Re-Thinking Settler Colonialism: Race, Labor, and Migration in Upper Burma, 1906-1935

This essay analyzes the overlap between economic development, business networks, and governance in British Burma between 1906 and 1935. In particular, my project focuses on the Burma Corporation, a transnational mining corporation founded by the future US President Herbert Hoover, whose operations were located in a remote area of Burma’s Northern Shan States. I argue that this company, which by the 1920s had become one of the largest industrial mining enterprises in the world, provides a unique vantage point to explore the complexity of Britain’s Empire during the early twentieth century. Founded and managed by white foreigners from the United States, Canada, and Australia, and primarily staffed by migrant laborers from China and India, my essay asks how an international commercial firm like the Burma Corporation was able to fashion a cosmopolitan city on the edge of Britain’s Empire and become an agent of the colonial state. Connected to Britain through a common racial and cultural heritage as well as a commitment to western models of political economy, I argue that foreign commercial agents and experts – particularly Americans, but also Germans, Italians, and Australians - were crucial to Britain’s colonial project in Burma, taking on the role of colonizer in areas where the state was weak. In doing so, my essay brings into question the character of colonial governance, the uniformity of the “British” Empire, and the nature of the state in colonial Burma during this period.