digitized them and made them…
(Natural) Historical Haircuts
Research often takes historians into unexpected tangents. This week, I started off continuing to read the Burmese anti-colonial journalist, writer and activist Thakhin Kodaw Hmaing’s Myauk Tika [Monkey Commentary] (1923)—which I have written about a bit here and also here before—and I ended up trying to find out more about Burmese haircuts in the 1920s….
Costly Cats, Neglected Lepers
This week I read an interesting article by the historian of medicine, Projit Mukharji, about the use of cats in anti-plague measures across the British Empire. The idea was developed by an imperial medical official in British India called Andrew Buchanan and he expounded it widely from 1907. He was inspired by his experiences serving…
Beasts of Rebellion
On Monday I had a couple of hours spare in London, either side of a meeting, so I did some lightning research in the British Library. I’d ordered some of the Public and Judicial Records on the Hsaya San rebellion of 1930-2. For those unfamiliar with the rebellion, it was the biggest one to hit…
The 1941 Yangon Sawmill Workers’ Strike: Part 4
How are strikes won or lost? And how do we—either as historians or as trade unionists—make this judgement? When we left the striking sawmill workers three weeks ago, they had the momentum. The strike had spread from the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation’s Dunneedaw sawmill, to the Corporation’s nearby sawmill at Dallah. In the following week,…
The 1941 Yangon Sawmill Workers’ Strike: Part 3
In my last post, we left the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation’s Dunneedaw Sawmill after a week of strike action. By this time the mill was under the control of the newly formed trade union, with red flags flying from the entrance. By 22 March, a week later, the mill’s manager still had no positive news…
Colonizing Animals 