Ashley Wright

Maintaining the Bar: Regulating European Barmaids in Colonial Calcutta and Rangoon

ABSTRACT In 1902 the government of India banned the employment of European women as barmaids in Calcutta and Rangoon. This article examines this intervention, proceeding from the premise that a close look at this ban, and the women whose lives were affected by it, illuminates the entangled and at times contradictory ideas about gender, sexuality, mobility, labour and racial boundaries that characterised British imperial policy in India and Burma at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article argues that European barmaids, while seemingly marginal, in fact occupied a unique and important position within the British Empire, being at the heart of the recreational worlds of Calcutta and Rangoon. It further argues that the ban on the employment of barmaids reflects a wider official ambivalence about the new social forms emerging from the interactions of mobile subjects in these colonial port cities. Finally, it argues that Curzon’s and his colleagues’ intervention to ban the barmaids demonstrates the way that the relations of empire were negotiated through the control of mobile subjects. The employment of barmaids was controversial in multiple sites across the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including in London. Yet the campaign against barmaids in London was unsuccessful, whereas the campaigns in Calcutta and Rangoon succeeded. The particular dynamics of the specific colonial context help to explain this difference: European barmaids in South and Southeast Asian colonial cities were marginal in multiple dimensions. Some of the women employed as barmaids were members of the domiciled European community, who occupied a place on the margins of both Englishness and ‘whiteness’. The barmaids’ employability in drinking establishments catering to a predominantly but not exclusively European clientele was in part a function of their European identity, yet that identity meant that their presence in the morally ambiguous space of the bar posed a threat to British prestige. To colonial officials, including Curzon, European women’s employment behind the bar was additionally problematic because these women could be employed in serving alcohol to non-European men in an inversion of the desired colonial hierarchy.

Regulating Opium in British Burma, 1852–1885: Addiction, Ethnicity and Revenue

This chapter examines opium policy in British-ruled Lower Burma in the interim between the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852 and the Third Anglo-Burmese War of 1885. Imperial opium policy changed in this period, as the increased bureaucratisation of colonial rule brought colonial officials an increased knowledge of the extent of opium consumption and addiction in British-ruled Lower Burma. It became clear to colonial officials and Burmese elders that young Burmese men were particularly vulnerable to opium addiction. The paternalism evident in Maingy’s views on opium policy outlasted Maingy’s tenure in Tenasserim, and Chief Commissioner Charles Aitchison’s 1881 memorandum formally articulated this paternalist rationale for Burmese opium policy, complicating it with a racial differentiation that would be made into law within a decade. This interwar period also saw the foundation of the London-based Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade in 1874, at the forefront of the second wave of the British anti-opium movement. The Society’s campaign against opium sales in Burma was one dimension of its larger transnational campaign against the global opium industry.

The Expansion of the Opium Industry in Burma, and the Beginning of the Age of International Conferences, 1895–1914

The outcome of the Royal Commission on Opium was a setback for the London-based anti-opium movement, but it did not end the campaign against opium in the British Empire. The nineteenth century anti-opium movement survived into the twentieth century, but it underwent a change in identity. In the nineteenth century, colonial officials making opium policy decisions in Burma were aware of scrutiny from, and were susceptible to campaigning from the London-based anti-opium lobby, as well as the demands and pressures of the local population. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, this scrutiny took on an increasingly transnational dimension. The series of international conferences held to discuss the drug trade that began with the Shanghai conference in 1909 indicated that the government of India and by extension the government of Britain were accountable beyond the confines of Burma, India, or the British Empire for opium policy decisions.

Opium and the Maintenance of Imperial Rule: The Royal Commission on Opium and the Rationale for British Opium Policy in Burma

The Royal Commission on Opium collected evidence relating to the opium industry in Burma of a sort that is not found elsewhere: firsthand accounts and personal observations of the social context of opium consumption. As noted at the beginning of the previous chapter, the collected witness testimonies and final report of the Commission are rich material for analysis of the complex connection between imperialism and opium policy in colonial Burma. The preceding chapter has outlined the content of this Burmese evidence. This chapter will analyse its significance, as well as the Royal Commission’s final report. Drawing briefly upon a comparison with opium regulation in the Indian province of Assam, this chapter will conclude that the desire to control labour, notions about race, the necessity of maintaining a plausible rationale for British rule and Burma’s position in an imperial network all affected the peculiar course of British opium policy in late nineteenth century Burma. It will further argue that while each of these factors influenced the construction of colonial opium policy, the Commission’s final report indicates that ultimately at the end of the nineteenth century British policy makers designed their opium policy to ensure the continuance and stability of British rule in Burma.

Separation, Negotiation and Drug Diplomacy: 1935–1939

In 1935 the Government of Burma Act formally separated Burma from India, effective from April 1st 1937. This separation from India did not break the imperial bond, however — colonial officials in Burma still had to consider the potential repercussions of their decisions for the other nodes of the British imperial network. In the years immediately preceding separation, officials in India and Burma negotiated the details of the separation agreement, including the effects that the separation would have on Burma’s opium regime. These negotiations were subject to the same international and transnational pressures that had affected imperial drug policy since the foundation of the League of Nations. In particular, the influence of the United States of America was increasingly felt, despite the fact that the United States was not a League member. Scrutiny from the United States, as well as the League of Nations, influenced the colonial regime to continue to publicly commit to an opium policy rationale that prioritised diminishing opium consumption. The government of Burma, now an autonomous entity though still responsible to London by way of the Burma Office, professed a commitment to the eventual abolition of the opium industry whilst looking to the Shan and Wa States to ensure a continued reliable source of government opium. As the end of British rule in Burma approached, Burmese nationalists continued to oppose the British opium industry, though they had limited ability to accomplish any change in colonial opium policy.

“Lady Britannia, her Children, her Step-Children and her Neighbours”: Race and the Regulation of Consumption in Colonial Burma, c.1890

By the time the Royal Commission on Opium travelled to Burma in December of 1893 in the course of its investigation into opium policy in British India, the province had developed a system of opium regulation that differed significantly from that of any other province in British India. Assumptions about the right of the colonial state to regulate the consumption habits of Burmese subjects collided with an evolving set of discourses about race to create a new regulatory system for opium that distinguished among potential consumers based on ethnicity. The previous chapter started to explain the way that the development of this system was influenced by increasing Burmese and British concern about Burmese opium use after the creation of the province of British Burma and by the Aitchison memorandum’s articulation of a distinction between Burmese consumers and Chinese and Indian consumers. The final conquest of the independent Burmese kingdom in 1885 gave the British administration control of a multiethnic population with sizeable Shan and Kachin populations in addition to other ethnic minority groups. These groups’ potential as opium consumers had to be taken into account in devising an opium policy for the newly conquered territory.

Burma as a “Special Case”: Testimony about Burma at the Royal Commission on Opium of 1893–1895

Any discussion of the development of opium policy in colonial Burma would be incomplete without considering the implications of the Royal Commission on Opium. The Commission, which began its investigations in 1893 and published its final report in 1895, was a pivotal moment in the history of British colonial opium policy, in Burma and elsewhere. The sheer volume of material collected by the Commission demands attention.1 This chapter and the following chapter will explore the Commission’s procedures and findings in detail. This chapter will summarise the testimony presented at the Commission that was relevant to Burma. The following chapter will analyse the significance of this testimony, with regard to the connection between opium regulation and imperial rule. This work’s premise is that control of opium and imperial rule were bound together in complex ways, with opium and its regulation influencing and influenced by the imperial power’s desire to regulate labour, the construction of racial discourses, and the networked context of imperial power. Each of these connections became apparent in the course of the Commission’s concerted investigation into the workings of the opium industry in India, though as the following chapter will argue, ultimately the testimony and the final report of the Commission made it clear that above all else, by the end of the nineteenth century colonial opium policy was designed to ensure the continuance of imperial rule.

The Fashioning of Colonial Opium Policy in Arakan and Tenasserim, 1826–1852

Although opium consumption has a long history in Burma, it is difficult to establish the specifics — by whom opium was consumed, in what context and how much — before the colonial era. Nonetheless, in order to better understand the development of the colonial opium industry this chapter briefly discusses opium consumption in pre-colonial Burma and outlines the British East India Company’s involvement in the Asian opium trade prior to the annexation of Arakan and Tenasserim in 1826. This chapter also sets opium consumption in Burma in a transnational context, briefly examining opium consumption and regulation elsewhere in Asia and establishing connections between regulation and consumption in India and China and in Burma which subsequent chapters will explore in greater detail. This chapter’s examination of British rule and opium administration in Arakan and Tenasserim introduces in nascent form several of the recurrent themes in this study: the connection between opium and labour, the recurrent question of the rationale for British drug policy and imperial rule and the importance of transnational networks in determining imperial drug policy. In order to understand the context of the colonial opium industry, it may be helpful to first sketch a very brief history of opium consumption, moving from the global history of opium to the local history of opium consumption in Burma.

Burma, the League of Nations and Transnational Opium Policy Networks

After the First World War, the government of India — and by extension the colonial administration in Burma — became part of a new transnational drug policy network. In the 1920s and 30s, Burma’s position in this network influenced the way that the British administration articulated its drug policy rationale. Burmese nationalists, as they became increasingly active against the colonial regime, condemned the effects that opium consumption had on the bodies of Burmese consumers, and drew upon the racially charged association of opium with the Chinese community in Burma to oppose both the colonial opium industry and the presence of “foreign” elements in Burma.