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Disaster or Release? J. S. Furnivall and the Bankruptcy of Burma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

R. H. Taylor
R. H. Taylor
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies University of London
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Extract

At the heart of modern social science lies the belief that if societies understand the causes of their current condition, their people will foresee what future ills may befall them unless particular public policies are implemented to avoid the undesirable consequences of previous actions. Analysis and prediction thus provides the power to alter the future, which is only inevitable if people and governments do nothing to understand the causes of their present complaints. J. S. Furnivall, arguably the most prescient foreign analyst of Burmese political and economic life this century, was a true disciple of this idea.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , February 1995 , pp. 45 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 Furnivall's, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948;Google Scholar reprinted New York: New York University Press, 1956) contains the essence of his analysis and provides the text for this essay. For an assessment of Furnivall's impact on the study of Burma, see Taylor, R. H., An Undeveloped State: The Study of Modern Burma's Politics (Melbourne: Monash University Centre of Southeast Asian Studies Working Paper No. 28, 1983).Google Scholar

2 Burma has been officially renamed in foreign languages Myanmar, a transliteration of the official Burmese language name of the country. However, as this essay largely refers to the country prior to 1988, the more familiar Burma will be used.

3 Colonial Policy and Practice, hereafter cited as CPP, p. 216.Google Scholar

4 ‘Foreword’ to Russell Andrus, J., Burmese Economic Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. x.Google Scholar

5 For further analysis, see, for example, Taylor, R. H., ‘Change in Burma: Political Demands and Military Power’, Asian Affairs, XXII, Part II (06 1991), pp. 131–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Steinberg, David I., The Future of Burma: Crisis and Choice in Myanmar (Lanham, New York and London: University Press of America, 1990), pp. 8–32.Google Scholar

6 Furnivall, J. S., An Introduction to the Political Economy of Burma (Rangoon: People's Literature Committee and House, 3rd ed., 1957).Google Scholar

7 CPP, p. 206.Google Scholar

8 Furnivall, J. S., Progress and Welfare in Southeast Asia: A Comparison of Colonial Policy and Practice (New York: Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, International Research Series, 1941).Google Scholar

9 Journal of the Burma Research Society, vol. 29, no. 1 (04 1939), pp. 3–137.Google Scholar

10 CPP, p. 10.Google Scholar

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., p. 46.

13 Ibid.

14 ‘Foreword’ to Andrus, , Burmese Economic Life, p. xii.Google Scholar

15 CPP, p. 76.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., p. 118.

17 Ibid., p. 304.

18 Ibid., p. 306.

19 Ibid., p. 308; emphasis added.

20 Ibid., p. 102.

21 Ibid, p. 17. Here Furnivall presaged some of the notions that Edmund Leach so powerfully developed later in his Political Systems of Highland Burma (London: G. Bell, 1954).Google Scholar

22 CPP, p. 158.Google Scholar

23 Ibid.

24 Introduction to the third edition of An Introduction to the Political Economy of Burma, p.f.Google Scholar