Christian Daniels

The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill

Invente par un Sicilien en 1449. Etudes sur la reelle origine du moulin a sucre et son developpement du moyen-âge a nos jours. Le moulin a sucre aurait ete introduit en Europe par les Arabes des le 8e siecle

Script Without Buddhism: Burmese Influence on the Tay (Shan) Script of Mäng2 Maaw2 as seen in a Chinese Scroll Painting of 1407

This article substantiates for the first time that Tay (Shan) script was written on a Ming dynasty scroll dated 1407. In the past, Tay scholars have assumed that early Tay script exhibited uniquely Tay characteristics from the outset, and only gradually acquired Burmese features after the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The data presented here demonstrates beyond doubt that the Tay borrowed heavily from the Burmese script to create their writing system before the fifteenth century. It also shows that the 1407 Tay script resembled the Ahom script more than the lik 6 tho 3 ngok 6 script, and on the basis of this similarity concludes that lik 6 tho 3 ngok 6 was not the progenitor of Tay scripts, as previously thought, and that the Ahom script preceded it. The impact of Burmese script on the Tay writing system from the outset raises the broader issue of borrowing from Burman culture during the Pagan and early Ava periods. The Tay of Mang 2 Maaw 2 and surrounding polities turned to Pagan and Ava for a written script, but shunned Theravada Buddhism, the religious apparatus that we assume always accompanied the spread of writing. Their adoption of a writing system stands out as a rare case of script without Buddhism in northern continental Southeast Asia. To the Tay, Pagan and Ava were dominant political powers worthy of emulation, and the adoption of their writing system attests the magnitude of its influence. It is hypothesized that such borrowing arose out of Tay aspirations for self-strengthening their polities, possibly in an endeavour to rival the Burman monarchy. Tay script emerged in an age when the Burman language had just become predominant among the elites of Pagan and early Ava. Two features of this case stand out. First, the Tay borrowed at a time when Burmese script was relatively novel and still the preserve of the Burman elite, a fact which reinforces the notion of borrowing for prestige value as well as practical utility. Second, the Tay gravitated towards the northern parts of Pagan and Ava, rather than the southern areas where Mon language retained predominance in inscriptions.

HISTORICAL MEMORIES OF A CHINESE ADVENTURER IN A TAY CHRONICLE; USURPATION OF THE THRONE OF A TAY POLITY IN YUNNAN, 1573–1584

By analysing a Tay chronicle and Chinese sources about a case of usurpation in the Tay (Shan) polity of Mang: Wan: located in southwest Yunnan on the border with Burma (Myanmar) in 1573, this article offers an alternative approach to the use of chronicles as sources for the history of the Tay Cultural Area. It argues that Tay chronicles are media for the creation and transmission of historical memories, and that they can be utilized to redress the excessive subjectivity of Chinese sources precisely because they show how the Tay interpreted events. Analyses of these interpretations in turn reveal the principal concepts underlying Tay political and social organization, thereby allowing historians to establish benchmarks for ascertaining the changes that took place in Tay polities. This study emphasizes that the memory of the usurpation was generated by the realities of Mang: Wan:s power relations with China and Burma, and demonstrates that apart from elucidating the role of royal succession, these memories also throw light on some of the larger recurring themes in the history of Tay relations with China, such as the role of Han Chinese migrants in polity building and administration and land alienation by contractual transactions.

Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology, and the World Market (review)

The history of cane sugar in China followed a very different path from the one it traced in the New World. Though the production of sugar greatly increased to meet an expanding consumer market from the sixteenth century on, China did not develop large plantations or slave-based plantation economies as in the New World. During the Ming and Qing periods, sugarcane cultivation and sugar manufacture were always undertaken by smallholders; sugarcane continually had to compete with rice and other subsistence and commercial crops, and never was it turned into a monoculture. Sucheta Mazumdar’s book sets out to explain how Chinese sugar manufacture, operating within the confines of the smallholder system, was able to expand and why it declined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with relation to the global economy. Mazumdar draws on a rich collection of primary and secondary sources to give an exceptionally detailed account of all aspects of sugar production in China, including consumption and demand in the domestic and world markets, manufacturing technology, the land system, and marketing structures, ending with a comparison of the divergent paths followed by the sugar industries in Guangdong and Taiwan. She demonstrates that changes in technology and cropping patterns raised the efficiency of production in the smallholder economy and enabled it to export large quantities of sugar before the late nineteenth century. The inability of South China to respond dynamically to the expanding demands of the world economy after this time she attributes to new social-property relations and peasant economic strategies. She singles out the new peasant property rights which emerged during the Qing as “the primary barrier between capital and production” (p. 406), and views the persistence of combining commercial agriculture with production for subsistence as another confining factor. She contrasts this situation, epitomized in the case of Guangdong, in which the peasants retained control over the immediate process of production, with Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, where the sugar factory owner became the “real controller of the immediT E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E