The colonial officer and writer V.C. Scott O'Conner, who had lived in Upper Burma in the 1890s explained: ‘The Burmese Court … were too proud and too weak to make the concessions that could alone serve as the basis for conciliation. Its own resources were too slender to sustain its great pretensions … The result was war.’

Others have echoed this assessment. The viceroy, Lord Dufferin, in a telegram to Rangoon, complained of the Burmese kingdom's ‘molluscous consistency’ which made informal empire over the Court of Ava near impossible. In many ways, this analysis of the reasons behind Britain's decision to impose direct rule over the kingdom of Burma in 1885 was correct and relates to many of the processes discussed in earlier chapters. Specifically, we have seen that, on the one hand, the development of a political and fiscal crisis of the Burmese state led to a precipitous decline of its authority within its nominal borders. This ‘weakness’ was in turn the consequence of a variety of factors related both to British imperialism and local responses to changing international conditions. On the other hand, the Burmese government, like the shell of a mollusc, remained ‘hard’ and impervious to informal control. Half a century after defeat in the First Anglo-Burmese War, the ‘pride’ and ‘great pretensions’ of the Court of Ava, though diminished, remained strong. Local patriotism, born in an age of conquest, had hardened under the shadow of British expansion.