UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title “A Burmese Wonderland”: British World Mining and the Making of Colonial Burma Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2109j3rs Author Baillargeon, David Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara “A Burmese Wonderland”: British World Mining and the Making of Colonial Burma A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by David J. Baillargeon Committee in charge: Professor Erika Rappaport, Chair Professor Adrienne Edgar Professor Mary Hancock Professor Mhoze Chikowero June 2018 The dissertation of David J. Baillargeon is approved. _____________________________________________ Mary Hancock _____________________________________________ Adrienne Edgar _____________________________________________ Mhoze Chikowero _____________________________________________ Erika Rappaport, Committee Chair June 2018 “A Burmese Wonderland”: British World Mining and the Making of Colonial Burma Copyright © 2018 by David J. Baillargeon iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Writing a dissertation is a long journey with many twists and turns. This dissertation was no exception. When I began this project, it was not a project at all. My previous work as a Masters student was focused on anti-slavery and abolition in Britain during the nineteenth century, and though I remained interested in issues surrounding humanitarianism and capitalism, I decided to start on a new path. Somehow, and serendipitously, those vague interests led me to study a small mining community in the Northern Shan States of British Burma. When I began, however, I was no expert in either the history of Burma or mining. Thanks to the help of so many over the past seven years, and the incredible guidance I received along the way, I was able to piece together the long history of these mines and the thousands of people who lived there, a feat I did not think possible in the beginning. For that help I am forever thankful. First, I would like to thank all of my friends and colleagues in Santa Barbara for their incredible support since my arrival in California seven years ago. A special thanks to the University of California Santa Barbara History Department and the History Associates for their generous support of my research, as well as the many professors and staff members whose paths I crossed in my time here, including James Brooks, Manuel Covo, Elizabeth Depalma-Digeser, Sharon Farmer, Pekka Hämäläinen, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Lisa Jacobson, Terence Keel, Nelson Lichtenstein, Harold Marcuse, Alice O’Connor, Darcy Ritzau, Sherene Seikaly, and John Talbott. At UCSB, I was also lucky to have around me an incredible community of fellow graduate students whose endless support, encouragement, and most importantly, friendship, made this all possible. Thank you to Zamira Abman, Dimitri Akulov, Munther Al-Sabbagh, Paul Barba, Elijah Bender, Sasha Coles, Sienna Cordoba, Tim Daniels, Andrew Elrod, Andrew Esch, Joe Figliulo-Rosswurm, Brian Griffith, Jesse Halvorsen, Sarah Hanson-Kegerreis, Julie Johnson, Chris Kegerreis, Eric Massie, Ryan Minor, Laura Moore, Will Murphy, Tim Paulson, Joshua Rocha, Samir Sonti, Cody Stephens, Nick Treblehorn, Brian Tyrrell, and Jackson Warkentin. You all, in ways both large and small, made my experience at UCSB an amazing one, and I appreciate all of your love and support. Thank you to all of the students I’ve had the honor to work with since I began at UCSB. Your energy, curiosity, and great questions have undoubtedly made me a better scholar. Finally, I would like to thank my dissertation committee at UCSB, which consisted of Erika Rappaport, Adrienne Edgar, Mary Hancock, and Mhoze Chikowero. Although, since its inception, this project changed a number of times (sorry about that!), my committee remained encouraging and flexible throughout the process, and their support, feedback, and guidance was irreplaceable. Thank you all so much. I would also like to thank the many people and institutions outside of UCSB who contributed to this project and helped me along the way. Thanks to a FLAS Fellowship to study Burmese at the Southeast Asia Summer Studies Institute (SEASSI) in Madison, Wisconsin, I was able to meet many amazing people who have helped me in countless ways since the start of this project. Thank you, in particular, to Saya U Saw Tun, U Mya Hla, and Kyaw Win Tun for your wisdom and patience, as well as Erin Biel, Sarah Bouchat, Marisa Charles, John Davis, Simone Jacobson, Kurt Kuehne, Marjorie Mosereiff, Justin Nadir, and Cassidy Rappaport for your friendship and advice. During the 2014-2015 academic year, I was fortunate to receive a Mellon Fellowship to study at the Institute of Historical Research in London, which provided critical time, space, and money to research this project – without iv their generous support, this dissertation would not have been possible. Thank you to Jon Connolly, Allegra Giovine, Laurence Goldman, Vanessa Rockel, and Amarjit Singh for your support while in London, as well as Mandy Sadan, who I was lucky enough to have as a mentor. Mandy’s knowledge of the archive as well as her invaluable advice and guidance at a critical juncture of the project proved significant in the development of this dissertation, and I am forever grateful for her support. I would also like to thank the University of California Center for New Racial Studies - particularly Howard Winant, Paola Bacchetta, and Sunaina Maira - who awarded me a Dissertation Fellowship in 2014-2015. Finally, I would like to thank the Council for European Studies, who provided me with a Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship in 2016-2017, allowing me the much-needed time to finish writing this dissertation. Thank you also to the many people who I met at conferences, research trips, and elsewhere along the way and whose feedback shaped the way this project developed. Thank you, in particular, to all of the members of the Burma Studies Group, who embraced my project from the beginning. Thank you especially to the organizers and participants of the Burma/Myanmar Research Forum hosted by Cornell University in 2015, which proved to be a turning point in my thoughts about this project. Among the many amazing Burma/Myanmar scholars, and in addition to those I mentioned above, special thanks to Jane Ferguson, Patrick McCormick, Alicia Turner, Courtney Wittekind, and Siew Han Yeo for your help and feedback. I would also like to thank Aung Soe Min, whose generosity and welcoming spirit has touched so many scholars who have passed through Yangon over the years. I have also been fortunate to meet many incredible scholars in the field of mining history, an area of study I knew little about before I began this dissertation. Thank you to the organizers of the International Mining History Congress in Linares, Spain in 2016 for introducing me to so many of these people (and, more generally, for an incredible trip), and I’d especially like to thank Roger Burt, Mel Davies, Jeremy Mouat, and Francesca Sanna for their advice and encouragement with this project. I would also like to thank Angela Woollacott at the Australian National University, who in welcoming me to Canberra and introducing me to the many other graduate students and scholars in the School of History at ANU, turned what I thought would be a lonely research trip to Australia into a very social one. Finally, I would like to thank Durba Ghosh, Elizabeth Elbourne, and the many participants of the “Cultures of Imperialism” workshop at NACBS in 2017. The important conversations we had in that workshop had a significant impact on how I ultimately framed this project, and in particular, how I now see the relationship between local, global, and imperial history. Thank you all for your support. This project, of course, would also not have been possible without the important work of the many archivists and librarians around the world who helped me navigate the archive for this project. First, thank you to the UCSB library, especially the Interlibrary Loan staff, for all of the assistance over the years. Thank you to the archivists at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University as well as at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library – particularly Spencer Howard – in West Branch, Iowa for your guidance at a very early stage of this project. Thank you also to the archivists and librarians at the National Library of Australia, who helped a great deal with finding the many mining trade journals used in this dissertation. In the UK, thank you to the archivists at the British National Archives in Kew, the London Metropolitan Archives, and the archives at the London School of Economics. A very special thank you is reserved for the many archivists and librarians at the British Library – v particularly in the Newsroom and the Asian and African Studies Reading Room – who very patiently guided and assisted me at various stages of this project, including nearly every day during my fellowship year at the IHR. Your support is very much appreciated. I’ve also been fortunate to have some incredible mentors since my undergraduate days. First, I would like to thank both Nicholas Draper and Catherine Hall at University College London, both of whom have had a major impact on my intellectual development and who continue to inspire me with their passion and commitment to the discipline of history. For Paul Deslandes, who served as my undergraduate advisor at the University of Vermont many years ago, no amount of thank yous could be enough. It was under Paul’s direction that I first became interested in the topic of British history, and it’s thanks to his constant encouragement and guidance over the past fifteen years (!) that I have been able to successfully navigate the world of academia.