Victor Lieberman

Burmese Administrative Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest, c. 1580-1760

This book is the first detailed study of administration and politics in premodern Burma and one of the few works of its kind for mainland Southeast Asia.Originally published in 1984.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Ethnic Politics in Eighteenth-Century Burma

We commonly find in the literature on pre-colonial mainland Southeast Asia a tendency to treat the principal ethnic groups—Burmese, Mons, Siamese, Cambodians, Vietnamese—as discrete political categories. This tendency is particularly marked in the historiography of the Irrawaddy valley, where the recurrent north—south conflicts of the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries have usually been interpreted as ‘national’ or ‘racial’ struggles between the Burmese people of the north and the Mon, or Talaing, people of the south. In writing of the last major ‘Mon—Burmese’ war, that of 1740—57, historians have characterized the 1740 uprising at the southern city of Pegu as an expression of ‘Mon nationalism’. The ensuing conflict reportedly became a struggle between Mons and Burmese each ‘fighting for the existence of their race’; and Alaung-hpaya, said to be a champion of ‘Burmese nationalism’, allegedly made vigorous efforts to destroy the Mon culture and people once he had triumphed.

Local Integration and Eurasian Analogies: Structuring Southeast Asian History, c. 1350—c. 1830

The historiography of precolonial Southeast Asia remains remarkably fragmented and inaccessible, even by the standards of that variegated region. We have a limited number of country monographs. But no systematic overview of Southeast Asian political or economic history has been attempted for all, or even part, of the period between the waning of the classical states in the fourteenth century and the onset of high colonialism in the early nineteenth. Scholarly surveys, like the magisterial and still standard magnum opus of D. G. E. Hall, make discretion the better part of valor by providing separate country chapters without integrative theme or comment.

The impact of climate on Southeast Asia, circa 950-1820: New findings

The recent discovery of continuous tree-ring series starting as early as 1030 CE has for the first time made possible the reconstruction of historical climates for much of mainland Southeast Asia. Perhaps the most dramatic finding is that wide cyclic fluctuations in the reach and volume of monsoon rains contributed substantially to both the genesis and the collapse of the charter civilizations of Angkor, Pagan, and Dai Viet. From circa 1450–1820 climate continued to influence political and economic development, but its impact appears to have diminished both because the amplitude of hydrological fluctuations decreased markedly, and because new sources of power rendered early modern Southeast Asian states more resilient. A pioneering collaborative effort by a historian and a paleoclimatologist, this paper promises three benefits: It can help to solve a variety of local historiographic puzzles, it can facilitate construction of a synchronized historical narrative for mainland Southeast Asia as a whole, and it can aid comparisons between mainland Southeast Asia and other sectors of Eurasia.

Reinterpreting Burmese History

Problems of periodization have received but limited attention in Burmese historiography. Precolonial, that is to say, pre-nineteenth-century history, is said to be of a piece, without significant institutional or social transformations. Dynasties and rulers changed, of course, sometimes with stunning rapidity; but it is always assumed that these oscillations occurred within a static framework. Lamenting the failure of the early Kon-baung kings to move their capital to the coast, G. E. Harvey, whose history remains the standard work on the precolonial era, observes, “Their ideas remained in the nineteenth century what they had been in the ninth. To build pagodas, to collect daughters from tributary chiefs, to sally forth on slave raids, to make wars for white elephants—these conceptions had had their day, and a monarchy which failed to get beyond them was doomed.” In the same vein, it has recently been argued that no “significant transformations” occurred between the origins and collapse of monarchical Burma. The entire precolonial royal era “should be viewed as one entity,” for from the mid-ninth to the late nineteenth century “the major features of [Burmas] political, economic, social, administrative, and religious systems were also virtually identical.”

How Reliable is U Kala's Burmese Chronicle? Some New Comparisons

Rarely has a national historiographic tradition depended so heavily on a single author as the Burmese tradition has on U Kala. A native of Ava in Upper Burma, U Kala completed the so-called “Great Chronicle”, the Maha-ya-zawin-gyi , in the early eighteenth century. Beginning, logically enough, with the start of the current world cycle and the Buddhist version of ancient Indian history, this chronicle proceeded with ever increasing detail to narrate the political story of the Irrawaddy basin from quasi-legendary dynasties to events witnessed by the author himself in 1711. Before U Kala, the only Burmese histories of which we have record were biographies and comparatively brief local chronicles. Some twenty years after U Kala finished his work, many of the original sources on which he relied were destroyed by a fire at Ava. This loss combined with U Kalas admirable prose style to establish his encyclopaedic work as a model in the eyes of all subsequent historians. The pre-1712 portions of later national Burmese chronicles — including the Ya-zawin-thit (New Chronicle), the Maha-ya-zawin-gyaw (Great Celebrated Chronicle), and the famous Hman-nan maha-ya-zawin-daw-gyi (Glass Palace Chronicle) — are more or less verbatim reproductions of U Kalas history, with some interpolations of quasi-legendary material and with limited digressions on points of scholarly dispute. In essence, therefore, we have but one chronicle prior to 1712. Not surprisingly, U Kalas Maha-ya-zawin-gyi has provided the basis for virtually every survey of pre-colonial Burmese political history.

Protected Rimlands and Exposed Zones: Reconfiguring Premodern Eurasia

In a recent study, I sought to analyze political and cultural patterns across main land Southeast Asia during roughly a thousand years, from c. 800 to 1830.1 In brief, I argued that each of mainland Southeast Asias three great north-south corridors experienced a pattern of accelerating integration. This process was territorial in the sense that some twenty-three small polities in the fourteenth century were assimilated, gradually or convulsively, fully or partially, to three overarching imperial systems by the early 1800s. Integration was admin istrative insofar as within each imperial system mechanisms of provincial control, economic extraction, and manpower organization became more pene trating, stable, and efficient. Integration was cultural in the sense that hitherto self-sufficient communities across each of the three principal zones came to accept linguistic, ethnic, and religious norms sanctioned by imperial elites. Obviously, one can find numerous specific differences between these three zones, with integration in the eastern sector?what we know as Vietnam?most contingent and hesitant. Yet at a workable level of abstraction, in all three sectors not only political and cultural trajectories, but also the dynamics of consolidation proved reasonably similar. In each case integration drew strength from synergies between agricultural extension and intensification (processes subject to climatic as well as social determination), foreign trade, imported European-style guns, wider literacy, the demands of intensifying interstate competition, and accumulated institutional expertise. Most such factors had their own etiology, but all modified one another in ways that were both open-ended and potentially cumulative. More over, in all three zones chronologies of integration were broadly synchronized, with periods of political florescence alternating with periods of collapse and territorial fragmentation. Indicative of the growing solidity of each zone, especially in the

The Political Significance of Religious Wealth in Burmese History: Some Further Thoughts

This article examines the recent assertion by a scholar of Burmese history that extensive landholding by the Buddhist monkhood helped to undermine every dynasty between the ninth and nineteenth century. It argues that religious wealth, possibly before the fifteenth century and certainly after that period, was less significant than has been suggested, and that the institutional relation between throne and monkhood was by no means static. During the later dynasties, secular elites represented the principal threat to the centralization of resources. Further, in certain instances, royal purification of the Religion sought not to deprive the monkhood of wealth, but to strengthen both the Religion and the crown at the expense of private lay interests.

A new look at the sasanavamsa

The Sāsanavaṃsa ‘History of the religion’, a Pali work written in Burma in 1861, has long been recognized as an important source for the study of Theravāda Buddhism. It is essentially a chronicle of famous monks which seeks to trace the lineal succession of orthodox theras from the Buddhas immediate disciple Upāli to the heads of the saṅgha at Mandalay in the authors own lifetime. As early as 1882 Louis de Zoysa in his Catalogue of Pali, Sinhalese, and Sanskrit manuscripts in the temple libraries of Ceylon referred to the Sāsanavaṃsa as a work containing ‘very interesting information on the religious history of … Burma and Ceylon’. In 1892 the Russian Orientalist Ivan Pavlovitch Minaev drew upon the Sāsanavaṃsa for his Recherches sur le bouddhisme , in which he quoted fairly extensively from the Pali text. H. Kern in 1896 classed it along with the better-known Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa as ‘highly important for the ecclesiastical history of Ceylon’, and the treatise also gained mention in the researches of such leading Buddhist scholars as E. Hardy, Wilhelm Geiger, and G. P. Malalasekera.

A New Look at the Sāsanava sa

The Sāsanavaṃsa ‘History of the religion’, a Pali work written in Burma in 1861, has long been recognized as an important source for the study of Theravāda Buddhism. It is essentially a chronicle of famous monks which seeks to trace the lineal succession of orthodox theras from the Buddhas immediate disciple Upāli to the heads of the saṅgha at Mandalay in the authors own lifetime. As early as 1882 Louis de Zoysa in his Catalogue of Pali, Sinhalese, and Sanskrit manuscripts in the temple libraries of Ceylon referred to the Sāsanavaṃsa as a work containing ‘very interesting information on the religious history of … Burma and Ceylon’. In 1892 the Russian Orientalist Ivan Pavlovitch Minaev drew upon the Sāsanavaṃsa for his Recherches sur le bouddhisme , in which he quoted fairly extensively from the Pali text. H. Kern in 1896 classed it along with the better-known Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa as ‘highly important for the ecclesiastical history of Ceylon’, and the treatise also gained mention in the researches of such leading Buddhist scholars as E. Hardy, Wilhelm Geiger, and G. P. Malalasekera.